NJ Governor Race EXCLUSIVE: Mikie Sherrill on Trump, Congress & the Future and We Can’t Afford To Wait
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Hello and welcome to American Fever Dream. I'm Sammy Sage and I'm here for a special segment with New Jersey Congresswoman Mikey Sherrill, who is now in the Democratic primary for New Jersey governor. Welcome, Congresswoman. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I am very excited to have you. We have a lot of fans from the Northeast and

And I imagine there are a lot of Jerseyans in that. You have the primary next week, June 10th. So tell us about your campaign. Well, we are in the final stretch here. So eight days until June 10th, the primary election.

Early in-person voting starts tomorrow, June 3rd, and lasts until the 8th. So this is all ongoing. We have a lot of people that vote by mail. So I think about a quarter of the vote's already in. And it's been great. We've been running all over the state. I've been apologizing today because I was at the Pride Parade yesterday. And I don't know if you could tell, I had glitter all over myself.

And yeah, so I'm going to these senior homes and I'm like, um, yeah, I know. I know. I can't get it off. I tried. Well, happy pride. Yeah. Happy, happy pride. I tried alcohol swabs. I tried Dawn dish detergent. I tried Vaseline. It was, uh, none of it was working. Honestly, I think it's, I think it's probably brightening up people's day. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Good. I'll tell my team that. Yeah.

Yeah. But so one of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you is that you were recently featured in a Time magazine article discussing the Democrats reboot. And you had said something that really stuck out to me because it kind of, you know, skirts on this age debate and that when you got to Congress, you were pretty shocked.

at how the seniority system and, you know, sort of the old ways of doing things really dominated. Can you elaborate on more of what that was like in practice and how can we change that? Is there any way to change it? Yeah. So it was really frustrating just thinking back to that because, you know, the Democratic Party had been in the minority in the House for almost a decade. Right.

And so finally, I think because so many of us were motivated by what Donald Trump was doing when he got into office, he had run this horrible, like this campaign that listed out these horrible things he was going to do. But I think a lot of us thought it was kind of just to break out or was going to be fake

But then he gets into office and starts to attack things I really cared about after a lifetime as a Navy helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor. Things that, you know, I felt like they were attacks on an oath to the Constitution that I'd sworn. And I wanted to to do something about that. So I decided to run for Congress, as so many people across the country did. And and we built this huge blue wave.

And we sort of built it from the ground up. I think a lot of us weren't your typical candidates that the Democratic Party in Washington would recruit. We didn't have connections. We weren't mayors or, you know, long serving politicos. I, you know, had never served in political office before, like so many of my colleagues. But we were drawn to the race. We ran.

And so in the 11th district of New Jersey, I had the largest swing in the entire nation. So from Republican to Democrat, we built this juggernaut of a campaign in a district that was considered unwinnable when I started, that Trump had won. And I get down to Congress. And just to give you a sense of probably what my mentality was, I felt like I should be wearing like a button.

on my shirt that said, you know, go ahead, ask me how I won. Because I thought, wow, you know, this is going to be really interesting to the Democratic Party because we cracked the code on winning back so many voters who had stopped voting for Democrats who had not been engaged. And we engaged them. And we had this juggernaut of a campaign. We had all these members in these tough districts who were coming in

to Washington and I thought we're going to have these meetings and we're going to discuss what just happened and why it happened and what we built and every I know you're you're kind of

I know I was naive. It was my first time. It was my first- No, I don't blame you because I still am holding out hope that they'll do this today. Right. But we, you know, we- We're talking about six years ago, seven years ago. Exactly. And so here, you know, and there was instead, what we found was we go to some of our first caucus meetings and we find this group of people that every time one of the new members spoke up, there was this-

derisive attitude like, hey, pipe down. We've been here. You haven't. Not interested. This is how we do things here. And I

So many of us were just sort of like, uh-uh, that's not how we roll. You know, we come from these other places where we've really had leadership roles and we've taken on responsibilities and we feel deeply committed to the people that we made commitments to back at home. So it's not okay to come down here and wait 20 years until we get a chairmanship on some committee and speak up then. In fact, I remember being told, hey, in 20 years, you might be able to do something, you know, if you work hard. And I'm like...

Like, seriously, I might not be here in two years. I'm in a Trump district. Maybe you can help me come up with a more elegant way to say this. But I find that this isn't the only situation where I kind of want to retort with such a comment. But it is something to the effect of, OK, so the approval rating for Congress, the body that you've all been running for ever, is what, in the 20% range?

So tell me what are you all doing right? And why we can't change something about it is like, you know, you think about it with like dying industries. It's like, you know, it's a, it's the way we've always done things. Well, it's like, well, haven't we decided, haven't we all concluded that you're having some problems maintaining that? So can you come up with a more elegant way to

say that in a way that would get through to people? You know, I think sometimes when you see dying industries or different non-innovative places, you see the problems being this entrenched group of people who have built power or built their careers based on a certain paradigm.

And they just really don't want it to change. Even if change would actually, you know, give them a better future or more ability to create change or to do good things. They just, they want it to be how it always was because they have built it and they've got this relationship with this one and they've got this and they've done this. And so when this change comes, suddenly they feel very, there's this desire for the status quo, right?

And I just think so many of us coming in and this, this cert, these, this kind of crisis and, you know, coming from the Navy, you are just constantly trained in crisis. I mean, if you are on a Navy ship,

You are doing, you know, you are doing drills for a chemical attack or a biological attack or a nuclear attack or if, you know, if the ship runs aground or if an engine goes out or if you're, you know, attacked by pirates. I mean, you really are constantly preparing for a crisis. And so the idea that we would be in a crisis in this country and

And instead of somehow changing how we're operating, that's not working. And that's, as you pointed out, very unpopular and we're losing, we're actually losing power that we wouldn't kind of change what we're doing and instead just double down. It was, it was really, it just made my head explode then. And it makes my head explode now. Yeah. There's this weird reluctance to be solutions oriented in any way.

And I just want to be like, okay, well, does it actually change the factors on the ground, what you're doing? Or did you just check a box?

And did that play into your decision to run for governor as opposed to continue running for Congress at all? There is a new generation of leaders. There are people who are very solutions oriented, who sort of lead, follow or get out of the way, who are not willing to take a backseat for 20 years, who know that the crisis is now and who, you know, like me, I feel really I feel very upset about.

Donald Trump is attacking everything that I care about, but I feel this deep-seated anger that we couldn't take stock of what was going on in the Democratic Party and present a better vision for the people in this country than a convicted felon who just...

breeds divisiveness and hate and takes down the things I love about America on a daily basis that we somehow couldn't find a different vision for it that was more compelling. And so that's what I'm committed to doing. I've been committed to doing that since I first ran in 2018. And I think the governors today

Our grounds here are the states today, as we have lost so much power, we don't have the majority in the House. We don't have the majority in the Senate. We have a president who, even if Congress is acting in a way it should, continues to kind of take executive power. And it takes time through the courts and through Congress to mount a defense against that. But the states...

and governors and executive power in the states, I think that's the front lines. And I think that's really where we can affect change and have a solutions oriented, you know, like have people like Gretchen, where, you know, just fix the damn roads. Like, come on, enough already. I think that's what you're seeing in the states.

I agree. And I think that this I think that the Democrat, the governors in the Democratic Party are much stronger than I would say the congressional bench, just because there's this weird like something I've noticed. And I think what you were saying about, you know, seniority really getting in the way there tends to be this sort of.

aspiration to the presidency as like the final boss job. And everyone's kind of planning their path to their highest potential leadership position rather than thinking about, okay, well, how am I going to solve these material problems? So my first question is, have you noticed that? And my second is, let's say you are governor of New Jersey. What are going to be your top three priorities to just get done?

Right. So, yeah, I noticed it after President Biden's debate. So that was the first time many of us saw Trump.

what was happening. You know, I had seen the last time I'd seen the president had been at the State of the Union, where he performed admirably, you know, that it seemed like everything was good. And I thought a lot of the attacks on his house on, you know, dealing with them, I thought they were sort of political attacks. But seeing that debate, it was very obvious that he could not be our candidate. It just and people had been hiding something. And so I thought at that moment,

there would be an overwhelming cry for us to address that as a party, because we had all been saying for a very long time that Trump was an existential threat to democracy. And yet I came to that moment and suddenly everyone's just ducking their head and not wanting, I heard a lot of, I'm going to write him a private letter.

Or attacking people who did speak out. Who did speak out. Oh, yes. Days and days. I was one of the first people to call for him to resign. And being in a leadership position is about servant leadership. It's about taking care of the people you serve. It's about knowing that you sometimes have access to a lot of different information that not everybody does. And you have to communicate that.

And you have to find a path forward. And it's not about saying like, it's not about a popularity contest. It's not about saying like, I'm just in leadership. So I get what I want or I, you know, have a great job. Right. It's about leading and it's about taking care of the people you serve. And, um,

And I think, you know, everybody it felt like was calculating what anything they did for or against Biden was going to do for their political future. And so I was shocked that so many people just...

sort of like decided to duck and cover in that really seminal moment. Because if you have run for office to be a public servant, then you owe people your leadership. And to me, that was the time to step up and lead. And so I do think there were too many people in that moment that were making all these calculations in their head. If I say this, this happens to me. If I say this, this happens to me.

I was at a point where I'm like, you know, look, this is I have said that I think Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. And if I mean that, then I need to do everything in my power to make sure he's not the next president. And that's what I'm going to do. And I thought everybody should do it. Yeah. So tell us, Jersey, top three.

Okay. So Jersey top three, the number one thing is, um, building more houses. So we're never going to make New Jersey more affordable if we don't make housing more affordable. And it's the number one thing I hear. So as I go up and down the state right now, because we are in the final eight days, I'm meeting with hundreds of people a day. And I hear so much about housing, whether or not it is rental prices, which are through the roof. A woman told me she had to go back to work because she couldn't afford her long-term apartment building after she retired. Um,

People think 70% of their income in the rent. People who just lose out on bid after bid after bid. We have got to build more houses and drive down costs here. Utility prices. So we have a grid operator that has really mismanaged our grid and not put new clean power into the grid. So utility prices are set to go by 20%. As governor, I'm going to drive in new clean power and drive down costs in the utility grid. And then health care. We have seen costs go up.

year after year after year. It's really adding to the cost in our municipalities as they pay for workers' health insurance. It's added to costs for everyone in the state. This healthcare system is really at a breaking point. The concern I have is that right now,

We just had Congress, I was just down there a little over a week ago, where the Republicans put a bill on the floor in the middle of the night. And I've told people here, you don't put a bill on the floor at 1 a.m., you don't notice it, if you're proud of that bill, or if you want everyone to know about it. You do it when you're trying to hide something. And...

You know, we saw Republicans push this bill through, that passed through the House, to cut Medicaid by $700 billion and Medicare by $500 billion over the next 10 years. This is not what the American people want. We will see where that goes. But certainly, it is going to really make it difficult in the states to provide better health care. That's though, again, what I'm signing up to do is to find that pathway forward.

Yeah, everything is costs. I was with John Della Volpe, the poster researcher who speaks to young people. And I asked him, you know, what is like, what's what is really the core thing? And he said that a large number of the people who he speaks to have who are young have either been homeless or on the verge of homelessness, that things are just so unbelievably unaffordable. And they just want to be able to

That's really like the level we're at right now. And that's the generation that we are raising. So it's really a shame. Yeah. Thank you so much, Congresswoman Sherrill. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks again. Everyone be sure to vote in the New Jersey primary June 10th. Betches.