January 20, 2026
Michael Karas/Imagn Images
Gov. Mikie Sherrill waves after being sworn in during her inauguration ceremony at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Tuesday morning.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill became the second woman governor of New Jersey after being sworn in during an inauguration ceremony Tuesday morning at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
In her first act, Sherrill signed two executive orders aimed at lowering the cost of utility bills around the state and used her 35-minute speech to assure residents that addressing the state's affordability crisis would be her first priority.
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The four-time congresswoman handily defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in November, when voter turnout increased in all 21 counties from 2021. Sherrill ran an affordability-focused campaign, and her victory marked the third consecutive gubernatorial win for Democrats in the state.
Sherrill was a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey, where she worked as an outreach and reentry coordinator and an assistant U.S. attorney before entering the race to represent New Jersey's 11th Congressional District in 2018.
Sherrill, who is succeeding two-term Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, faces with a slate of challenges from rising energy costs to federal funding cuts.
On her campaign trail, she vowed to use her first day in office to implement a freeze on utility bills and declare a state of emergency to increase energy production. In June, customers saw an average increase of 17-20% on their electric bills, according to the state's Board of Public Utilities. The spike, first announced last February, was largely due to the regional grid manager, PJM Interconnection, facing increased demand from data centers.
"Rising electric bills are the number one concern I hear about across New Jersey, which is why I pledged to take bold action to freeze rate hikes and take on our grid operator, PJM," Sherrill said in a statement on Jan. 16. "… I will work with other governors in the region to advocate for meaningful reforms at PJM to ensure our ratepayers and constituents are not caught in an endless cycle of mismanagement and unsustainable rising costs."
Sherrill's full "affordability agenda" lays out a plan to address similar rising costs in housing, health care and child care, while also acknowledging New Jersey's status as the highest-taxed state in the country. Her plan involves incentivizing new housing to be built across the state, driving down prescription drug costs by holding Pharmacy Benefit Managers accountable, expanding the state-level child tax credit and earned income tax credit, and providing free school meals.
The mother of four also made online safety a priority during her campaign. She supported a bill to ban cellphones in schools that was signed into law by Murphy this month and promised to protect seniors from artificial intelligence scams, stop deepfakes and implement guardrails to protect children from harmful side effects of AI and social media usage.
In response to the Trump administration's cuts to federal programs from education to health care, Sherrill told WHYY that she believes New Jersey will be able to hold its own.
"We are seeing at every level that Trump's agenda on the economy is harming working families," she said. "... Here, we're going to drive transparency and accountability with the constant focus on driving down costs for middle-class families, not lining my own pockets as Trump is doing."
Watch Sherrill's inauguration here:
