The three other candidates carved up the balance of the total vote: Representative Josh Gottheimer, of New Jersey’s Fifth Congressional District; Stephen Sweeney, a former State Senate president; and Sean Spiller, the president of the New Jersey Education Association.
“I’m going to protect our rights — including a right to an abortion,” Ms. Sherrill told supporters gathered in Morristown, N.J., to celebrate her victory. As for Mr. Ciattarelli, she said, “I am ready to shake up the status quo, and Jack is the status quo.”
She added, “He’s not change, he’s a rerun.”
Ms. Sherrill, a lawyer and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who worked for about four years for the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, was among the 101 congressional newcomers — 42 of them women — who took office in 2019 during Mr. Trump’s first term as president, flipping the House from red to blue. She won a seat held for nearly a quarter century by a Republican who did not run for re-election.
This year, Ms. Sherrill, 53, was the only woman running for governor in either party’s primary, and she stuck closely to a carefully curated message in which she presented herself as a mother and a veteran trained to run “toward the fight.” Two of her four children will enter the Naval Academy later this month, a detail she shared with voters.
Ms. Sherrill’s supporters gathered for an election night victory party were jubilant.
“We’re ecstatic,” said Robert Rodríguez, a field organizer with the Laborers’ International Union of North America’s Eastern region, which knocked on about 19,000 doors on her behalf. “She’s about the working class, about job opportunities. She’s going to make sure contracts are extra set in stone.”