FDU Poll Finds Strong Approval Numbers at Start of Sherrill’s Term

Strong Approval Numbers at Start of Sherrill’s Term

NJ Voters Pragmatic About Working with Trump; MAGA voters on the decline

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, March 31, 2026 – As Governor Sherrill wades into negotiations over her first state budget, her approval ratings are high, significantly outpacing the numbers given to her predecessor at the end of his time in Trenton. While former Governor Phil Murphy’s approvals hovered in the 40s for most of his second term, Sherrill comes into office with 58 percent approval. But while Sherrill has repeatedly clashed with President Trump, most New Jersey voters want her to work with the President, at least sometimes.

“Sherrill is getting what no politician on the national level gets these days: the benefit of the doubt,” said Dan Cassino, a Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the Executive Director of the FDU Poll. “Independents, and even some Republicans, have nothing bad to say about her yet, and that approval is political capital in her talks with the legislature.”

Sherrill’s approval among her base nears 90 percent: 88 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of progressives and 85 percent of liberal voters in New Jersey approve of how she’s handling her job as governor. Her numbers are also relatively high among groups that weren’t supportive during last year’s election, with 22 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of conservatives, and even 14 percent of MAGA voters currently approving.

“As the governor starts having to make tough choices, these numbers are going to go down,” said Cassino. “The question is what Sherrill does with her high support while she has it.”

While she has only been in office for a few months, Sherrill has already clashed repeatedly with the Trump administration over issues like immigration enforcement and funding for the Gateway tunnel project. The survey asked New Jersey voters whether Sherrill should try and work with Trump, or if she should use lawsuits and other means to defy him. Forty-two percent of voters said that she should work with Trump, and 31 percent said that she should defy him. Fully 26 percent, unprompted, said that it depends. Volunteered responses like this are generally much less common.

“Voters in New Jersey may not like Trump very much, but they’re pragmatic,” said Cassino. “The fact that they’re volunteering a conditional response about working with the President tells us that they want to see cooperation when it’s possible.”

Beliefs about when Sherrill should work with Trump or defy him are tied closely to underlying political identities. Only 15 percent of Democrats say that Sherrill should work with Trump, similar to the 10 percent of progressives and 20 percent of liberals who say the same, while majorities in all these groups say that she should defy Trump. Just so, Republicans (80 percent), conservatives (74 percent) and MAGA voters (93 percent) say that Sherrill should work with Trump. Black (40 percent) and Hispanic (44 percent) voters are more likely than other groups to say that “it depends.”

While MAGA voters almost universally say that Sherrill should work with Trump, there are a lot fewer of them than there used to be. In January of 2024, in the run up to his re-election, 27 percent of voters in New Jersey identified as MAGA, including a majority (54 percent) of Republicans, and a sizeable portion of independents (31 percent). Today, only 16 percent of Garden State voters identify as MAGA, including 37 percent of New Jersey Republicans and just 11 percent of independents.

“Being a MAGA voter isn’t like being a conservative or a libertarian,” said Cassino. “The MAGA coalition is real, but the fact that it’s so tied to an individual means that people move pretty freely in and out of it depending on how they’re feeling about Trump at the moment.”

Methodology

The FDU Poll is a proud member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative and is devoted to ensuring that our results are presented in such a way that anyone can quickly and easily get all of the information that they may need to evaluate the validity of our surveys. We believe that transparency is the key to building trust in the work of high-quality public opinion research, and necessary to push our industry forward.

The survey was conducted between March 20 and 28, 2025, using a voter list of registered voters in New Jersey carried out by Braun Research of Princeton, New Jersey. Respondents were contacted via either live caller telephone interviews, or text-to-web surveys sent to cellular phones, resulting in an overall sample of 805 registered voters in the state. Surveys were carried out via live caller telephone interviews to landlines (127) and cellphones (275) and the remainder (404) were done on a web platform via weblinks sent via SMS to cell phones. Surveys were conducted only in English.

The data were weighted to be representative of the population of registered voters in New Jersey. The weights used, like all weights, balance the demographic characteristics of the sample to match known population parameters. The weighted results used here are balanced to match parameters for sex, age, education, region and race/ethnicity.

SPSSINC RAKE, an SPSS extension module that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using the GENLOG procedure, was used to produce final weights. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis helps to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The size of these weights is used to construct the measure of design effects, which indicate the extent to which the reported results are being driven by the weights applied to the data, rather than found in the data itself. Simply put, these design effects tell us how many additional respondents would have been needed to get the weighted number of respondents across weighted categories: larger design effects indicate greater levels of under-representation in the data. In this case, calculated design effects are approximately 1.2, largely driven by the weights used on the race/ethnicity variable.

All surveys are subject to sampling error, which is the expected probable difference between interviewing everyone in a population versus a scientific sampling drawn from that population. Sampling error should be adjusted to recognize the effect of weighting the data to better match the population. In this poll, the simple sampling error for 805 registered voters is +/-3.4 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-3.9 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported.

This error calculation does not take into account other sources of variation inherent in public opinion studies, such as non-response, question wording, differences in translated forms, or context effects. While such errors are known to exist, they are often unquantifiable within a particular survey, and all efforts, such as randomization and extensive pre-testing of items, have been used to minimize them.

Weighted Telephone Sample Characteristics

805 Registered Voters in New Jersey

Figures do not include individuals who declined to answer demographic items.

Man                                

47%                 N = 376
Woman                            

52%                 N = 417
Some Other Way          

1%                  N = 5

18-30                          

15%                N = 119
31-44                          

22%                 N = 175
45-64                          

33%                 N = 266
65+                              

30%                 N = 243

White                                           

65%                N = 523
Black                                              

14%                N = 113
Hispanic/Latino/a                                     

12%                N = 97
Asian                                       

4%                  N = 32
MENA                                      

1%                  N = 10
Other/Multi-racial                                    

2%                  N = 18

No college degree                      

57%                N = 459
College degree or more             

42%                N = 337

Democrat (including leaners)    

48%                N = 355
Independent (no lean)                

15%                N = 113
Republican (including leaners)  

37%                N = 271

Question Wording and Order

First off, we’d like to ask you a few questions about government here in New Jersey.

NJ1. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Mikie Sherrill is handling her job as governor?

1. Approve
2. Disapprove
3. Not Sure/Don’t Know [Vol]
4. Refused [Vol]

NJ2. Already, the governor has come into conflict with President Trump. When there is a conflict, what do you think the governor should do? Should she try and work with President Trump, or should she use lawsuits and other means to defy him?

1. Work with him
2. Defy him
3. It depends or similar [Vol]
4. Don’t Know
5. Refused

Further Questions Held for Later Release

Release Tables

Contact:                           

Dan Cassino 

Executive Director, FDU Poll    

973.896.7072/ dcassino@fdu.edu