Democrat Mikie Sherrill has an eight-point lead over Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the New Jersey governor’s race, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released this afternoon.
Sherrill leads Ciattarelli, 51%-43%, in a poll of likely voters in the November 4 election. Libertarian Vin Kaplan and Social Workers Party candidate Joanne Kuniansky are each at 1%.
Among independents, Quinnipiac shows Sherrill and Ciattarelli split at 47% each. Women are backing Sherrill by a 57%-37% margin, while Ciattarelli has a 50%-43% margin among men.
“Will another Democrat assume the reins from Governor Phil Murphy? In the final days of a very combative race, Mikie Sherrill’s 20 percentage point advantage with women fuels her overall lead of 8 points over Jack Ciattarelli,”said Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac polling analyst.
Sherrill has favorables of 47%-38%, while Ciattarelli is at 42%-47%.
President Donald Trump’s New Jersey approvals are upside-down at 40%-56%. Murphy is at 45%-47%.
Ciattarelli’s pollster, Adam Geller of National Research, pushed back on Quinnipiac’s numbers.
“Their methodology is RDD (Random Digit Dial). They don’t use a voter list. They call landlines and ask for adults whose next birthday it is. Can’t make it up,” Geller said. They are the front-runner for this year’s Ann Seltzer Award.”
This is the third independent poll of the day: an Emerson College Polling/PIX11/The Hill poll released this morning also shows a dead heat, with Sherrill ahead, 49%-48% among likely voters; and a Suffolk University poll also had the race within the margin of error, with Sherrill up by four points, 46%-42%.
Quinnipiac had Sherrill ahead by six points (50%-44%) on October 14 and by eight points (49%-41%) on September 17.
The Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University was once New Jersey’s gold-standard pollster, releasing regular polls of New Jersey’s major statewide elections alongside surveys of how voters felt about their state leaders, major policy issues, and top news stories like Bridgegate and Hurricane Sandy.
After the 2018 election, however, the pollster withdrew from the Garden State, except for one poll in 2020 that focused on COVID-19 in the New York tri-state area. It was largely supplanted by Monmouth University as New Jersey’s gold-standard pollster, but Monmouth announced earlier this year that it would shutter its polling institute.
Quinnipiac’s final poll of the 2018 U.S. Senate race between Senator Bob Menendez and Republican challenger Bob Hugin wasn’t far off the mark: the poll put Menendez up by a 55% to 40% margin, and he ended up winning 54% to 43%.
The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from October 23-28, with a sample size of 1,166 likely general election voters and a margin of error of /- 3.8%. Some of the data is a week old. Click HERE for crosstabs.
