Jack Ciattarelli will win the Republican nomination for New Jersey governor, CNN projected Tuesday, setting him up to take on Gov. Phil Murphy in the fall.
Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman and the establishment-backed candidate, pushed out three other Republican candidates – engineer Hirsh Singh, pastor Phil Rizzo and previous Franklin Mayor Brian Levine – to win the party’s nomination.
While he was the leader in Tuesday’s GOP contest, Ciattarelli presently faces a fight against Murphy, the top favorite in the current year’s race. The sitting governor, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, is well-positioned to break a New Jersey streak that started in 1989 of electing a governor from the party opposite of the sitting president, a year after Joe Biden won the state by 16 percentage points.
Ciattarelli was by a wide margin the best-funded candidate in the Republican race, raising $7 million while none of his opponents had reached the $1 million mark. With supports from each of the 21 province Republican associations in the state, he additionally profited with prime placement on the ballot.
On the campaign trail, Ciattarelli zeroed in generally on how he’d take on Murphy, featuring tax policies and the Democratic governor’s handling of the Covid pandemic. Be that as it may, his campaign signaled it saw his history of criticizing former President Donald Trump as a vulnerability: Ciattarelli attended a “Stop the Steal” rally, and was sponsored by Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a former Democrat who exchanged gatherings and turned into a staunch Trump partner.
Ciattarelli additionally named his leading rival Singh, a “fake MAGA candidate” in an advertisement, where his campaign cast Singh as a rival of law enforcement officers and featured a 2014 Facebook post in which Singh wrote in light of the killing of Eric Garner that “police terror must stop.”