The Governors, Part One: Democrats Start as Favorites in 2025 New Jersey and Virginia Races

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— While 2026 will feature three dozen gubernatorial contests, two states, New Jersey and Virginia, will elect governors in open-seat races this year.

— We are starting out both 2025 contests, which are in states that backed Kamala Harris by nearly 6 points apiece, as Leans Democratic.

— In New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11) is a tenuous favorite for the Democratic nomination amidst a crowded field, while 2021 GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli is a stronger favorite on his side.

— Neither Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA) nor former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) have primary competition, so Virginia’s race is in general election mode earlier than usual.

2025’s gubernatorial races

A theme of this cycle’s gubernatorial races is open seats, so it’s fitting that before the flood of races in 2026, the pair of races contested this year, Virginia and New Jersey, are both open. We’ll go into more detail on the pair of 2025 races below, and then we’ll survey the 2026 races in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball.

In 2021, the gubernatorial results in both states signaled an electorate that was souring on then-President Joe Biden after less than a year in office: While Republicans ended their 12-year statewide drought in Virginia that year, the more surprising result of the night was that they also came within about 3 points of denying Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) a second term. The pair of states exhibiting that type of thermostatic reaction was hardly uncommon: For first-term presidents since George H. W. Bush, coming out with a net loss between the two states has almost been like taking the oath of office—it’s something that has invariably taken place during their first year. While the 2021 returns did not forecast 2022 in the same way that, say, 2009 and 2017’s results did for 2010 and 2018, respectively—for one thing, the Dobbs decision was handed down in the interim, which helped weaken the “typical” midterm dynamics—we are still beginning this cycle with the aforementioned history in mind.

New Jersey, which we’ll start with, is the more fluid of the two 2025 contests. Aside from the crowded primaries on both sides (which we’ll get to later), this year’s gubernatorial race will be the first within living memory that will not feature the county “line” ballot system. This format essentially gave preferential ballot positioning to candidates endorsed by county-level political parties. With most of the politicking done at the county-level conventions, primaries were typically a formality, as line-backed candidates rarely lost.

However, 2024 marked the beginning of the end of the county line’s dominance: now-Sen. Andy Kim (D), as part of his Senate campaign, challenged the system in court and got a favorable ruling. Although the initial ruling only applied to the 2024 Democratic primary, the writing seemed to be on the wall. Earlier this year, Murphy signed legislation abolishing the line altogether, although some good government reformers, including Kim himself, were not entirely satisfied, as it gives county-level officials some wiggle room when formatting ballots. For instance, as Zach Blackburn of the New Jersey Globe points out, candidates endorsed at the county conventions can still appear on the ballot with the slogan of the county party next to their name—so local parties can still telegraph their choices to the electorate, though perhaps more subtly than they otherwise could with the line.

All this history is to say that the death of the line may make primaries, which are scheduled for June 10, less predictable this year.

On the Democratic side, candidates include Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D, NJ-5), Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11), former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller.

Sherrill has held consistent, if tenuous, leads in the polls; a fresh poll from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University showed her leading the pack while taking just 17%. Despite her leading position, she has only recently started running ads, so we’ll be watching if she can really start breaking away from the rest of the field.

Gottheimer, a Blue Dog who is probably the most moderate candidate, has been among the House’s best fundraisers since he was elected in 2016, something he has worked to leverage at a statewide level—he has transferred about $10 million from his federal war chest to his Super PAC (Sherrill has done so as well, if to a lesser extent). As of last week, though, Gottheimer had been slightly outspent on the air by Fulop, who is one of the more progressive choices, according to data from AdImpact Politics.

According to the New Jersey Globe’s tracker linked to above, Sherrill has endorsements from much of North Jersey (though Gottheimer has institutional support from two counties within his district, including voter-rich Bergen County), while Sweeney, who represented a legislative district in the Camden area for two decades, has much of South Jersey locked down. However, “pro-Sherrill” counties would have cast 62% of the ballots in the 2017 gubernatorial primary while “pro-Sweeney” counties accounted for just over 20%. The balance is a little more equitable when using the 2024 Senate primary as a baseline, 56%-24% in favor of the “pro-Sherrill” counties, though Kim, the landslide winner of the contest, is from South Jersey.

On the Republican side, former state legislator Jack Ciattarelli held Murphy to a 51%-48% win in 2021 and has, more or less, been running for a third time ever since (he ran in 2017 but lost the primary). Though there will be more candidates on the ballot, the GOP primary has essentially become a three-man race: Ciattarelli, who is the frontrunner, is ideologically between state Sen. Jon Bramnick, a center-right Republican, and talk radio personality Bill Spadea, on the right—the latter likely has more potential to pull an upset. Ciattarelli, not surprisingly, has emphasized the need for party unity and, considering his close 2021 result, has talked up electability. But the sparks that have flown on the GOP side, especially between Ciattarelli and Spadea, make the tenor of the busier Democratic primary seem relatively cordial.

Trump’s involvement—or lack thereof—could have an outsized impact in the primary. Thus far, the president has stayed neutral (and it seems possible that he may remain so for the duration of the primary). The aforementioned Rutgers-Eagleton poll showed Ciattarelli leading Spadea 42% to 12%, with no one else breaking into double-digits. Still, Spadea has had an audience for years and, though most counties have not endorsed candidates as of this writing, the Spadea campaign points to their strong showing at the Ocean County convention in late February—the county, which includes much of the Jersey Shore, is the GOP’s largest source of votes in general elections. But it would be hard to see Spadea getting the nomination without a Trump endorsement. Conversely, if Trump backed Ciattarelli, it would likely cement his frontrunner status.

So, between the new ballot format and crowded fields on both sides, June 10 seems likely to make for an intriguing night of election-watching in the Garden State.

Looking towards the general election, we are starting New Jersey out as Leans Democratic. To be sure, in the presidential election last year, the state was among Kamala Harris’s weakest—or, possibly better put, Trump’s best—performances, relatively speaking. Though Harris held it 52%-46%, its 10-percentage point redshift was second in the nation only to New York. Still, we wonder how much of Trump’s gains there can be replicated with Trump himself off the ballot, and considering the fact that he will likely be less popular in office than he was as a non-incumbent.

Even with Trump on the ballot, down-ballot Republicans were hard-pressed to match his performance. Let’s consider the 2024 presidential and Senate races in the state to illustrate this. A few weeks after the election, Managing Editor Kyle Kondik looked at the undervote in Senate races (typically, more votes are cast in presidential races than Senate races in any given state). Across most states that saw competitive Senate races, voter turnout was about 99% of what their presidential totals were—this was not out of line with history. But New Jersey’s Senate contest saw a comparatively low 94% of its presidential turnout. This was mostly driven by GOP Senate nominee Curtis Bashaw taking only 90% of Trump’s vote total. Trump’s most substantial gains in New Jersey came in the New York media market, with Hudson County (Jersey City) and Passaic County (Paterson) leading the state (each shifted more than 15 percentage points to him). But Bashaw took just 80% of Trump’s votes in the former and 86% in the latter. This is not to say that Republicans could not outrun Trump elsewhere in the state, but it does speak to the difficulty they may have in trying to recreate his coalition.

On paper, Virginia is set to have its primaries just a week after New Jersey, on June 17. But neither party will have a contested gubernatorial primary.

For Democrats, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s (D, VA-7) coronation has been in the works for the better part of two years. Shortly after Virginia’s 2023 legislative elections concluded, she got into the gubernatorial race and rolled out endorsements at a breakneck pace. Though she briefly had a rival in then-Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (who has since dropped down to the lieutenant governor race), Spanberger has been something of the de facto Democratic nominee for most of that time. While some Black Democrats were not apparently thrilled with her candidacy—veteran Rep. Bobby Scott (D, VA-3) was sometimes mooted as a possible primary challenger to Spanberger, but he never took real steps toward running—Spanberger successfully boxed out potential rivals.

Spanberger entered the 2025 contest as a veteran of competitive elections: She represented two different versions of a competitive district over the course of three terms, as her Richmond-centric 7th District became more Northern Virginia-centric in redistricting in advance of her last election in 2022, which gave her some exposure in both media markets. For much of her time in the race, Spanberger emphasized the types of issues that Democratic legislative candidates ran on in 2023, such as protecting abortion rights, supporting public education, and, generally, pushing back against Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). However, more recently, Trump seemed to hand Spanberger a campaign issue on a silver platter. Virginia has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of federal workers, a group that, to put it charitably, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to antagonize. Spanberger, who has a background in the Intelligence Community, has been a vocal critic of the president’s (typically haphazard) efforts to reduce the federal workforce.

Meanwhile, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) got into the race in September of last year and secured Youngkin’s endorsement in November. For a time, it seemed like Earle-Sears might have a contested primary, as former state legislators Amanda Chase and Dave LaRock entered the race running to the lieutenant governor’s right. Though Earle-Sears is, without a doubt, a conservative, after the 2022 midterms, Earle-Sears said she did not like the idea of a third Trump presidential run. However, Chase and LaRock were not able to put together serious campaigns, as neither submitted enough petition signatures to qualify for the primary ballot. Even if the Republican primary were contested, we’d have had a hard time seeing Earle-Sears losing; despite her earlier comments on Trump, she is a candidate who seems basically acceptable to most Republican voters.

Though Youngkin, who cannot run for a second consecutive term himself, has tied himself closer to Trump over the last several months, he remains a popular governor: a February poll from Roanoke College put his approval rating at 53%, while an earlier Mason-Dixon poll put him at 58%. Earle-Sears is essentially running to continue Youngkin’s policies. For instance, Earle-Sears has emphasized her support for the parents’ rights movement, something that Youngkin got electoral mileage out of four years ago, as the state (and nation) was moving out of the Covid pandemic.

Earle-Sears has been quick to identify a potential Spanberger governorship as a threat to the state’s Right to Work status, something conservatives see as a key factor in the state’s highly-regarded business climate. It might also be worth noting, though, that in 2016, a constitutional amendment supporting Right to Work in Virginia failed 54%-46%.

Democrats, meanwhile, have brought up one of Earle-Sears’s votes from this year’s legislative session (as lieutenant governor, part of her job involves breaking ties in the state Senate). In late January, because of some wily maneuvering by Senate Democrats, Earle-Sears went on record voting against a bill aimed at expanding access to contraception. The Spanberger campaign has also tried to paint Earle-Sears as insensitive to federal workers, aided by an audio clip of the lieutenant governor seeming to minimize the impact of their layoffs.

As with New Jersey, we are starting Virginia off as Leans Democratic, although it would represent a Democratic flip instead of a hold. Put simply, several factors that propelled Youngkin to a 51%-49% win in 2021 are now absent.

As we outlined earlier, the biggest such factor is the presidential dynamic: since 1977, Virginia has elected a governor from the non-White House party, with the sole exception coming in 2013. Since 2021, we have also increasingly looked at that 2013 contest with a bit of an asterisk: Terry McAuliffe (D) probably benefited from the combined impact of a GOP-induced government shutdown late in the campaign, a very conservative GOP opponent, and a relatively strong third party candidate’s presence on the ballot. McAuliffe tried to stage a comeback in 2021 after his 2013 win, but lost to Youngkin.

Given Youngkin’s narrow—though impressive—win in 2021, could McAuliffe have closed the 2-point gap if the election had been held in 2022, after the Dobbs decision? It’s possible: Democrats won the House popular vote in the state by 3.6% in 2022. While there are conceivable scenarios where Youngkin would have still won, potential restrictions on abortion rights are now less abstract to voters than they were in 2021.

Though this may be splitting hairs to some extent, we’d call Virginia a firmer Leans Democratic than New Jersey. Part of this has to do with candidate pairings: While we know what the Virginia matchup will be, there is considerably more uncertainty in New Jersey. Federal government cuts also seem like an issue uniquely salient to Virginia compared to many other states given the state’s proximity to Washington (and the importance of federal jobs elsewhere in the state, like in military-heavy Hampton Roads). While Virginia tends to be the state that reacts more against whatever is happening on the other side of the Potomac River, New Jersey might be a little more idiosyncratic. In 2017, for instance, while Virginia got several points bluer from 2016, New Jersey barely budged.

In the smattering of elections held so far in 2025, Democrats have generally been performing similarly to how they performed in 2017, which augured well for them in the following year’s midterm. New Jersey and Virginia represent Democrats’ next big tests: They really should win both races.

J. Miles Coleman is an elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ and a political cartographer. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

See Other Political Commentary.