A trio of new polls today, from different sources and with different motivations, all find Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) ahead of former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R-Somerville), albeit by varying amounts.
Perhaps the most important poll came from Fox News, among the most reliable and respectable pollsters operating nationwide. According to the Fox News poll, Sherrill holds a 50%-42% lead among likely voters in this November’s gubernatorial election; a registered voter subsample finds a similar 48%-41% lead for Sherrill.
Fox also found Sherrill to be the better-liked candidate of the two: 51% of voters view her favorably and 41% view her unfavorably, compared to Ciattarelli’s 45%-47% ratio. Term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy is slightly underwater at 47%-48%, and President Donald Trump is more thoroughly unpopular at 42%-55%.
Sherrill’s own campaign also released an internal poll that found a similar result; according to a polling memo from Democratic pollster Global Strategy Group – the full poll was not released – Sherrill is up against Ciattarelli by a 50%-43% margin. Internal polls should always be taken with a grain of salt, though it’s worth noting that GSG’s polls for Sherrill during last spring’s primary were largely on the mark.
“New Jerseyans are excited by Mikie’s bold leadership and vision to chart a different path forward for New Jersey, and it’s evident in the momentum we’re seeing across the state,” Sherrill comms director Sean Higgins said of the campaign’s poll.
Lastly, a poll from conservative-leaning pollster Quantus Insights found by far the closest race of the three; according to Quantus, Sherrill has just a two-point lead, 48% to 46%. That’s far down from Sherrill’s lead in Quantus’s prior poll from September 5, which put the congresswoman ahead 49%-39%.
“This is movement more so than drift,” Quantus said in a press release accompanying the poll. “And it’s happening in a state where Democrats typically have the structural upper hand.”
Quantus is the latest pollster to show a close race in a state that Democrats normally expect to win more easily, especially when a Republican sits in the White House. Ciattarelli’s own campaign released an internal poll last week showing him up by a one-point margin – the only poll of the race thus far to produce a Ciattarelli lead – and Emerson found the race tied at 43% apiece.
Other established pollsters, though, are more in line with what Fox News and Sherrill’s campaign are saying. Quinnipiac University, returning to the New Jersey polling scene for the first time in years, had Sherrill leading 49% to 41% earlier this month, and home-state pollsters Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rutgers-Eagleton both gave Sherrill decent leads over the summer as well.
The big question hovering over any discussion of polls, of course, is just how accurate they’ll be. In 2021, famously, polls regularly found Murphy with a formidable lead, only for Ciattarelli to take the state by storm and fall short by just three percentage points, flipping a number of state legislative seats in the process.
The fact that Sherrill’s average polling lead is now smaller than Murphy’s ever was has many Republicans optimistic and some Democrats skittish – but there’s no guarantee that the polls will be off again this year, and if they are, it might not be in Ciattarelli’s favor.
The Fox News poll was conducted from September 25-28 with a sample size of 1,002 registered voters and a margin of error of +/- 3%.
The Global Strategy Group poll was conducted on behalf of the Sherrill campaign from September 22-25 with a sample size of 800 likely general election voters and a margin of error of +/- 3.5%.
The Quantus Insights poll was conducted from September 29-30 with a sample size of 900 likely general election voters and a margin of error of +/- 3.3%.
