Mikie Sherrill certainly did not win the 2025 gubernatorial election based on policy.

Just 13 minutes after polls closed on Election Day, Decision Desk called Democrat Mikie Sherrill as the 57th governor of New Jersey, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in his third bid for the office.

Sherrill, however, did not win based on her policies to make New Jersey a better place. In what should have been a race about fixing New Jersey, Sherrill won solely on an anti-Trump agenda, as seen in her attack ads. According to a Fox News exit poll, 71% of Sherrill voters voted for her primarily to oppose Trump.

What those voters may have overlooked were the real issues facing their communities, like their electricity bills, taxes, and overdevelopment of their communities. This is probably because Sherrill doesn’t talk about these issues.

I attended her rally in Ridgewood on Oct. 28 and was greeted by two things: the most uninspired and poorly-spoken five-minute speech I’ve ever heard from a politician and a crowd that talked about nothing except how much they hated Trump.

I’m not the biggest fan of President Trump, but that’s because I have stances on policies, and I’m bound to disagree with the president on some issues. At the Sherrill rally — one of her first public events on the entire campaign trail — I saw the opposite. She didn’t mention a single policy in her bid to become governor. In the five minutes that she spoke, she talked about flying a helicopter in the Navy, some fun quotes she remembers from the Navy, and graduating with the Naval Academy. She probably shouldn’t have mentioned the last one based on her widely-reported Naval Academy cheating controversy.

The contrast with Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign couldn’t have been clearer. You could go to any of the eight Ciattarelli rallies he did per day for the last four months and hear him talk about every policy there is for 45 minutes. Taxes, energy costs, education, housing — you name it. You’d find that people in the crowd actually understood the policies at stake and held informed opinions about them.

But this election proves that New Jersey will vote for Democrats no matter what, especially when the opposing party controls the White House — it’s a blue state after all. Even at a rally with former President Barack Obama, Sherrill didn’t fill a community college gymnasium without putting up partitions; yet the Democrats still came out to vote, and that’s all that matters.

So what can New Jerseyans expect from the next four years of Democratic leadership under Mikie Sherrill?

First, expect your electric bill to remain sky-high. Sherrill has pledged to freeze electricity rates at the astronomical level left behind by Governor Phil Murphy. By freezing rates, she’s guaranteed they won’t come down and get better — they can’t change.

Next, expect your town to continue to be overdeveloped with affordable housing projects that towns are fighting against. Under Sherrill, New Jersey will continue Murphy’s policy that forces all 564 municipalities to build housing units, regardless of whether their infrastructure can handle it. For most towns, they can’t.

In fairness, Ciattarelli faced an uphill climb. He ran an undoubtedly better campaign — an exhaustive, issue-forced one, but in a state where Trump lost by six points, it makes sense that Ciattarelli lost with headwind. With 95% of votes in on Tuesday night, Sherrill led 56% to 43%, a much wider margin than Ciattarelli’s narrow loss to Murphy in 2021 by 3 points.

New Jersey wasn’t alone in this trend. Democrats won big across the east coast, taking the governorship in Virginia and the mayor’s race in New York City. Their strategy was simple: tie every Republican to Trump, like calling Ciattarelli “100% MAGA,” and turn every race into a referendum on the president. It worked.

For New Jersey Republicans, this race should be a wake-up call. In comparison from the 2024 general election to this year’s election, every single county shifted Democratic, including Republican strongholds like Hunterdon and Ocean. Gloucester and Cumberland even flipped back to blue. Until the GOP can convince voters to separate their feelings about Donald Trump from their opinions on local policy, Democrats like Mikie Sherrill will keep coasting to victory on national emotion rather than local leadership.

At the end of the day, with Trump sitting at a 47% approval rating and the government in the midst of a record-setting shutdown, the Democrats were able to run a successful campaign based on attacks rather than policy.

Sherrill didn’t win on ideas. She won on outrage.