FDU Poll Finds Baraka, Sherrill and Fulop Pull Away from the Pack
Baraka, Sherrill and Fulop Pull Away from the Pack
Clear Lanes Forming in Race for Democratic Nomination
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, March 5, 2025 – While there are still six major candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for Governor this year, three of those candidates: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop have the edge in favorability among Democratic voters in the state. Results from the subsample of 572 Democrats in the latest FDU Poll also show the split between the center and left of the Democratic Party, as well as how his association with the NJEA seems to be hurting Sean Spiller.
Among Democrats, Baraka and former State Senate President Steve Sweeney have a clear advantage in overall name recognition. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats say that they’re heard of Baraka, and 73 percent recognize Sweeney. Sherrill and former Mayor of Montclair Sean Spiller lag in this measure, with just 56 percent of Democrats saying that they’re heard of them. This high name recognition helps Baraka in favorability measures, where he leads the pack, with 43 percent of Democrats saying that they have a favorable view of the Newark Mayor. Thirty-two percent of Democrats have a favorable view of Fulop, and 31 percent say the same about Sherrill. The other named candidates – Congressman Josh Gottheimer, Sweeney and Spiller – all lag with favorability ratings in the 20s.
“This is not the race anyone was expecting a few months ago,” said Dan Cassino, a Professor of Government and Politics at FDU, and the executive director of the Poll. “We had been expecting Gottheimer to do much better, and the strong showings of Fulop and Baraka in the progressive wing of the Party has left other candidates scrambling.”
Of course, in a primary election, only members of a party get to vote, so whether voters are Democrats or Republicans matters less than ideological groups within those parties. The largest ideological group in New Jersey are self-described moderates: 38 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Republicans say that they’re moderate, but they’re outnumbered in the Democratic Party by liberals (46 percent of Democrats) and in the Republican Party by conservatives (53 percent of Republicans) and MAGA voters (46 percent of Republicans). In addition, a third of Democrats (32 percent) describe themselves as progressives, and 11 percent as socialists.
While Baraka, Sherrill and Fulop lead the rest of the Democratic pack in favorability, dividing up Democrats by ideology shows the lanes forming within the party. All three of the top candidates do reasonably well among self-described progressives, with Baraka having insignificantly higher favorability among this group, but Sherrill has a clear lead in favorability among the larger group of liberal Democrats (44 percent favorability, compared to 38 percent for Baraka and 34 percent for Fulop).
“Baraka is currently edging out the competition among voters on the left of the Democratic Party,” said Cassino. “If the primary electorate skews left, that’s a big advantage; if the electorate looks more like the Democratic Party as a whole, it looks better for Sherrill.”
However, Baraka’s advantages in favorability are matched by his higher unfavorable numbers. Overall, six percent of Democrats have a negative view of Sherill; seven percent have a negative view of Fulop. Baraka’s unfavorability is about twice that, 12 percent among Democrats, spread about equally across ideological groups. This means that in the commonly used metric of net favorability – favorable views less unfavorable views – Sherrill has a substantial lead among liberals (+40, versus +29 for Baraka and +28 for Fulop), and moderates (+37, versus +27 for Baraka and Fulop), while Fulop has an insignificant edge among progressives (+38, versus +35 for Baraka and +34 for Sherrill).
“Lower name recognition means that Fulop and Sherrill have more room to grow their support than Baraka does,” said Cassino. “More Democrats have made up their minds about Baraka, and double-digit unfavorable numbers among your own party are a bad sign for anyone.”
In addition, the survey included an experiment in which respondents were randomly assigned to have one of the candidates described in one of two different ways. The President of the NJEA has higher name recognition among Democrats (63 percent versus 52 percent) as well as rather higher unfavorable ratings – 16 percent versus 10 percent – than the Democratic former Mayor of Montclair despite being the same person, Sean Spiller.
“One of Spiller’s biggest advantages in this race – his connection to the NJEA – also looks like something of a liability among voters,” said Cassino.
In addition to the ideological split, views of the candidates among Democrats vary on the basis of age, race, ethnicity and sex. Among white Democrats, for instance, Sherrill has higher favorability than any of the other candidates by a ten-point margin: 48 percent, versus 38 percent for Fulop and 37 percent for Baraka. In contrast, 63 percent of Black Democrats say that they have a favorable view of Baraka, with no other candidate getting above 20 percent. Baraka also has an edge among Hispanic Democrats, with 40 percent favorability, with Fulop coming in second at 26 percent.
“We don’t know what the voters who actually turn out in this primary are going to look like,” said Cassino. “If it’s more Black and Hispanic, Baraka has a clear advantage; if it skews more white, Sherrill is in a very good position.”
Among nearly all of the candidates, favorable views are skewed towards older voters. For instance, 46 percent of Democrats 65 and over have favorable views of Sherrill, compared with 29 percent of voters 30 and under. The major exception to this is Fulop, whose favorability – around 32 percent – is stable across age groups.
“We generally don’t see a lot of young voters in primaries,” said Cassino. “But Fulop seems to be doing a better of activating young Democrats than anyone else in the race.”
Of course, there are still several months before the primary, and some candidates – like Gottheimer – are only now starting to roll out media campaigns that could be expected to increase their visibility. In addition, name recognition and favorability are imperfect measures of electoral support, as many Democrats have favorable views of multiple candidates: the fact that a candidate has higher favorability does not necessarily mean that he or she will do better in a primary election. However, they can be seen as an upper limit on a candidate’s support, as well as a measure of the extent to which a candidate has successfully been able to market themselves to a statewide audience. A model that looked at likely voters would provide more clarity, but in the absence of a recent competitive primary election in New Jersey that such a model could be based on, any likely voter model necessarily has a great deal of uncertainty.
The survey was conducted between February 23 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 1,476 registered voters in the state, including an oversample of Newark residents who were randomly assigned to some, but not all, of the sections in the main survey. The data presented in this release contains approximately 240 respondents from this oversample. Surveys were carried out via live caller telephone interviews to landlines (191) and cellphones (319) and the remainder (966) 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 and race/ethnicity. This weighting process means that the oversample of Newark resident, carried out in conjunction with a simultaneous poll of Newark residents, does not skew the results of the poll towards any particular group, and the results are not substantively different if this oversample is not included in the results.
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 1.3, 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 1,476 registered voters is +/-2.9 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-3.8 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported. For the subsample of 572 Democrats, the simple sampling error is +/-4.5 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval
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.
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.
1,476 Registered Voters in New Jersey
Figures do not include individuals who declined to answer demographic items.
Man
47% N = 698
Woman
51% N = 754
Some Other Way
0.4% N = 4
18-30
17% N = 251
31-44
23% N = 336
45-64
36% N = 534
65+
24% N = 347
White
67% N = 987
Black
13% N = 190
Hispanic/Latino/a
12% N = 173
Asian
3% N = 42
Other/Multi-racial
3% N = 44
No college degree
54% N = 790
College degree or more
44% N = 645
Democrat (including leaners)
48% N = 347
Independent (no lean)
7% N = 51
College degree or more
45% N = 323
[Earlier questions held for later release]
Now, we’d like to ask you a few questions about the upcoming Gubernatorial Election
D1. In politics today, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or something else?
- Democrat
- Republican
- Independent [ASK D1A]
- Something Else/Other
- DK/Ref [vol]
D1A. [Ask only if D1 is 3] Which way do you lean?
- Democrat
- Republican
- Independent
- Something Else/Other
- DK/Ref [vol]
[Respondents only asked about candidates in their party; non-leaning independents excluded from candidate questions]
In June, both Republicans and Democrats will be having primary elections to pick their candidates for governor. I’m going to [read/show] you a list of potential candidates in this year’s race for Governor of New Jersey. For each, just tell me if you’ve heard of them or not, and, if you have heard of them, whether you have a favorable or unfavorable view of them.
[Order of Names Randomized
D1. Democratic Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop
D2. Democratic Member of Congress Mikie Sherrill
D3. Democratic Member of Congress Josh Gottheimer
D4. Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka
D5. Democratic Former State Senator Steve Sweeney
D6. Democratic Former Mayor of Montclair/ President of the NJEA Sean Spiller [Randomize how this candidate is presented: half get Montclair Mayor, half get NJEA president]
R1. Republican Talk Show Host Bill Spadea
R2. Republican State Senator Jon Bramnick
R3. Republican Former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli
R4. Republican Former State Senator Ed Durr
- Haven’t Heard of Them
- Favorable Opinion
- Unfavorable Opinion
- Heard of Them, No Opinion
- Don’t Know [Vol]
- Refused [Vol]
[Intervening questions held for later release]
Just a few more questions, for statistical purposes
D1B. Which of the following terms would you use to describe your political views? You can choose as many as you like. [Shuffle Order]
- Liberal
- Moderate
- Conservative
- Socialist
- Progressive
- Libertarian
- Make America Great Again or MAGA
- Nationalist
D2A. To ensure we are reaching people of all ages, would you please tell me your age?
____ (ENTER AGE: 98=98+, 99 = REFUSED)
[IF Don’t Know/REFUSED IN QD1, ASK:]
D2B. Would you be willing to tell us whether it’s between…?
- Under 30
- 31 to 44
- 45 to 64
- 65 or over
- [Refused]
D3. What was the last grade in school you completed? [CODE TO LIST]
- Did not complete High School
- High School Diploma or equivalent
- Vocational or Trade School
- Some college, but no degree
- Associates, or other 2 year degree
- Bachelor’s Degree
- Graduate work, such as Law, MBA, Medical School, or similar
- Refused (VOL)
D4. How would you describe your sex? Do you describe yourself as …
- A Man
- A Woman
- Some other way
- [DK/REF]
D5. How would you describe your racial and ethnic background? You can pick as many as you’d like.
- White
- Black
- Asian
- Hispanic/Latino/a/Spanish
- Other or Multi-Racial
- [Dk/Ref]
|
Percent reporting favorable views |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Liberal |
Moderate |
Progressive |
Socialist |
|
Baraka |
43% |
38% |
41% |
45% |
44% |
|
Fulop |
32% |
34% |
36% |
41% |
31% |
|
Sherrill |
31% |
44% |
44% |
41% |
41% |
|
Gottheimer |
27% |
25% |
34% |
28% |
25% |
|
Sweeney |
23% |
24% |
28% |
21% |
27% |
|
Spiller |
22% |
23% |
16% |
24% |
25% |
|
Percent reporting unfavorable views |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Liberal |
Moderate |
Progressive |
Socialist |
|
Baraka |
12% |
10% |
14% |
10% |
16% |
|
Fulop |
7% |
6% |
9% |
3% |
5% |
|
Sherrill |
6% |
5% |
7% |
7% |
6% |
|
Gottheimer |
10% |
12% |
9% |
16% |
14% |
|
Sweeney |
24% |
28% |
24% |
21% |
27% |
|
Spiller |
13% |
13% |
16% |
13% |
10% |
|
Net Favorable (Favorable – Unfavorable) |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Liberal |
Moderate |
Progressive |
Socialist |
|
Baraka |
+31 |
+29 |
+27 |
+35 |
+28 |
|
Fulop |
+26 |
+28 |
+27 |
+38 |
+27 |
|
Sherrill |
+25 |
+40 |
+37 |
+34 |
+35 |
|
Gottheimer |
+17 |
+13 |
+25 |
+12 |
+11 |
|
Sweeney |
-1 |
-4 |
+5 |
+0 |
+0 |
|
Spiller |
+8 |
+11 |
-1 |
+11 |
+16 |
|
Overall Name Recognition (including those without opinion) |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Liberal |
Moderate |
Progressive |
Socialist |
|
Baraka |
78% |
74% |
78% |
78% |
77% |
|
Fulop |
62% |
61% |
67% |
65% |
52% |
|
Sherrill |
56% |
68% |
68% |
65% |
67% |
|
Gottheimer |
61% |
61% |
66% |
61% |
61% |
|
Sweeney |
73% |
79% |
81% |
67% |
73% |
|
Spiller |
56% |
61% |
52% |
53% |
52% |
|
How would you describe your political views? [Multiple Responses Accepted] |
|||
|
|
Overall |
Democrats |
Republicans |
|
Moderate |
31% |
38% |
21% |
|
Conservative |
26% |
10% |
53% |
|
Liberal |
23% |
46% |
4% |
|
MAGA |
18% |
2% |
46% |
|
Progressive |
18% |
32% |
4% |
|
Libertarian |
8% |
6% |
8% |
|
Socialist |
7% |
11% |
1% |
|
Nationalist |
5% |
3% |
5% |
|
Name Recognition and Favorability of Sean Spiller, by Description |
||
|
|
Democratic Former Mayor of Montclair |
President of the NJEA |
|
Haven’t Heard of Them |
41% |
31% |
|
Favorable Opinion |
20% |
23% |
|
Unfavorable Opinion |
10% |
16% |
|
Heard of Them, No Opinion |
19% |
24% |
|
Don’t Know |
9% |
6% |
|
Percent reporting favorable views |
|||||
|
|
Men |
Women |
White |
Black |
Hispanic |
|
Baraka |
49% |
40% |
37% |
63% |
40% |
|
Fulop |
39% |
28% |
38% |
19% |
26% |
|
Sherrill |
47% |
33% |
48% |
18% |
19% |
|
Gottheimer |
33% |
23% |
34% |
12% |
19% |
|
Sweeney |
26% |
21% |
25% |
18% |
21% |
|
Spiller |
21% |
22% |
24% |
19% |
14% |
|
Overall Name Recognition (including those without opinion) |
|||||
|
|
Men |
Women |
White |
Black |
Hispanic |
|
Baraka |
84% |
75% |
72% |
94% |
82% |
|
Fulop |
71% |
57% |
65% |
59% |
60% |
|
Sherrill |
70% |
58% |
71% |
45% |
47% |
|
Gottheimer |
68% |
57% |
68% |
44% |
56% |
|
Sweeney |
78% |
70% |
79% |
61% |
63% |
|
Spiller |
63% |
52% |
60% |
54% |
43% |
|
Percent reporting favorable views |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Under 30 |
31-44 |
45-64 |
65+ |
|
Baraka |
43% |
37% |
45% |
43% |
47% |
|
Fulop |
32% |
32% |
32% |
34% |
32% |
|
Sherrill |
31% |
29% |
33% |
41% |
46% |
|
Gottheimer |
27% |
21% |
17% |
30% |
37% |
|
Sweeney |
23% |
22% |
20% |
26% |
22% |
|
Spiller |
22% |
14% |
27% |
20% |
23% |
|
Overall Name Recognition (including those without opinion) |
|||||
|
|
Democrats |
Under 30 |
31-44 |
45-64 |
65+ |
|
Baraka |
78% |
59% |
77% |
85% |
84% |
|
Fulop |
62% |
46% |
61% |
70% |
65% |
|
Sherrill |
56% |
53% |
55% |
70% |
69% |
|
Gottheimer |
61% |
55% |
55% |
62% |
70% |
|
Sweeney |
73% |
62% |
69% |
77% |
80% |
|
Spiller |
56% |
38% |
58% |
58% |
65% |
Contact:
Dan Cassino
Executive Director, FDU Poll
973.896.7072/ dcassino@fdu.edu