How Mikie Sherrill won | Lowry

What always made Mikie Sherrill such an attractive congressional candidate was the part of her résumé that included Naval Academy graduate and Navy helicopter pilot.

What carried her across the finish line, however, was not the Navy, but rather “Mikie’s Army” of volunteers that spread its wings and kept growing, and that helped her campaign continue to build momentum all the way to the end, by which time Sherrill, a moderate Democrat who set records for congressional fundraising, had overwhelmed her opponent, Republican Assemblyman Jay Webber.

The impressive thing about Mikie’s Army is that its ranks swelled enough to include a wide array of volunteers, including a trio of middle-aged Essex County women who’d grown weary of former Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a so-called “Rockefeller Republican” who’d lost touch; energized teenage girls from Chatham High School who rushed to join the Sherrill campaign even though they couldn’t vote; and a Parsippany native who described himself as a “nominal independent” who’d been up since 5 a.m. on Election Day, he said, working as an “election challenger” at Brooklawn Junior High School.

“We’ve built our campaign with the support of so many people,” Sherrill said when she took the stage shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday inside the elbow-room-only ballroom at the Sheraton of Parsippany. Sherrill went down a long list of “thank-you’s” that included veterans, and young people, as well as “thousands of women who are ready to join me so that we have a better future for our kids.”

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In the end, said Jen Grisafi, the campaign’s volunteer coordinator who had introduced Sherrill moments before, “We proved that ordinary citizens can still make a difference.”

Among those ordinary citizens who made a difference, and who showed up at the campaign watch party, was Ellen Barocas of Essex County, who said she had grown disillusioned with Frelinghuysen, who she said “was not like his father” and “had no backbone.”

“If we believe one thing about Mikie,” Barocas said, “it's that she has backbone.”

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Another member of Mikie’s Army was Brian Tappen, who lived for a time in upstate New York but had in recent years returned to his hometown of Parsippany, and who had, before he knew it, become involved in the Sherrill campaign through one of his neighbors. He said Frelinghuysen had been “OK” representing the district but that he saw Sherrill’s candidacy as the “perfect opportunity to make a change.”

“Since Donald Trump said this election was about him,” Tappen said, “I decided I would work to help Democrats like Mikie get elected.”

Mia Paone and Emily Lamb, students at Chatham High School, also wanted to help Sherrill get elected. Both served as interns on the campaign and were there Tuesday night to celebrate.

“The biggest issue for me is gun violence,” said Paone, who participated in the “March for Our Lives” earlier this year in Morristown. “People of my generation, we just want to be able to have our school be a safe place. Mikie supports common-sense gun laws, including universal background checks.”

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Lamb said she got involved through the grass-roots movement 11th for Change, a group that began to form shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

“A lot of that movement included suburban mothers,” Lamb said, “but it also had young people, too.”

Lamb described working on the Sherrill campaign as a rewarding, instructive experience, as if it were a civics lesson that could never be replicated in a classroom.

“Truly being involved showed me how a campaign should work,” Lamb said. “Even though we weren’t able to vote, being able to do something on the campaign, and working to bring about change, was really exciting.”

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One woman I spoke to Tuesday, who asked that her name not be used, perhaps put it best when she said she thought all the excitement was "because she's authentic."

"I think a lot of people can relate to her," she said of Sherrill. "She seems like one of us. She understands our concerns."

There was lots of excitement for Sherrill on Tuesday, and lots of electricity. And why not? A small, determined part of a revved-up “army” was letting off steam after a long, fruitful campaign.

Bruce Lowry is the editorial page editor for NorthJersey.com and The Record. He can be reached at lowry@northjersey.com.