The New Jersey governor’s race could show the GOP how to win in midterms

The midterm elections are a little over a year away. To continue pushing the Trump agenda forward, Republicans must keep control of the House and the Senate.

Democrats want to make the midterms a referendum on the presidency of Donald Trump. The GOP should counter by making the elections, instead, about the ongoing need to reverse former President Joe Biden’s disastrous excess spending, open borders, climate obsession and soft-on-crime policies. It will take two years to drain the swamp; Republicans will need two more to replant it.

In New Jersey’s governor’s race, Republican Jack Ciattarelli is doing just that, and is closing the gap with Democrat U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill. The “Jersey Guy” may be creating the template for a GOP victory next November.

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Ciattarelli is running on a platform that promises to oppose sanctuary cities, reject cashless bail for violent and repeat offenders, cap property taxes (New Jersey has the highest in the nation), create a “Parents bill of rights”, ban offshore wind farms from New Jersey’s beautiful coastline and create a state DOGE to reduce excess spending.

In other words, Ciattarelli is taking on some of the worst Democrat policies left behind by Biden. His approach is working with New Jersey voters.

Panicky Democrats are pouring money into the Garden State to defeat Ciattarelli. The race has tightened, with Democrat U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill now eking out a 4-point advantage, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. A few months ago, Sherrill was up by double-digits. 

Sherill’s vanishing lead comes despite big money donors throwing 14 times as much money towards the New Jersey representative as to Ciattarelli and in spite of a super PAC backed by the Democratic Governors Association spending $20 million on TV and digital ads. That’s more, according to NBC, than all groups spent on incumbent Governor Phil Murphy’s campaign in 2021. 

Democrats are right to be nervous. Trump lost New Jersey by only 6 percentage points last year; in 2020 he lost the state by 16 points. New Jersey’s swing towards the president was the second largest in any state. And, when Ciattarelli ran against Governor Phil Murphy in 2021, he lost by only 3 points.

A Rutgers-Eagleton poll this past summer showed 85% of New Jersey residents dissatisfied with the state’s high cost of living, while 80% were angry about taxes. 

Who is surprised? New Jersey ranks as the fourth highest-taxed state in the U.S. and is also in the top ten most expensive places to live. The Garden State is the 38th state ranked by the cost of doing business and next-to-last in “business friendliness”, beaten out only by New York. If businesses cannot thrive, neither do communities. 

One important voter issue that looms large in the current race is the cost of electricity in New Jersey, which has jumped 22% this year; for the U.S. overall, the rise is only 5%. The average residential electricity rate in New Jersey is 25.31 ¢/kWh, a shocking 44% above the national average. Businesses aren’t much better off; the average New Jersey commercial electricity rate is 18.38 ¢/kWh, 29% higher than the national average. 

Ciattarelli blames Democrats, who have controlled the governor’s mansion for the past eight years and the state legislature for over two decades. He reminds voters that when Phil Murphy became governor, New Jersey was a net exporter of energy; today it is an importer, thanks to Democrats’ obsession with climate change.

In recent years, New Jersey has closed all its coal-fired power plants and a nuclear facility, in part to comply with the ambitions of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the nation’s first cap-and-trade agreement in the U.S., meant to limit carbon emissions from the power sector. Ciattarelli calls the RGGI a “carbon tax policy that has cost New Jersey $300 to $500 million a year.” He is correct.

New Jersey was one of the original members of the RGGI, joining in 2005 under a Democrat governor. In 2012, concerned about rising power costs, Republican governor Chris Christie pulled the state out of the agreement, declaring the program ineffective. He noted that New Jersey’s carbon output was declining not because of the RGGI, but because the state, as elsewhere in the U.S., had replaced coal-burning facilities with natural gas. “RGGI does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment,” Mr. Christie said at the time.

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Murphy, whose campaigns have received considerable support from environmental groups, and who embraced the climate follies of the Joe Biden White House, rejoined the RGGI, only to see electricity costs go through the roof. This was inevitable; the cap-and-trade agreement levies additional costs on electric utilities that are then passed on to customers.

Not only did Murphy make New Jersey residents subject to the cap-and-trade burden, he also blocked natural gas pipelines from carrying abundant and inexpensive fuel to the state, just as New York has done.

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Ciattarelli is educating voters about the costs not only of the RGGI, but also about the long-term costs of relying on the kinds of intermittent and unreliable renewable energy favored by Joe Biden. Electricity prices are important, not only because power is an essential product for every household, but because today’s new technologies require vast amounts of electricity. States that have driven up electricity prices through bad policies will be forced to provide tax incentives and subsidies to attract AI data centers. New Jersey is doing that, diluting the benefits of such investments and further driving electricity costs higher.

The New Jersey contest will tell us a lot about what to expect in next year’s midterms. Will voters in the Garden State throw out the politicians who have driven businesses and citizens to leave the state for greener pastures, or settle for the second-hand Joe Biden policies that push taxes and costs even higher?