Unpacking The New Jersey And Virginia Races For Governor

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Hi, this is Marissa in Houston, Texas, and I'm currently trying to build the habit of going on a 30-minute morning walk.

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Hey there.

It's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And we're joined by WNYC's Nancy Solomon, who also hosts the podcast, Dead End, Crime and Politics.

Hi, Nancy.

Hi.

So today on the show, we are talking about two key governors' races, both along the eastern seaboard, and we're going to start in New Jersey, where early voting begins later this month.

Nancy, let's talk about the candidates to succeed Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

He's term limited.

So who from his party wants to be governor?

All right, the candidate for the Democratic Party is Mikey Mikey Sherrill.

She is a three-term congresswoman from New Jersey, got elected in 2018 during the Blue Wave election after the Trump election in 2016.

She's a moderate Democrat,

really disciplined about being a moderate Democrat.

During the primary, she came into some criticism from the progressive wing of the party, but she pretty much holds that lane.

And she's a former Navy helicopter pilot and a former federal prosecutor.

So she kind of brings that moderate middle-of-the-road kind of background.

And her politics pretty much follow suit.

And on the Republican side?

We have Jack Chitterelli, the Republican nominee.

He was a state assemblyman for several years.

He's now been out of the assembly and he's run for governor three times.

He's also a former businessman and he made quite a bit of money selling his businesses.

So he has some independent wealth to help him in his political career.

Yeah.

And, Nancy, what are the major issues you're seeing in this race so far?

You know, I think it's really going to be about which candidate can pull out the most votes and get the most turnout.

I think most people probably have made up their mind of which of these two candidates they prefer because they really do offer very, very different visions for the future of the state.

You know, Jack Chittarelli is endorsed by President Trump, and over the course of his political career, he has gone from being a moderate Republican to what can, I think, safely be called a MAGA Republican.

So I think in terms of this race, people think of New Jersey as a reliably blue state, but when it comes to statewide gubernatorial elections, that's just not true at all.

We have flipped back and forth between Republicans and Democrats for decades.

So that gives Jack Chitterelli an advantage there.

But we also have a state of moderate independence and Democrats who are distressed, I think is a fair word to say about the Trump administration and all the changes that have come in his second term.

And so people are also going to be voting for the Democrat against the president, you know, some people.

Trevor Burrus: So are there local issues that are really driving this?

Or is this like everything else where all politics used to be local and now they're all national?

It is true that people are very tuned in to Washington and President Trump.

But I think at the same time, the reason why we've seen the governor's seat flip back and forth between Republicans and Democrats is that New Jersey voters are very upset about how unaffordable the state is, very upset about high taxes, particularly high property taxes.

And that is, it's just a perennial issue.

People are upset about it and they want to see change.

And change doesn't happen because it's a very hard problem to fix.

And Ashley, how does this fit into the broader national political conversation right now?

Voters are asking, I mean, no matter where you are, they're asking their lawmakers to tackle the issue of affordability.

That is in both Republican and in Democratic states.

And, you know, you'll hear a lot of Democrats say that candidates in their party that are not doing enough to address this issue and just talk about affordability day in, day out are doing a disservice to the party because this is a space where Republicans made a lot of promises, particularly President Trump, and he hasn't delivered.

I mean, there hasn't been a significant decrease in prices.

Arguably, it's going in the other direction, and this is something that could be a huge liability for the party.

So, I think no matter where you are, this is going to be coming into the midterms.

As long as prices continue to tick up, or at least there's no significant improvements for the sort of day-to-day costs of people's lives, like this is going to be a very big issue.

Nancy, there's been some criticism of the the Democratic candidate Mikey Sherrill that she's not talking about costs enough or about the economy enough.

What do you make of that?

So there has been criticism and people do want to hear what the candidates are going to do about affordability.

I don't think necessarily it's true that Mikey Sherrill is not talking about affordability.

Jack Chitterelli says, look, you know, if we take a drink every time she mentions Donald Trump, we're all going to be drunk.

And she does talk about Trump and his connection to Trump and the fact that he was endorsed by Trump.

But she also talks about affordability a lot.

I mean, one of the things she's made very clear is that one of the big issues right now with affordability is the electric bills, which have gone way up, 20% up in June.

Huh.

And Chitterelli is saying green energy is the problem?

Yeah.

He says that the Murphy administration's investment in clean energy, particularly wind power, is the problem and that's what drove up costs, that Democrats have closed power plants.

It's really not true because two of the plants were closed by Chris Christie, a Republican.

And if we could get those clean energy projects online, I think anyone who really knows this issue would argue that prices would come down if we were producing more electric energy.

You know, now

Murphy put a lot into the wind industry.

That's been really toppled now by the Trump presidency.

A lot of these projects have been either canceled or put on hold.

So, you know, it's unclear exactly how much Cheryl can do for clean energy right now, given the federal situation, but she certainly supports clean energy in a way that Jack Chitterelli doesn't.

And we aren't in the prediction business here on the NPR Politics podcast, but you are following the polls there, Nancy.

Is there a favorite to win?

No, it's really neck and neck.

Yeah.

I think the question is going to be, who is this going to be a referendum on?

Is it on Phil Murphy or is it on Donald Trump?

And that's going to be really hard to predict at this point.

You know, in 2017, Phil Murphy was replacing Chris Christie.

And, you know, of course, the whole country is affected by federal and national politics and influenced by it.

But, you know, we definitely have state politics that has its own life here.

All right.

Well, we are going to leave it there for now and take a quick break.

Thank you for being here, Nancy.

Oh, thanks for having me.

And when we get back, we'll be talking about a different governor's race in Virginia.

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And we're back.

And Margaret Barthell from Member Station WAMU joins us now to discuss the Virginia governor's race.

Welcome, Margaret.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So, candidates in Virginia are running to replace Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

He won in 2021, but Virginia is quirky and governors can only serve one term at a time.

So let's start on the Republican side.

Who is trying to get this job?

Yeah, so that would be the current lieutenant governor, Winsom Earl Sears.

She has been in the Yunkin administration for the last four years.

That's sort of the central part of her political biography.

She served a stint in the House of Delegates as well.

She is a fairly conservative Republican.

She has been running in part as a sort of second term for Glenn Young.

You know, you see campaign signs occasionally that have sort of, you know, the slogan is, let's keep a good thing going.

That said, she's also focused a lot on sort of social and cultural issues significantly as a way to speak to her base.

So that's when Simmer El Sears, she is trailing in fundraising and also trailing in what polling we have.

Yeah, it's interesting because Youngkin ran as the sort of moderate Republican.

Yeah.

And she is not exactly in that mold.

No, no, she isn't.

And I think, I mean, I think that some Virginia Democrats would probably tell you, well, but did he govern as a moderate Republican?

And Yunken himself has really evolved.

You know, you saw him sitting next to President Trump at the Republican National Convention last summer when Samerrel Sears does not have Trump's endorsement.

She's indicated that she'd be open to it,

but he has not come through.

And many sort of the the Republican Party apparatus overall are kind of keeping their powder dry on this one in terms of fundraising and so forth.

Yeah, and White House correspondent here, just to weigh in and say that President Trump tends to only endorse people he thinks have a chance of winning.

He doesn't often go out on a limb.

Yeah, yeah.

So tell us about the Democratic candidate.

Sure.

So the Democrat running is former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger.

She has an incredibly similar political biography to Mikey Sherrill, three terms as a kind of a moderate Democrat in Congress.

She has a background as a CIA officer.

And so, you know, kind of heavy like law enforcement emphasis as well.

She is running on sort of general affordability issues in a similar way to, you know, some of the conversation that you were having earlier with Nancy.

That has been the central focus of her campaign, as well as the impact of the Trump Trump administration's federal workforce and contracting cuts in Virginia.

I know because of where Virginia is situated, I would assume like maybe national politics play a bigger role there than they were in New Jersey.

What else are you sort of seeing cropping up as like important issues?

Yeah, I mean, I think one really wild card that we have right now is the shutdown.

You know, usually in Virginia, elections tend to favor the party that is not currently in the White House.

The governor's race obviously comes immediately after the year after the presidential election, and voters tend to swing the other way in Virginia.

The one time that that did not happen was actually during a government shutdown in 2013.

But I would say that this time, you know, that debate has already been had in large part.

You've had Doge cuts come to Virginia.

You've had the overall Trump administration sort of treatment of the federal workforce, you know, more than 300,000 of whom actually live in Virginia.

And that's not to say say anything about the federal contractors who are also very numerous in the state.

So in some ways, I think, you know, you could just see the shutdown as sort of an added bullet point to that already very long list of things that at least some people are upset about.

I also mentioned social and cultural issues.

Earl Sears is very much leaning into issues of transgender students in school bathrooms.

and locker rooms and girls' sports.

This has been almost the sole focus of her campaign for the last month or two.

That is obviously a play for her base.

They really like when she talks about that.

I think that there are some questions about the extent to which that really plays with voters outside of the base.

Ashley, all of us who lived through the 2024 election will find these themes very familiar.

President Trump's closing argument was all about transgender issues.

That ad was on repeat again and again and again, hitting Vice President Harris.

So, yeah, I mean, what do you make of the fact that this issue has come back?

There are a couple of reasons that Earl Sears would be doing this.

I mean, first of all, you know, off-cycle elections are mostly

participated by their like base voters, people who are excited to vote, pay attention to politics.

You want to engage your base because those are the voters who will most reliably show up in 2025 in an off-year election.

These are the people that will go to the polls.

And two, I mean, Republicans would probably want to talk about the economy more, but that is not a strong issue for them right now.

So they're kind of stuck to these culture war issues that they probably otherwise wouldn't want to talk about.

I mean, it is a safer subject than talking about affordability, as we were saying.

A lot of Republicans don't really want to talk about the tariffs.

I think they're kind of relegated to one, going to issues that they know will engage the voters that they can most reliably expect to show up in an odd year election.

And two, there's not really much else to talk about.

Well, and as President Trump likes to say, some of these are 80-20 issues,

but they aren't necessarily the thing that drives people to vote.

So, Margaret, do you have any sense of whether this is working or could work?

Yeah, recently I saw Winsomer El Sears at a Moms for Liberty event in Fairfax County.

It's very clear that the people who support her, who are excited about her candidacy, this really enlivens them.

They feel that, you know, Virginia schools, particularly the sort of big liberal districts in northern Virginia, have just completely gone off the rails.

This was something that Glenn Youngkin brought up quite a bit in 2021.

Now, that was, you know, sort of in the wake of the pandemic.

People were much more upset in general about school closures and things like that.

So I think, you know, we'll have to see if the issue has that kind of salience moving forward.

To Ashley's point, the Earl Sears campaign is running essentially a version of the Kamala Harris's for They Them ad that you referenced.

They have got a clip of Spanberger saying that she supports essentially equal rights and anti-discrimination legislation for LGBTQ people.

And they're running that ad, suggesting that she is not focused on the interests of all Virginians.

The last point is that we do have a little bit of public polling from George Mason University and the Washington Post in the race.

It shows that Spanberger is leading by more than 10 points.

And the other thing that they asked about was, you know, top issues for voters.

And the economy was the plurality of, you know, people's concerns.

Education was further down the list.

And a much smaller percentage of those responses were about transgender issues in schools.

So, Ashley, as we close this out, I want to talk about both of these races.

These governor's races, every four or eight years, get a huge amount of attention because everybody in politics is trying to read the tea leaves about what they say about how the midterms are going to turn out, what they say about the president's popularity, all of this stuff.

So, depending on how this turns out, is there a clear message that should or could be taken?

Well, they don't say everything about like how voters are feeling about stuff on a federal level.

But I think for Democrats, losing any of these two states would be a hit to the gut because, one,

Democrats pretty much only have power at the state level.

Governors are playing a very key role in the quote-unquote resistance against Donald Trump right now because Democrats don't have a majority in the House.

They don't have a majority in the Senate.

They're out of the White House.

There is really not a lot of places where they can exert any sort of power.

So losing any one of those states would be a hit to the gut.

And then two, I think we are still more than a year away from midterms.

Who knows how Democratic voters are going to feel then?

Right now, it's hard to predict because even though Democratic voters are really upset with the Trump administration, they don't really like Democrats.

And so how they react to either of these two moderate Democrats is, you know, sort of a wild card as well.

But I don't know that it is predictive of how they're going to respond to maybe a more like bigger mix of Democrats when congressional races come up.

So yeah, I also wonder if this becomes a data point in the battle between sort of the moderate wing and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or, you know, if it just washes past.

I mean, we'll get a sense of how at least voters in New Jersey and Virginia feel about moderate Democrats.

You know, if they turn up, you know, that's a pretty good indicator.

And if they don't, we get a sense of how they feel about that too.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

I mean, you know, Virginia is a pretty moderate state when it comes right down to it.

And we'll see how that sort of message plays in the midst of all of the Trump administration sort of back and forth.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to leave it there for today.

Thank you for being here, Margaret.

My pleasure.

I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Pete and Jerry's Eggs, inviting you to tag along with one of their organic, pastor-raised hens as she heads out for her day in the pasture.

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Under the open sky, they can hear songbirds nesting in the trees.

They bask in the sounds of nature as they prepare to lay their rich, delicious eggs.

And when the sun starts to set, the crickets begin to sing.

Time to catch one last squiggly snack before bedtime.

To learn more about Pete and Jerry's organic pasture-raised eggs and the certified humane farms where their hens roam, visit PeteandJerry's.com.

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