Jack Ciattarelli’s allies seize on Mikie Sherrill’s cautious campaign

Dem Garden State Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s carefully choreographed campaign appearances and occasional gaffes have given fodder to allies of her Republican foe, some of whom have branded her as “the Kamala Harris of New Jersey.’’

GOP opponent Jack Ciattarelli’s team believes Sherrill’s cautious campaign has given its candidate momentum as he struggles with a significant deficit in voter surveys.

“She’s a gaffe machine, frankly,” said Chris Russell, a New Jersey GOP consultant who works with the Ciattarelli campaign, to The Post.

“There’s similarities [between Sherrill and Harris] in that they both are incapable of answering basic questions and seem to have a penchant for putting their foot in their mouth,” he said. “[They] hide from the press, hide from the public [and are] very, very managed and choreographed.”

Ciattarelli is making hay of Sherrill’s perceived aloofness as he criss-crosses New Jersey, running on a toned-down MAGA platform that includes kitchen-table issues such as skyrocketing utility prices and the highest-in-the-nation property taxes.

His team has claimed that Sherrill has had less unscripted face-time with voters than he has — even as she missed 64% of votes in Congress between July and September, according to GovTrack.

“I do this for a living — I know what it looks like when you pick out just your supporters to go to the event,” said GOP strategist Alex Wiles.

“Everyone I’ve seen with her looks highly curated, like there was a heavy hand in the selection process. … It’s just safe towns, safe places, safe faces.”

Even some nonpartisan outside observers have noted that Sherrill’s campaign feels laconic — perhaps for good reason, because of her massive polling lead.

“Mikie Sherril is very much running what we call a Rose Garden strategy. She’s doing very few interviews. She’s doing relatively few unscripted moments,” said Dan Cassino, a politics professor and executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll.

“The strategy Sherrill is running has been effective for other candidates,” he said.

Sherrill’s team is downplaying the attacks against her from “two-time loser Jack Ciattarelli” as futile and contends that the congresswoman is connecting with voters in ways he never could.

This is the third time Ciattarelli has run for Jersey governor.

“Mikie has gotten support from fellow veterans to seniors to families struggling to make ends meet to young people hoping to build their future in New Jersey,” Sherrill campaign rep Sam Chan said.

“Jack’s campaign is desperate because Mikie is fighting for every New Jersey family and Jack is only out for himself and follows Trump’s lead without a shred of independence.”

Sherrill has a commanding 8.8 percentage point lead over Ciattarelli in polls so far, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate.

Only one known poll has the GOPer up, an outlier internal survey commissioned by Ciattarelli’s campaign, which pegs him in the lead 46% to 45%.

Ciattarelli’s campaign, which began TV ads earlier this month, recently took to the airwaves to zing Sherrill for being flummoxed during an interview in May when asked about the top piece of legislation she’d like to get across the finish line.

“That’s a really good question, ’cause there’s so many that are coming to mind right now,” she replied, stalling for about 18 seconds before conjuring up a vague federal block grant program — something beyond the purview of the legislature and governor.

The clip is reminiscent of the word salads that former Vice President Harris became infamous for while in office.

Sherrill cut her teeth in national politics in the halls of Congress and was first elected during the country’s 2018 blue-wave year to succeed former Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, the top GOPer on the powerful House Appropriations Committee at the time.

Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor, was famously one of three relatively centrist female Dems with national security credentials who were elected to the House that year — alongside Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is now in the Senate, and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who’s vying to be governor of Virginia.

But now she’s being forced to focus on issues close to home.

“She doesn’t seem to have a grasp of the policies of New Jersey and state government,” New Jersey GOP strategist Jeanette Hoffman said.

“Look, it’s a lot easier to be one of 435 members of Congress than it is to lead a complicated state like New Jersey.”

In a departure from his unsuccessful 2021 campaign for governor, Ciattarelli has seemingly been more open-armed toward Trump and the MAGA agenda. 

Part of this means calling for an end to sanctuary state laws, despite roughly 23% of New Jersey’s population being foreign-born — the second highest in the nation.

But Ciattarelli is also focusing on pocketbook issues.

His campaign recently took aim at Sherrill’s plan to address energy costs in the state, a touchy subject, particularly after New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities warned this year that electric bills could spike between 17% and 20%.

His team cut an ad showcasing Sherrill’s comments in a March interview, faulting Democrats’ messaging on clean energy as often being along the lines of, “It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person, you’ll do it.”

In the interview, Sherrill argued that a green-energy push will be “cheaper than any other source of power,” but that context wasn’t included in the ad, prompting her team to rip the spot as a “blatantly misleading, desperate smear.”