Gov. Mikie Sherrill is entering her first budget season with a 58% approval rating, a significant boost from her predecessor’s second term ratings, according to a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released Tuesday.
Sherrill, a Democrat, has high approval ratings from Democrats and progressives, with 88% approving of how she’s handling her job as governor. Her approval rating from Republicans is at 22%, and at just 14% among self-identified MAGA voters. Her approval among independents is 50%.
This is the first independent poll of Sherrill’s performance since she became governor on Jan. 20.
“Sherrill is getting what no politician on the national level gets these days: the benefit of the doubt,” said Dan Cassino, politics and government professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and 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.”
While Sherrill has been in office for only about two months, she’s already clashed with the Trump administration, particularly over issues like immigration enforcement and Gateway tunnel funding, and her administration is on both sides of a number of lawsuits against the federal government.
Forty-two percent of voters want to see Sherrill work with President Donald Trump and 31% say that she should defy him, while 26% said, unprompted, that it depends on the issue, according to the poll. Cassino noted that the latter responses are unusual.
Just 15% of Democrats want to see Sherrill work with the president, and about 80% of Republicans said she should cooperate with Trump.
Black and Hispanic voters — at 40% and 44%, respectively — were most likely to say that it depends on the situation. Cassino said that while most New Jersey voters may not like Trump, “they’re pragmatic” and “want to see cooperation when it’s possible.”
The poll also found a drop in New Jersey voters who identify as MAGA. In January 2024, as Trump was seeking his second term as president, 27% of voters self-identified themselves that way, and that number has fallen to 16% today.
“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 that moment,” Cassino said.
The poll was conducted between March 20 and 28, 2026. Respondents were contacted via either live caller telephone interviews or text-to-web surveys sent to cell phones, resulting in an overall sample of 805 registered voters.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
