Republicans here desperately wanted to run against Zohran Mamdani, and instead they got Mikie Sherrill.

At the beginning of the campaign, you could see rightwing media types from New York huffing and puffing over the New Jersey landscape, scandalized that the Mamdani party would even have the gall to field a statewide candidate.

They peeled off, gradually but steadily, by the time it was all over tonight, even as their media companies trotted out polls hatched in remote incubators that made the contest look like a nailbiter.

They didn’t quite know what to make of Mikie Sherrill.

Of course, the GOP, shamelessly protecting a guy from the contents of the Epstein Files, tried to do the only thing consistent with their morally pretzled condition: attack an honorable veteran’s service record, to drag the contest into the same stinking, primal muck that gives Trump his supposed superpowers.

Sherrill was ready.

In the same way that she wasn’t Mamdani (who won tonight, by the way, across the river), New Jersey’s – not New York’s - Governor-elect also defied the fatiguing, corroded emblem of the same party that loves to barf up warmed-over establishment AI constructs.

“She’s lucky,” multiple old political warhorses told InsiderNJ.

But what they missed, of course, was that the party was lucky it had Sherrill, a retired Navy veteran, who rebranded Democrats worn out by their own collective cowardice, and top heavy with intergenerational fat cats too slovenly to face the sins of their past. Thankfully, Sherrill never parked herself in their confessional booths, not that they would ever show up there – or that she would need to go there.

In an atmosphere that might have been defined by spillover from the New York political trough: Mamdani (the turn-on-the-government-firehoses-and-let-‘em-rip liberal) or Cuomo – a mummy-wrapped resuscitation of himself, Sherrill arrived as someone completely new: uniquely herself, with an actual public service record.

Imagine that.

Public service!

She added other elements, which separated her from the same party that had grown complacent in the rack up of gold bars, nepotism, and a routine reference to “folks,” as if that covered up an utter lack of interest in doing tangible stuff for people.

Sherrill was different. She wasn’t simply a Wall Street person or a manufactured product of a tired establishment. First materializing in NJ politics back in 2018, she won a CD-11 seat during the Trump midterm, turning a suburban Republican district blue, and in the process giving a voice to women appalled by what would eventually become the Trump Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. As a mother of four, a wife, and a genuinely empowered and empowering toughie with a military and prosecutorial record among the usual crumb bums who have been here for a hundred years, wheezing, waist bands straining from self-indulgence, Sherrill arrived fit for office, emphasizing citizenship.

She was bigger than the machines, which had become worn out in the service of power, not people. That meant when Sherrill’s colleague, Andy Kim, challenged the party lines in court and won in 2024, the congresswoman found herself well poised for a statewide run. She hadn’t attacked them, as Kim had, but she never defined herself by their dictates. Candidly, Sherrill didn’t need the machines as much as the machines needed her. The coming together of once powerful (and now jittery, post Kim) party chairs who (for the most part) saw the opposite of themselves in Sherrill - and the Navy veteran, proved a potent combination in the 2025 Democratic Primary.

The only woman in that contest, Sherrill generated voter support everywhere, losing her home county of Essex (Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark, the county’s largest city, won there), but ringing up strong vote tallies in suburban Morris, Monmouth, and Burlington – and proving statewide reach by winning, of all places, Camden.

Finally, Sherrill showed the unique political power of Sherrill.

Late, panic-stricken whispers of this or that machine lying down on the job might have sent shivers down the spines of establishment hacks, but hardly seemed to threaten Sherrill, whose Triump-enraged galvanized suburban base already looked like a convincing advancing Roman Army.

Republicans rubbed their hands together when Mamdani won, thinking they could make him the target, and deflect voter angst about Trump to the NYC mayor’s race, but they didn’t bargain for Sherrill, who as soon as they started hitting low, retaliated with a vengeance, usually a plus in a hardnosed place called Jersey.