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 watch

See Full Page