President Donald Trump made a last-minute push to boost Republican turnout Tuesday’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginiabut he only mentioned one GOP hopeful by name.
While Trump talked up Jack Ciattarelli, his preferred candidate for governor in New Jersey, he did not name the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia: Winsome Earle-Sears. Instead, he broadly urged supporters to vote for the entire GOP 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 shot at winning on Election Day.
“You need to go out and vote for Jack Ciattarelli, who’s a great guy, a friend of mine, a great guy, a very successful man, who wants to put all of 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’s going to do it. He’ll be able to do it. The polls are looking really 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.
“Get out and vote tomorrow for Jason Miyares, very — so important — and the Republicans up and down the ballot,” Trump said, referring to the GOP incumbent who is locked in a tight race against Democrat Jay Jones.
The attorney general race has been rocked by recent revelations of text messages where Jones wrote that a top GOP colleague in the state House should be shot in the head. Jones has since apologized for the texts.
Earle-Sears has trailed former Rep. Abigail Spanberger in recent public polling and ad spending, while polls show Ciattarelli is in a more competitive race against Rep. Mikie Sherrill, although Sherrill’s lead has varied in recent surveys.
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Trump warned that Democratic victories in both governor races would be “a catastrophe,” and lead to higher energy costs.
The president’s remarks came shortly after he backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayor’s race. Trump endorsed Cuomoa longtime Democrat who is running as an independent, over Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in a three-way race with Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many voters participated in the tele-rallies. Youngkin said the call surpassed his 2021 telerally with Trump, which drew 450,000 supporters, but did not say how many supporters were listening Monday night.
New Jersey GOP Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who hosted the Garden State call, did not mention the number of participants.
Trump said that New Jersey is the race to watch.
“This is the biggest election. The entire country is watching New Jersey,” Trump said.
New Jersey swung towards Trump by 10 percentage points last year compared to the 2020 presidential election, the second-largest swing of any state in the country. Turning out Trump voters who may be less likely to vote in an off-year gubernatorial race is a key part of Ciattarelli’s path to victory against Sherrill, along with 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 suggestions that Trump could be a liability in the race, even as voters nationally give the president low marks on his handling of the economy and the cost of living.
The New Jersey race “is all about property taxes. It’s all about monthly electricity bills. It’s about public safety, public education, over-development,” Ciattarelli told reporters at a campaign stop at Murph’s Tavern in Totowa on Monday morning. “Those are new New Jersey issues that my opponent wants to blame on the president. He’s got nothing to do with any of those things. It has everything to do with her party who’s controlled Trenton for the last 25 years.”
Asked about the upcoming tele-rally with Trump, Ciattarelli said, “We appreciate what the president is doing to get the base excited and reminding them that they’ve got to vote, as do all New Jerseyans. The future of our state hangs in the balance.”
Trump endorsed Ciattarelli about a month before the state’s June primary, which Ciattarelli won handily. The former state legislator has had his own evolution on Trump over the years as he has run for governor in two previous election cycles. Ciattarelli lost the 2017 GOP primary, but became the party’s nominee in 2021, losing the general election to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy by 3 percentage points.
Both Murphy and Youngkin are term limited.
During Trump’s first presidential run, Ciattarelli called him a “charlatan” and said he was unfit to be president. After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, 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” rating in a recent debate.
“I think he’s right about everything that he’s doing,” Ciattarelli said of the president during that debate. “He has secured the border and the economy, we’ve got inflation is much lower than it was 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, instead opting for a tele-rally Monday and one late last month.
Ciattarelli said recently that 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 of Ciattarelli in a Truth Social post last month, “He calls me constantly, wanting assurances that I will use the Power of Common Sense on helping New Jersey with their Energy bills, which are going up by record amounts.”
Sarah Dean and Gary Grumbach contributed.
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