Mikie Sherrill picks Dale Caldwell, a Black pastor and university president, for lieutenant governor

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill has selected Centenary University president Dale Caldwell as her running mate for New Jersey governor.

Caldwell, the first Black president of the university, is also a pastor at Covenant United Methodist Church in Plainfield, Union County. He has experience in the private and public sectors, including working in state government, starting nonprofits, and leading charter schools. He served on the New Brunswick school board for 26 years, including six as president.

“Mikie Sherrill and I represent a different kind of leadership that sees possibilities, not a blind commitment to doing things the way they’ve always been done,” Caldwell said Friday. “My life, much like Mikie’s, has been dedicated to service: to my church, my students, and my community.”

Sherrill praised Caldwell as being “a voice for the voiceless” and said that the duo is “committed to New Jersey” while Jack Ciattarelli, the GOP candidate, “is committed to Trump.”

Ciattarelli announced his lieutenant governor pick earlier this week at a bar in Sherrill’s district, choosing Morris County Sheriff James Gannon.

Sherrill and Caldwell are launching their partnership on the campaign trail Saturday with three stops, including one at the Burlington County Fair in Columbus.

A 1982 graduate of Princeton University and a 1988 graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Caldwell also received his doctorate in education administration from Seton Hall University in 2017. His resumé includes stints as the executive director of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Rothman Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and as president of the Educational Services Commission.

He served as a deputy commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs for a few years after being appointed by former Democratic Gov. James McGreevey. He also worked as a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting, and he was the founding executive director of nonprofit Newark Alliance, which focuses on economic growth.

Caldwell also brings to the Democratic ticket ties to the charter school movement. He is the founding board chair of a charter school in Asbury Park, and previously worked as the head of a Trenton charter school. In 2015, he argued in an op-ed that “charter school students’ success is a direct threat to the lucrative franchise the NJEA [public schoolteachers union] holds on a public education system that has failed generations of New Jersey children.”

Caldwell’s charter school connections could complicate attacks on Sherrill by Ciattarelli, a pro-charter candidate who has sought to cast his Democratic opponent as “owned by special interests” such as teachers’ unions.

Sherrill has focused on providing mental health services and magnet schools, though both candidates have criticized the state’s school funding formula.

Sherrill had a strong primary campaign, winning a six-person race by over 100,000 votes, but she became a target for attacks as she held onto her status as front-runner.

Some of those attacks came from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who tried to motivate working-class Black voters he said have been neglected by the Democratic Party.

At one point, Baraka went to Sherrill’s hometown, Montclair, and criticized her answer to a question about what programs she would implement to close the racial wealth gap in New Jersey. Sherrill had said she would implement better education programs to have children reading by third grade as well as first-time home ownership programs.

Baraka said her answer about children reading “would be considered racist” if a Republican said it, calling it “tone deaf and completely out of touch,” and saying that disparities instead come from decades of discrimination.

In response, Sherrill said she agrees there is “deeply rooted systemic racism in New Jersey that must be addressed.”

Caldwell’s connection to fighting racial injustice, both by making history in some of his roles and through his personal connection to the Civil Rights Movement (his father, the Rev. Gilbert Caldwell, was a civil rights activist who protested alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), could help Sherrill’s rapport with Black voters.

Caldwell said that if successful, Sherrill’s administration will focus on lowering costs and creating opportunity for New Jerseyans as Trump’s “MAGA movement” costs the state “our wallets and our freedoms.”