Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill, has again avoided addressing whether she will support socialist Zohran Mamdani’s bid for mayor across the Hudson River, despite previously showing interest in his campaign.
“Look, I haven’t weighed in, I haven’t made endorsements in New York because I’m running in New Jersey,” Sherrill told PIX11 News on Friday.
Just two days following the New York City mayoral primary, Sherrill conveyed a somewhat different message to NBC 10 Philadelphia. She suggested that she might support Mamdani and expressed curiosity about his approach to providing “effective governance.”
Democrats in New York and the surrounding tri-state area are unsure how to deal with Mamdani’s surprising victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo last month, considering his very progressive agenda.
Top leaders such as Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have refrained from endorsing Mamdani — for now.
Republicans have seized their silence and sought to use Mamdani’s victory to help boost their otherwise dim prospects in the off-year elections.
New Jersey Republican gubernatorial contender Jack Ciattarelli quickly ripped into Sherrill for sidestepping on Mamdani and highlighted how she expressed interest in him shortly after he won the Democratic primary during a June 26 interview.
“First Mikie Sherrill endorses Zohran Mamdani and calls his radical policies ‘interesting’… now she’s pretending she never heard of him? Come on, Mikie — NJ voters aren’t stupid,” Ciattarelli chided on X.
“Roll the tape. You said it. You own it,” he added with a compilation of Sherrill’s responses to questions about Mamdani.
The Republican Governors Association also blasted Sherrill.
“New York’s failures become New Jersey’s problems,” the RGA swiped. “[Mikie Sherrill] said she’d support Mamdani saying, ‘If he’s the Democratic candidate, which it sounds like he is, I assume I will.’ Now, she’s acting like she doesn’t know him,” the GOP group said on X.
Mamdani is the favorite to win the Big Apple mayoral primary, though he still faces general election competition from Mayor Adams, Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Sherrill, a former Navy pilot who rode the blue wave to Congress in 2018, has sought to portray herself as a moderate Democrat.
She first arrived in the House in 2019 with fellow national security buffs Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who is the favorite in the Virginia gubernatorial primary.
All three women had fashioned themselves as centrists and touted their national security backgrounds.
“I will tell you here, people are deeply concerned about the affordability that I’ve laid out,” she added to PIX11 News, after evading a question on Mamdani.
“They want to see the plans and policies that are going to make a difference and [have] a sense that what Trenton is doing in the entrenched interests there and the regulations and the red tape and the bureaucracy are not delivering for them.”
Ciattarelli lost to outgoing New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) by a measly three points in 2021, and President Trump lost the Garden State by about six points in 2024, indicating that Republicans can be competitive in the Democratic stronghold state.
The off-year election in New Jersey, alongside the elections in New York City and Virginia, are widely seen as bellwethers that could be harbingers of what’s to come in the 2026 midterm cycles.
