In 2024, Donald Trump made huge inroads in New Jersey by making gains with working class people, particularly among Black and Latino voters. One year later, and Sherrill helped return many of those voters to the fold through what she said was a laser-focus on issues of affordability.

“I think we saw 22-point swings in Hudson County, a big Latino county. We saw about an 18-point swing in Passaic County, a Latino and a Black county that’s very diverse,” she said. “I think what you’re seeing in these races is a deep desire to address the needs of working people.”

It’s the sort of rhetoric that Mamdani, though his prescriptions may differ, would be hard pressed to disagree with.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on the victory. I want to hear about that moment last night when you realized that you had won. Take us into that moment for you.

I had a sense that we were in a good space, but I’m also really superstitious — former naval aviator — so you never quite know until you know. We had really great early returns. It was looking like we were outperforming our model. What I was hoping for was a big victory, a mandate so we could really govern well. And when it became clear that we were going to start to win by big numbers, that’s when I got incredibly excited.

In my mind, I thought, I’d really like to have a 10-point victory here. And that’s what I was modeling towards. When that morning some weird poll came out saying that it was tied and everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, is everything going wrong?” I’m like, “No, I think 10 points, but we’ll see.” But 13 points, wow, that was pretty awesome.

The numbers were funky in the final stretch there. What were the conversations like for your campaign as that started to percolate?

I’m not sure what they were polling. We just looked at it and we’re like, “This makes zero sense.” They were saying 60 percent of the Black vote was going to go to Jack Ciattarelli, which there was just zero signs of that at all. I mean zero. So that poll was odd. But again, I never really felt too nervous about my ability to win this one.