The New Yorker:

Sherrill, the governor-elect of New Jersey, argues that if Democrats don’t learn to work at Donald Trump’s pace, “we’re going to get played.”

By Gabriel Debenedetti

On Tuesday, November 11th—two days after eight Democratic senators split with their party and voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown—Mikie Sherrill, the governor-elect of New Jersey, was sitting in a diner in Montclair, in the northeast suburbs of the state. “Well, I’m really upset, so my take on it was, ‘What the actual fuck?’ ” she told me. Sherrill, a four-term Democratic congresswoman who was first elected when she flipped a conservative U.S. House district in the anti-Donald Trump wave of 2018, said she had campaigned all year to “say no” to the notion that Trump was leaving his opponents deflated and powerless. She went on to defeat her Republican rival, the former state legislator and three-time gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, by fourteen points—and watched Democrats win by similarly large margins in Virginia, California, and New York. The idea behind her campaign, she continued, had been “to finally galvanize what I think of as Democrats, meaning the working-class suburbanites, working people in the cities, in a powerful way so we can actually fight back. And then, not even a week later, to see the Senate fuck that all up?”

Sherrill, a fifty-three-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot, litigator, and prosecutor, is not primarily known for provoking her own party. For months this year, the word about her campaign, which she oriented around promising to fight rising energy costs and relentlessly tying her opponent to Trump, was that it was “milquetoast,” as one national progressive activist called it this fall. She had a record of questioning the Party line—she repeatedly voted against Nancy Pelosi leading the Democrats in the House, arguing that the Party was ready for a new generation of leaders, and she was one of the first elected officials to call for Joe Biden to drop his reëlection campaign after his debate against Trump last year. But the concern was that Sherrill didn’t represent anything new in a state that was calling for change. Four years earlier, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, won reëlection by just three points; last year, Trump got within six points of Kamala Harris, the closest Presidential result the state had seen in more than thirty years. Sherrill was a compelling—and tough—character, but she had risen to prominence in Trump’s first term as a face of the suburban #Resistance.

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