The Times Does Republican Jack Ciattarelli a Favor

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

The polls of the race for New Jersey governor are tighter today than they’ve been all cycle — far tighter than they ever were in 2021, when the current GOP nominee for governor, Jack Ciattarelli, outperformed his RealClearPolitics average by a full five points.

 

Unlike in 2021, there is a Republican in the White House. Donald Trump’s omnipresence fires up Democratic voters and blows headwinds in the face of any Republican seeking statewide office in a dark blue state like New Jersey. But there are conditions at work in Ciattarelli’s favor, too.

 

Phil Murphy is the first Democrat to serve out two consecutive terms as New Jersey governor since Brendan Byrne left office in early 1982. Democrats have not managed to secure three consecutive terms in the New Jersey governorship since 1965. Outgoing Governor Murphy is unpopular, and state residents are fit to be tied over the rising costs of living, the spiking price of utilities, and their onerous income, sales, and property tax burdens.

 

The forces contributing to Ciattarelli’s growing strength in the polls seem to have put his opponent, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, on the back foot. In her campaign spots, the Democratic nominee has issued two charges against her opponent — both of which are in conflict.

 

First, she argues that Ciattarelli is a tax hiker. He supports raising your sales, income, and property taxes — not like the Democrat in the race, who promises to relieve your tax burden. It is an argument premised on a misleading clip of the GOP nominee musing about the virtue of eliminating income taxes in favor of a broader consumption tax, following the lead of states like Tennessee.

 

The claim that Ciattarelli — or any Republican, for that matter — would be more inclined than the Democratic nominee to hike state taxes is a stretch. Perhaps that’s why Sherrill’s campaign is devoting its closing argument against Ciattarelli to the contention it has made from the start: the Republican gubernatorial nominee is “100 percent MAGA.”

 

That, too, has struggled to catch on, owing perhaps to Ciattarelli’s mild-mannered demeanor and the fact that his career in state-level politics long predates Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene. The New York Times has noticed that Sherrill seems to be struggling, and the paper of record is calling in the cavalry. Yes, the outlet declared this week, Ciattarelli is MAGA — but subtly and in ways that only the keenest observers can deduce. How? Well, take, for example, his sordid affinity for the plastic shopping bags that New Jersey elected officials rendered contraband earlier this decade.

 

“I can say, ‘I’m going to lower taxes,’ and I get a nice round of applause,” Ciattarelli recently told an audience of supporters at a Jersey Shore bar and grill. “But I say, ‘I’m bringing back the plastic bags,’ and it brings down the house, every time.”

 

It was a “brief aside,” Times reporter Nick Corasaniti conceded. And yet, it “revealed a candidate who is steadily learning over the course of three campaigns for governor how to run as a Republican during the Trump era in a deeply blue state like New Jersey.”

 

Of course, Ciattarelli cannot “embrace the MAGA movement” outright. He is, thus, reduced to signaling his covert Trumpian instincts in nuanced ways — using phrases like “open borders” and “sanctuary cities,” terms that apparently no Republican ever used prior to Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House. Ciattarelli’s subterfuge is further evinced by his failure to name-check Donald Trump in his ads, save for one instance in which he chided Sherrill for attempting to turn the governor’s race into a referendum on Trump’s presidency. But the GOP nominee’s rhetoric and his shared hostility to initiatives like New Jersey’s bag ban betray the Republican candidate’s true sympathies.

 

Corasaniti and his paper have done Ciattarelli a favor by drawing attention to his opposition to this preposterous policy. It has been more than two years since an independent pollster has asked New Jerseyans how they feel about the ban on the provision of disposable plastic bags to shoppers, but it wasn’t a wildly popular policy even then. In the interim, the obvious inefficiencies and unnecessary headaches this prohibition has imposed on state residents have only grown more intolerable.

 

The bag ban was retailed to state residents as a crucial environmental initiative aimed at cutting the waste associated with single-use plastics. But it has only contributed to more waste, and New Jerseyans know it. One recent poll found that 53 percent of state residents know that they are not using their reusable bags enough to offset the environmental impact associated with their production. Indeed, more resources are used to make the reusable bags in which state residents are drowning than would be devoted to the production of plastic bags. “Plastic consumption in the state has nearly tripled, with New Jerseyans previously consuming 53 million pounds of plastic before the ban, compared to 151 million pounds following the ban,” Fox News reported last year.

 

That unrealized environmental benefit renders the irritations associated with the withholding of plastic bags that much more aggravating. New Jerseyans know that the bag ban encourages theft of supermarket conveniences like hand carts — a cost that is passed on to the consumer. They know that bag bans give retailers the opportunity to charge customers for a convenience that was previously gratis. They know that bag bans encourage politicians to carve out special exemptions for privileged Democratic constituencies, contributing to voters’ alienation from Trenton.

 

The Times is right to suspect that New Jersey’s utterly superfluous plastic bag ban is a political liability for Democrats. Indeed, all that can be said in its favor is that it imposes a costly discomfort on state residents who must suffer in solidarity with the abstemious environmental zealots who think everyone should practice their bizarre brand of puritanical asceticism. The best the Gray Lady’s reporters can do is brand those of us who chafe under this meritless regime disciples of MAGA. The Times piece implies without stating outright that giving up on bag bans is tantamount to abandoning in whole the liberal values that most New Jerseyans share.

 

It’s a Hail Mary, and a risky one. The effort to emotionally blackmail New Jerseyans who resent the deprivation the state imposed on them may convince some that their identity as good liberals compels them to endorse the Murphy administration’s policies in toto. But it could just as easily lead voters to reassess their political values. If something as commonsensical as wanting plastic bags back is MAGA, maybe MAGA isn’t the bogeyman we thought it was.