Democrats are early favorites to win governors races in New Jersey and Virginia this year, according to a leading elections handicapper.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan project of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, on Wednesday rated both states, which went for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election last fall, as “leans Democratic.”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) are unable to seek reelection because of term limits.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) will face Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) on the ballot in Virginia, after uncontested primaries in June, while New Jersey voters will decide their parties’ nominees from crowded slates in primary elections on June 10.
“Though this may be splitting hairs to some extent, we’d call Virginia a firmer Leans Democratic than New Jersey. Part of this has to do with candidate pairings: While we know what the Virginia matchup will be, there is considerably more uncertainty in New Jersey,” Crystal Ball associate editor J. Miles Coleman wrote in his analysis.
“In the smattering of elections held so far in 2025, Democrats have generally been performing similarly to how they performed in 2017, which augured well for them in the following year’s midterm. New Jersey and Virginia represent Democrats’ next big tests: They really should win both races,” Colelman wrote.
Virginia, which limits governors to one term, has historically favored gubernatorial candidates from the party opposite of the sitting president. Coleman notes that the Trump administration’s impact on Virginia’s sizable population of federal workers, government contractors and military families also could sour voters on GOP candidates. President Trump, through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has approved a sweeping overhaul of the federal workforce, prompting mass layoffs and uncertainty across agencies.
“Trump seemed to hand Spanberger a campaign issue on a silver platter,” Coleman wrote.
Meanwhile, five New Jersey Republicans are seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination, including former talk radio host Bill Spadea, state Sen. Jon Bramnick and former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli, who narrowly lost to Murphy in 2021.
Trump has not endorsed a candidate in the race, though Coleman notes in his analysis that “Trump’s involvement — or lack thereof — could have an outsized impact in the primary.”
On the Democratic side, six candidates are seeking the nomination: Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill, former state Sen. Steve Sweeney, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop and New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller.
A poll released last week showed a tight race among the Democratic candidates, with Sherrill holding a narrow lead. But it also found a third of voters were undecided.
The same poll found a similar bloc of Republican voters had not yet decided which candidate would get their votes, but Ciattarelli was an early front-runner for the GOP nomination again with 42 percent support.
“All of the candidates have made some progress since the fall in terms of voters knowing who they are, but they haven’t made noticeable gains in favorability,” Eagleton Center director Ashley Koning said in a release on the New Jersey poll’s findings. “Though not necessarily unusual at this stage in the game, candidates on both sides of the aisle still lack name recognition from a notable number of voters, and no candidate on either side of the aisle is viewed favorably by more than one in five voters.”
