President Donald Trump made a last-minute effort to boost Republican turnout in Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, but only mentioned one Republican candidate by name.
While Trump talked about Jack Ciattarelli, his preferred candidate for governor of New Jersey, he did not name the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia: Winsome Earle-Sears. Instead, he broadly urged his supporters to vote for the entire Republican ticket.
Trump endorsed Ciattarelli earlier this year, but has not endorsed Earle-Sears, the state’s lieutenant governor. The president signaled Monday that he believes Ciattarelli has a better chance of winning on Election Day.
“You have to go out and vote for Jack Ciattarelli, who is a great guy, a friend of mine, a great guy, a very successful man, who wants to put all his efforts now into really saving New Jersey, making it great again, saving it,” Trump said on the New Jersey call, where he spoke for just under nine minutes. “And he is going to do it. He will be able to do it. The polls look very good.”
Trump spoke for about eight minutes on a call with supporters in Virginia hosted by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, touting his endorsed candidate for state attorney general.
“Go out and vote tomorrow for Jason Miyares, very, very important, and for Republicans everywhere on the ballot,” Trump said, referring to the Republican incumbent who is locked in a tight race against Democrat Jay Jones.
The race for attorney general has been rocked by recent revelations of text messages in which Jones wrote that a top Republican colleague in the state House should be shot in the head. Jones has since apologized for the text messages.
Earle-Sears has trailed former Rep. Abigail Spanberger in recent public polls and in advertising spending, while polls show Ciattarelli is in a more competitive race against Rep. Mikie Sherrill, although Sherrill’s lead has shifted in recent polls.
Trump warned that Democratic victories in both gubernatorial races would be “a catastrophe” and lead to higher energy costs.
The president’s comments came shortly after he endorsed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral race. Trump endorsed Cuomo, a longtime Democrat running as an independent, against Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in a three-way race with Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani.
It was not immediately clear how many voters participated in the teleprotests. Youngkin said the call surpassed his 2021 teleral with Trump, which drew 450,000 followers, but he did not say how many followers were listening Monday night.
New Jersey Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who hosted the Garden State call, did not reference the number of participants.
Trump said New Jersey is the race to go.
“This is the most important election. The entire country is looking at New Jersey,” Trump said.
New Jersey swung toward Trump by 10 percentage points last year compared to the 2020 presidential election, the second-largest swing of any state in the country. Making Trump voters less likely to vote in an off-year gubernatorial race is a key part of Ciattarelli’s path to victory against Sherrill, in addition to winning over independents.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration in the state, and Trump lost New Jersey by 6 points last year. But Ciattarelli dismissed any suggestion that Trump could be a drag in the race, even as voters nationally give the president low marks for his handling of the economy and the cost of living.
The New Jersey race “is about property taxes. It’s about monthly electric bills. It’s about public safety, public education, overdevelopment,” Ciattarelli told reporters at a campaign stop at Murph’s Tavern in Totowa Monday morning. “Those are new New Jersey issues that my opponent wants to blame on the president. He has nothing to do with any of those things. It has everything to do with his party, which has controlled Trenton for the last 25 years.”
When asked about the upcoming phone meeting with Trump, Ciattarelli said, “We appreciate what the president is doing to excite the base and remind them that they have to vote, as all New Jerseyans do. The future of our state is at stake.”
Trump endorsed Ciattarelli about a month before the June state primary, which Ciattarelli won handily. The former state lawmaker has had his own take on Trump over the years, having run for governor in two previous election cycles. Ciattarelli lost the 2017 Republican primary, but became the party’s nominee in 2021, losing the general election to Democratic Governor Phil Murphy by 3 percentage points.
Both Murphy and Youngkin are term-limited.
During Trump’s first presidential campaign, Ciattarelli called him a “charlatan” and said he was unfit to be president. After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Ciattarelli did not campaign with Trump during that year’s gubernatorial race.
Ciattarelli has now embraced Trump and broadly supported his policies, giving Trump an “A” grade in a recent debate.
“I think he’s right in everything he’s doing,” Ciattarelli said of the president during that debate. “It has secured the border and the economy, we have much lower inflation than when Joe Biden was in the White House.”
Cattarelli also said during the primary that he would welcome Trump to the Garden State to campaign. But Trump has not campaigned in person, opting instead for a telephone rally on Monday and another late last month.
Ciattarelli recently said he told Trump he could have won in 2021 if the president had campaigned in the state.
Trump has indicated that he and Ciattarelli speak frequently, writing about Ciattarelli in a Truth Social post last month: “He calls me constantly, wanting assurances that I will use the power of common sense to help New Jersey with its energy bills, which are rising by record amounts.”
