SHERRILL UNDER FIRE FROM RIVALS
Baraka, Fulop Unload on Mikie Sherrill’s Money, Record
Perhaps because she’s the perceived frontrunner in an intensely competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary – although, according to the latest poll, she’s at just 17 percent, hardly a runaway lead – her rivals for the nomination are going negative. Earlier this month, it was former state Senate president Steve Sweeney, the longshot candidate from South Jersey, who’s broadside against Sherrill’s finances didn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
This week, it’s the two mayors of New Jersey’s largest cities, Newark’s Ras Baraka and Jersey City’s Steve Fulop.
On Tuesday, Baraka released a two-page “fact sheet” on Sherrill headlined: “We cannot afford a Democrat whose allegiance is to Wall Street, weapons contractors, and billionaires.” It cited her multimillion-dollar contributions from Wall Street funds, including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and JP Morgan; $200,000 from “Big Pharma PACs” and a total of $1.3 million from healthcare companies while “refus[ing] three times to support Medicare for All;” and $375,000 from defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Overall, Baraka’s fact sheet said that Sherrill “ranked among the top 20 percent most conservative House Democrats” and “consistently broke with progressives on core issues – labor rights, civil liberties, foreign policy, healthcare, and Wall Street reform.”
Meanwhile, on X, Fulop laid into Sherrill, too. Sherrill, he said, lacks “executive experience” – unlike, presumably, the three mayors in the race, including Baraka, Sean Spiller, the former mayor of Montclair, and Fulop himself. “Mikie’s background and rhetoric has avoided the daily scrutiny that comes with local office which makes her very vulnerable in a general election,” added Fulop, who also took aim at her using her military record as a leading item on her resume. “Being a Navy Pilot or in the Marine Corps is not a reason to be governor.” Sherrill, of course, was a helicopter pilot in the Navy, and Fulop served in the Marines. “The case for me to be governor has never been based solely on my Marine Corps service. Anyone that follows the race can understand the difference I’m pointing out,” he wrote.
But Baraka, at a press conference in Montclair on Tuesday, made it personal. At a time when President Trump’s administration is “kidnapping Black and brown people off the street” and dismantling DEI initiatives nationwide, he said, Sherrill has expressed “tone-deaf” comments on race – comments, he said, that if they were uttered by Trump or the GOP they’d be called racist.
“People keep raising, and rightfully so, this wealth gap,” said Baraka, citing a recent study that the “wealth gap” between white and Black households in New Jersey has doubled from $300,000 – bad enough – to $600,000 now, on average. “Our congresswoman says that the wealth gap can be fixed by making sure that third-graders knew how to read. If that was coming from a Republican, it would be considered racist. From us? Tone deaf and completely out of touch.”
Mikie Sherrill and Ras Baraka at a candidates’ forum in Newark.
Here’s an exchange at one recent forum that relates to Baraka’s point.
At the April 23 gubernatorial candidates’ forum in Maplewood, sponsored by SOMA Action and a number of municipal Democratic committees, moderator Nancy Solomon of WNYC asked the candidates the following, according to a transcript provided by Village Green:
I’d like to talk a little bit about racial disparities in New Jersey. There was a study by New Jersey Institute for Social Justice that found that the Black/white wealth gap has doubled since 2020. The median household wealth for white families in New Jersey is $662,000. And in Black and Latino New Jersey, the median household wealth is just under $20,000. That’s a huge $640,000 wealth gap. What kind of programs would you create as governor to close this gap?
Sherrill answered first:
I don’t think we can be surprised at that when we see the disparities in education in this state and we see the racial segregation in this state. That is why we have to get, push in better educational programs. That’s high intensity tutoring, especially making sure at the third-grade level, that is where we have to have our children reading by third grade. Right now, in some cities, only about 36 percent of the children are reading at the correct level at third grade. We have to make sure there’s access because if you can’t read, you’re not gonna be doing math, you’re not gonna be doing science. You have to do better there.
Because Sherrill doesn’t seem to relate to Black and brown voters, Baraka said, especially to what he called the most reliable Democratic voters, Black women, she’ll find it hard in November to rally Democrats to the polls. And he blamed the New Jersey Democratic party at large, including its leaders. “I think that this party is tone deaf,” he said, noting that Sherrill was chosen by the “party bosses.” “They cannot speak to racial and economic disparity in this state. I don't think they have the desire to do it.”
In a statement to Spotlight News, Sherrill responded. “I absolutely agree that there is deeply-rooted systemic racism in New Jersey that must be addressed,” she said. “This is a moral outrage that demands immediate action, it is at the core of why I’m running for governor, and it is a top priority when I get to Trenton.”
By all accounts, Sherrill has decided to run a middle-of-the-road campaign, leaving the left lanes to Baraka, Fulop, and Spiller and the right lanes to Sweeney and Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Unlike the three mayors, she’s repeatedly refused to say that she’d support raising taxes on ultra-wealthy New Jerseyans. Unlike the three mayors, she’s repeatedly refused to endorse the Immigrant Trust Act, a bill in Trenton designed to enact into law protections for migrants.
At the forum in Maplewood, she was asked by Solomon if she considered herself a candidate of the “machine,” since most of the county Democratic committees have endorsed her.
“What do you say to people who maybe are afraid that you are too mainstream for their taste, that you’re too moderate, and they want more of a progressive, and the proof of this is your endorsement [by] the machine,” asked Solomon, at the Maplewood event. But Sherrill avoided the question, saying, “I’ve always hated labels.” She didn’t take issue with the idea that she’s the candidate of “the machine.”
There’s no question that Sherrill’s eight years of fundraising for congressional campaigns and now in the gubernatorial race makes her a juicy target. According to Open Secrets, between 2017 and 2024 Sherrill pulled in a staggering $25.5 million for her congressional campaign committee, including $2.7 million from securities and investment firms (i.e., Wall Street & Co.), her No. 1 industry backer. Her biggest haul was during his first run in 2017-2018, when she garnered more than $8 million.
Over the past year, besides the money she raised for her congressional campaign she is also making use of a “super PAC” called One Giant Leap. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, super PAC’s – unlike the more highly regulated, old-fashioned PACs – are the Wild West of fundraising, with virtually no limits on who can contribute or how much.
One Giant Leap PAC, launched in 2023 by Sherrill’s 2018 campaign manager along with a former New Jersey Democratic State Committee political director, raised $2,180,000 from October 2023 to December 2024, according to the Federal Election Commission. It had nearly $1.7 million left in January when Jonah Scharf, fresh off running Sherrill’s 2024 Congressional campaign, became its executive director. By far the biggest chuck, $790,000 came from the securities and investment industry, according to Open Secrets. Of that amount, $450,000 came from just two donors, Lone Pine Capital, founded by billionaire Stephen Mandel, and a Wall Street private equity firm, Diamond Castle Holdings.
I say good on Baraka and Fulop. I'm relieved they spoke up because no one else has been fact-checking Sherrill or Gottheimer and they are both absolutely full of it. They keep lying and manipulating things and doing the classic political double talk, while the Democratic Party actively suppresses our primaries here (I mean has anyone else been getting news about the fact that there are MULTIPLE things on the ballot we'll be voting on in June? Because as someone who's been heavily involved in looking into this election as well as the problems with the election coverage, I have not found a single thing mentioning any other seats that will be on the ballot)
The Party is trying to suppress knowledge of our primary because they know the other four candidates are not taking dark money (AIPAC might even lend a hand to boost those two since they heavily endorse both Sherrill and Gottheimer) and that our primaries have such abysmal turnout numbers while simultaneously making it very difficult to find information on candidates, which is a beautiful combination that means that a lot of voters simply go by name recognition and THAT gives a massive advantage to the two names from Congress that people have the opportunity to know about and to have heard about before this election.
Trans folks, migrants, our environment all face an existential crisis with Gottheimer or Sherrill in the Governor's seat.
I think it's crucial to point out that people who can be bought, people who are so heavily backed by corporate money, especially those who refuse to actually commit to really simple positions on incredibly vital topics, are INCREDIBLY dangerous and cannot be trusted, even if they appear to have a fine record thus far, particularly if they do have suspicious votes or decisions recently and when the main adversary they will need to face is a ruthless tyrant who we've seen so many bow down to (these two included, obeying in advance, with Sherrill's excuse supposedly being that she was coming from a position of fear, anticipating what might come if she didn't support it - though this concern for the trans community clearly being false anyway given her subsequent behaviors in this race, even advocating for a don't say trans type approach and clearly demonstrating a lack of self education on the subject to even get comfortable talking about it properly)
They also seemed to have missed the fact that there are crypto groups heavily invested in Gottheimer and they've both been against recent regulatory legislation. Or, as or possibly more important, the fact that Sherrill has taken tens of thousands of dollars from Health industry groups (since the cost of medical expenses is a massive topic of this campaign season, I'm surprised it hasn't come up)
Here, on the ground, in Bloomfield, the machine is an not an abstraction nor it is a label. Mikie Sherrill can try to deflect and bey coy, but the Essex County Convention showed anyone who would look who is the machine candidate.