Towns hit hardest by Ida send a mixed gubernatorial message

It was a line Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli was to repeat over and over: “If ever we needed one of those ‘get the hell off the beach’ moments, this was it.”

In that oft-repeated part of his campaign stump speech, Ciattarelli criticized Gov. Phil Murphy for his slow response to Hurricane Ida, which wreaked devastation across the state and killed 30 New Jerseyans. Murphy’s delayed declaration of emergency and poor disaster management, Ciattarelli argued, caused huge amounts of preventable destruction.

If Ciattarelli’s criticism of Murphy’s Ida response was to be effective anywhere, it would have been in the towns and cities that were themselves hit the hardest.

But a look at seven towns up and down the state that were especially thrashed by Ida shows no such straightforward conclusions. 

Some, like Harrison and the city of Passaic, saw Murphy fall compared with his 2017 performance; others, like Manville and Millburn, gave the governor a slightly better result than four years ago. Ciattarelli’s message that Murphy screwed up when the state needed him most may very well have been effective statewide – but seemingly not everyone who bore Ida’s brunt agreed with him.

Bound Brook, Hillsborough, and Manville

The three Somerset County municipalities of Bound Brook, Hillsborough, and Manville were undoubtedly more emblematic of Ida’s destruction than anywhere else in the state.

President Joe Biden, in his post-Ida tour of the Northeast, held a press conference in Hillsborough before touring damage in Manville; Bound Brook, meanwhile, was infamously flooded after a stuck NJ Transit train prevented critical flood gates from closing.

But if residents of the three towns held the damage against Murphy, they didn’t necessarily show it.

Murphy won Bound Brook by around 1 percentage point, the exact same margin he received in 2017. He lost Hillsborough by 4.6 points, a minor fall from his 3-point loss four years ago.

In other words, the minor swings in the two towns don’t come anywhere close to matching the statewide 2017-2021 swing of more than 12 points. If Murphy were particularly unpopular in places like Bound Brook and Hillsborough because of Ida, one would expect them to swing against him more than the state overall, not less.

And the governor actually improved slightly in Manville, though he still lost it in a landslide. His 28.5-point defeat in the borough was marginally better than his 30.2-point loss in 2017.

Harrison Township

Moving down to South Jersey, Harrison Township – and more specifically its Mullica Hill neighborhood – was the part of the state that was slammed the hardest by Ida’s accompanying tornadoes.

It strongly rejected Murphy, giving Ciattarelli a 21.6-point margin four years after voting for then-Lieutenant Gov. Kim Guadagno by 11.8 points, a 9.8-point shift to the right. 

However, it’s tough to separate Murphy’s specific unpopularity in Harrison from his broader collapse in South Jersey more generally. 

For example, in neighboring Cumberland County, which was hardly touched by Ida, Murphy lost by 11.9 points after winning it by 13.4 last time around. That 25.3-point swing is much bigger than the one seen in Harrison, and it happened in a part of the state where Ida was extremely unlikely to be on the top of voters’ minds.

Cranford, Millburn, and Passaic

Finally, looking at three hard-hit municipalities spread across different parts of suburban North Jersey, the results are once again highly mixed.

Murphy won Union County’s Cranford by 8.5 points, four years after winning it by 10.1 points. Millburn, in Essex County, was more forgiving of the governor; it gave him a 33.2 point victory, up from a 27.5-point win in 2017, a swing to the left of 5.7 points.

Finally, the city of Passaic, where three people died, saw a swing to the right that outpaced nearly anywhere else in the state. It voted for Murphy in a 38.2-point landslide – but that still doesn’t come close to the 56.8-point margin he got four years ago, and represents an 18.6-point rightward shift.

Among the seven towns analyzed here, Passaic is the only urban municipality and the only one where a majority of residents are people of color; Murphy underperformed his turnout goals in urban and nonwhite areas more generally, which also possibly helps explain his troubles in the city of Passaic.

These seven towns are, of course, not the only places Ida damaged; hundreds of municipalities across the state faced devastation great and small, and delivered hundreds of different results for Murphy and Ciattarelli on Tuesday.

But as parties and analysts try to determine exactly how Ciattarelli was able to outperform polls and the state’s partisan baseline by so much, the mixed messages these seven towns sent is worth heeding. 

Perhaps Murphy’s disaster response hurt his campaign, and perhaps Ciattarelli’s messaging was effective in some places. But the data simply don’t support anything stronger than “perhaps.”

This story was updated at 10:00 a.m. on December 17 with finalized gubernatorial results.