Mikie Sherrill Ran a Strong Campaign

Or at least it’s hard to argue with the results.

Most post election commentary this week has focused, understandably, on the anticipated but nonetheless stunning victory of charismatic socialist Zohran Mamdani over disgraced sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race. Beyond that, the huge win for California redistricting will have a major impact on the 2026 midterms, and is also (again understandably) a major topic of discussion.

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Those races, and the sweeping D victory in Virginia, were all, though, more or less in line with polls. The surprise of the night, was Mikie Sherrill’s win in the Governor’s race in New Jersey. Sherrill had been predicted to win in most polls—but the race had looked tight. One poll on the eve of the election had her up only 2 over Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

Instead Sherrill won by over 13 points, 56.3% to 43.1%, about the same margin as Spanberger’s commanding win. Harris only won the state in 2024 by 6, which means Sherrill got an impressive 7-point swing.

Sherrill’s numbers were in line with the massive blue wave that roiled across every election on Tuesday. But that in itself was somewhat surprising, because the conventional wisdom was that she was not a very good candidate. New York Times columnist and very astute political analyst Jamelle Bouie summed up the conventional wisdom shortly before polls closed when he argued that the much touted centrist/left divide between Spanberger and Mamdani was overhyped. Instead, he said, “the actual contrast is between spanberger/mamdani (focused message, vigorous campaigns) and sherrill (unfocused, half-hearted).”

I didn’t follow Sherrill’s campaign closely, and just assumed, based on all the commentary I saw, that she had in fact been uninspiring. But it is hard to argue that her campaign failed in any material way when she won by 13 points and achieved a 7 point D swing. On any metric, that is a remarkable result; it is hard to imagine Spanberger, or Mamdani, or anyone, doing better than that in a race in New Jersey.

So, I think in retrospect we’d have to say that Sherrill did not run a bad campaign. She seems to have run a solid campaign—maybe even an exceptional campaign. People who claimed she was uninspiring seem to have been mostly responding to unimpressive polling. Pollsters underestimated Democrats across the board—partially because of low quality partisan Republican polls gumming up averages, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris. But for unclear reasons they missed especially badly in New Jersey. As a result of that miss, it looked like Sherrill’s message was not getting through, and commenters backed and filled to conclude that she was a poor campaigner.

The point here is not to dump on people who got fooled by bad polls. Predicting the future is hard; gauging how well a campaign is doing is difficult. Polls are flawed tools, but they’re the best tools we’ve got; abandon them and you’re just relying even more on gut checks and subjective feelings about candidate quality. So when the polls say that Spanberger and Mamdani are winning by a lot, and that Sherrill may blow it, it’s natural to conclude that Sherrill has fucked up and is maybe blowing it because of a lack of charisma, poor messaging, or both.

That natural conclusion, though, was completely wrong in this case. Whatever failures of charisma or messaging pundits thought they saw, those failures obviously did not register with voters, who gave Sherrill a historic win.

All of which suggests that even astute pundits may wildly overestimate their own ability to judge the virtues of campaign messaging and charisma. Or, more broadly, we all may just overestimate how much messaging and charisma matters. When you look at Tuesday, Democrats wildly overperformed whether they were progressives or centrists, whether they were in red states or blue states or purple states, whether they seemed to have a focused coordinated campaign or a campaign that was less impressive. Maybe when the president is incredibly unpopular and he’s driving the economy into a ditch, all you have to do to win is stand there with a D beside your name.

There’s obviously still reason to try to select qualified, appealing candidates and to focus on messages that resonate. You never know exactly what the national environment is going to look like, and in close races every little bit matters.

Sherrill’s entirely unanticipated success, though, suggests that it may be more difficult than we like to think to identify appealing candidates and appealing messages, or to figure out how or whether candidate quality will matter. If it was easy to pick surefire winning candidates, everyone would pick them, and (somehow) no one would ever lose. As it is, we’re all mostly throwing darts in the dark. It’s only after the dust has settled that we’re able to say for sure that Mickie Sherrill ran a great campaign—or, alternately, perhaps, that she didn’t need to.