WOODLAND PARK, NJ – New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill made her political debut in 2018, turning a solidly Republican congressional seat — that had been occupied by Rodney Frelinghuysen, who retired that year, for 24 years — reliably blue.
She had party support and won in a tight race. The Montclair resident has never looked back and is serving in her fourth term as the representative for New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District.
Sherrill, 53, announced her plans to run for governor less than two weeks after she was reelected in November 2024. The district includes 15 municipalities in Essex County, 27 in Morris County and four in Passaic County.
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Before Sherrill’s 2018 win, the district hadn’t elected a Democrat in decades. Redistricting has since moved the Sussex County towns out of the district and replaced them with more Democratic towns in Essex County, including Millburn.
Sherrill, a native of Reston, Virginia, is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, in which she served as a helicopter pilot. She earned an undergraduate degree from the U.S. Naval Academy. After her military service, she obtained a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Georgetown University. She worked as a lawyer and then joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, where she developed programs to build trust between law enforcement and members of Garden State communities.
Naval service has defined Mikie Sherrill’s campaign
From an announcement video in which she wore her Navy flight jacket to TV ads in which she’s riding in a helicopter while telling residents she learned the importance of decision making during her military service, Sherrill’s naval experience has been a hallmark of her campaign for governor.
It’s also been the source of campaign controversy this fall.
Her entire U.S. Navy record was released to an ally of her Republican rival, former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, by the National Personnel Records Center at the National Archives in Washington. The mostly unredacted version of Sherrill’s records included Sherrill’s Social Security number, home addresses for her and her parents, life insurance information, Sherrill’s performance evaluations and the nondisclosure agreement between her and the U.S. government to safeguard classified information.
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The release came as the Ciattarelli campaign tried to raise questions about whether Sherrill was involved in a cheating scandal during her time in Annapolis in the early 1990s.
Although she does not appear in the commencement program with the rest of her graduating class of 1994, Sherrill was commissioned in May of that year, according to a copy of her service record provided by the Navy Personnel Command Public Affairs Office.
In a statement, Sherrill said that during her time as an undergraduate, she did not “turn in some of my classmates,” which is why she didn’t walk but still graduated and was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy.
A former House colleague, Sen. Andy Kim, offers perspective
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, sits down with USA TODAY Network New Jersey Editorial Board at The Record and NorthJersey.com, Woodland Park, N.J., Oct. 9, 2025.
Sen. Andy Kim ran for the first time during the same election cycle as Sherrill in 2018. Kim said he found in Sherrill a “kindred spirit of service for this country.”
During that time, Kim said, he and Sherrill spoke often of how to navigate running for office and potentially being members of Congress as parents.
“I really hold that early interaction with her in my heart. I really felt like I got a sense of why she’s doing this,” he said. “She’s not doing this because she ever thought that she’d be running for office. She served our country in the military. She’s the kind of person that runs toward the fire, somebody that’s trying to shape the future that her kids and my kids are growing up in.”
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Kim, who won his U.S. Senate seat last fall, has talked to Sherrill about what it means to hold statewide office and connect with people throughout New Jersey.
“I said, ‘Look, right now more than ever, people don’t like the status quo. People want change,’ which we saw in my race,” he said. “I think that she represents that, and I told her to lean in on that and really show people that you’re not somebody that’s just been looking in the mirror and trying to be governor since they were a kid.”
He said that is among the biggest contrasts between Sherrill and her opponent, who has “spent basically the last decade of his life running for governor.”
Sherrill has lived in the Garden State for more than 15 years, but Ciattarelli has been quick to point out that she has Virginia roots. The move echoes a strategy he used against Gov. Phil Murphy, a Massachusetts native, to no avail four years ago.
What does Sherrill stand for?
Mikie Sherrill (D) takes the stage during the second New Jersey gubernatorial debate against Jack Ciattarelli (R) at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night, Oct. 8, 2025.
The congresswoman has said she will use the corporate transit fee to fund NJ Transit in the immediate future and reevaluate the program when it is set to expire in 2028.
She has also said she would “work to enshrine abortion rights into our state constitution and stockpile the abortion pill, mifepristone.”
Sherrill has said the state has established important protections for the LGBTQ community and she believes more can be done to provide “privacy and medical protections.”
She has also said she would “pursue every legal avenue as governor to fight” federal funding cuts for programs like Medicaid.
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Sherrill has also said she would invest in “cheap, clean energy like solar” and streamline approval processes.
The congresswoman said she would “build more housing and lower prices” by doing things like converting underused infrastructure and commercial buildings into housing units and expanding first-time homebuyer programs.
Concerns about Sherrill’s appeal
Though New Jersey ultimately went blue in the 2024 presidential election, the margin of victory, just six points, was much closer than most expected.
In the traditionally blue 9th Congressional District, which includes many residents from underrepresented Black and Latino constituencies, President Donald Trump managed to secure victory despite President Joe Biden‘s victory by 19 points just four years earlier.
This voting bloc is something that has become a cause for concern in the gubernatorial race, but state Democratic Chairman Leroy Jones said Sherrill is working to address concerns.
“It’s not just a congresswoman. It’s all of us in many Black and Brown communities that there have been promises made and promises not kept,” he said. “We’re not going to ignore that. That’s a fact, and we have to do better on that. Congresswoman Sherrill has demonstrated that she hears that. She knows that. She understands that and she’s going to embrace that to try to level those playing fields so that equality for all is front and center for all New Jerseyans.”
Jones said the campaign has a volunteer operation from “Cape May to Mahwah” and every community in between because it is “not taking anything for granted.”
Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@northjersey.com
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Who is Mikie Sherrill, NJ Democratic candidate for governor?
