Quinnipiac University published a poll this month that showed President Donald Trump’s approval rating in New Jersey stands at a meager 41%, while 55% of the Garden State’s likely voters disapprove of his job performance. And yet, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, former New Jersey General Assembly member Jack Ciattarelli, doesn’t seem to have received the memo.
The Trump-endorsed Republican repeatedly declined to criticize or distance himself from the president during a debate last Sunday against his Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill. Ciattarelli offered no direct rebuttal to Sherrill’s prediction that “he’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do” or her claim that “all he does is say Trump’s right.”
Indeed, when he was pressed to address concerns among Trump-skeptical New Jersey voters about the current administration’s indifference to MSNBC’s reporting that “border czar” Tom Homan allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash in an FBI sting operation (which the White House denies, and of which Homan said: “I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal), Ciattarelli instead opted to shower the president with praise. And he did the same when he was asked to address the Federal Communications Commission’s seeming threats against television networks and the president’s pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters.
“Well, let’s talk about what the president has done for New Jersey since he took office,” he said before framing several provisions of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” as “good for all New Jerseyans.”
If this were a Republican primary campaign — in which Trump’s approval is effectively a prerequisite for the party’s nomination — such an answer might have been a master stroke. In a general election, however, and particularly in a state where no Republican has won statewide since Chris Christie’s re-election as governor in 2013 — and Trump’s approval rating is underwater — it borders on amateurish.
In many ways, Ciattarelli’s choice of words reflects the same stubbornness and lack of interest in his constituents’ wishes as is typical of the very man he is so desperate not to cross.
While polls continue to show that the majority of Americans oppose Trump’s implementing tariffs, for instance, the president recently dismissed their concerns in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, claiming “that’s only because they don’t understand the word ‘tariff’” and falsely stating, “We have all this money, trillions of dollars pouring into our country, only because of the tariffs.” And perhaps most controversially, he continues to phrase his administration’s failure to release the Epstein files as a “dead issue,” and “merely another Democrat HOAX,” even though polls demonstrate that most Americans wish to see all documents about the disgraced, deceased sex offender made public.
Similarly, even as Ciattarelli acknowledged during last weekend’s debate that his state leans heavily Democratic, he explicitly laid the blame on “the party that’s controlled our Legislature for 25 years” and “the executive branch for eight years” as “the reason why we are today” facing numerous crises.
Ciattarelli may well have policy disagreements with his state’s opposing party, but with most polls indicating that he trails Sherrill, the strategy of simply pinning her entire party as the cause of New Jersey’s problems is unlikely to win voters over to his side.
The same is true of his uncompromising loyalty to the president. Ciattarelli’s campaign advisers need only to look at the outcomes of several Senate and gubernatorial races in swing states last November as proof.
While Trump himself won all seven swing states in the 2024 elections, Republican candidates’ strategy of forging ironclad alliances with him didn’t produce similar success down the ticket. With Trump’s endorsements, Republican Senate candidates Sam Brown, Kari Lake, Eric Hovde and Mike Rogers all handily won their primary races in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, respectively — and all came up short in their general elections. Similarly, then-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson — even with Trump’s endorsement — finished nearly 15 percentage points short of Democratic candidate Josh Stein in his bid to become governor of North Carolina, a state Trump won by over 3 points.
With considerable ground to make up on his opponent and a little more than a month remaining, the New Jersey Republican will have to shake up his strategy quickly. Otherwise, he is heading for a place on the same list as the other recent Republican runners-up and only he will know whether remaining on Trump’s good side was truly worth the cost.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
