New Jersey Democrats will emerge from Election Day 2024 having held onto all nine of their current congressional seats, elected Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) to the U.S. Senate, and delivered 14 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
They’re still going to feel abysmal about how things went down.
Mirroring similarly strong results for Republicans across the country, New Jersey Republicans summoned a groundswell of support statewide, pushing Democratic margins down into the single digits in races across the state. In the presidential election, Harris currently leads former President Donald Trump by just 4.8 points, 51.4% to 46.6% – the smallest Democratic presidential margin in the state since 1992. (Around 10% of votes have yet to be counted, so these numbers could still shift before the election is finalized.)
The result is far different than expectations from both parties going into Election Day, and it’s also far different from the public polls of the race, which showed Harris with leads of between 12 and 20 points.
The 9th district congressional race for the late Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson)’s seat between State Sen. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) and Republican Billy Prempeh, which most had thought would be an easy Democratic hold, is just as tight. Pou currently leads Prempeh just 50.6% to 46.2%; her lead was even smaller for much of election night, but a big set of ballots counted in Passaic County gave her a healthier lead.
What was supposed to be the marquee race of the night, meanwhile, may end up having a larger margin than either the presidential or 9th district contests. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and Democratic challenger Sue Altman each spent millions of dollars to win the swingy 7th congressional district, but it was Kean who ended up the very clear victor: he leads 52.5% to 45.7%, a nearly 28,000-vote margin. (Again, these numbers, like all numbers cited in this story, are subject to change as the remaining votes are counted.)
And in congressional districts, counties, and towns up and down the state, Democrats are trailing where they didn’t expect to be or winning narrowly where they expected to romp. Even Kim, who was the colossal favorite for the Senate against Republican Curtis Bashaw, is only leading by a 53% to 45% margin, far closer than had been predicted.
What caused such a Republican wave, one that none of the polls released prior to Election Day had predicted? That’s a question that New Jersey politicos of both parties will likely be pondering for years – but there are a few things we can say tonight.
The Republican early vote advantage wasn’t a mirage. This year was the first year New Jersey voters really took to early in-person voting, which was implemented in 2021, with nearly 1.2 million early in-person votes cast statewide. And registered Republicans in particular used it en masse; 400,792 Republicans cast early votes to Democrats’ 418,544, far outperforming their share of the statewide electorate.
In the lead-up to the election, it was impossible to conclusively say what those numbers meant. Because early voting is still so new, and this year’s early voting period obliterated prior turnout statistics, no one knew whether to interpret the Republican edge as a sign that they would do particularly well or simply as the new normal in New Jersey elections; there weren’t any previous equivalent elections to make comparisons against.
In retrospect, it seems clear that the answer was the former: Republicans showed their enthusiasm via the early vote, and it resulted in a GOP wave. Now, if nothing else, New Jersey political observers have a baseline against which to compare future voter turnout patterns.
Republicans improved everywhere, but in some places more than others. Looking at the county-by-county breakdowns in the presidential race, Trump and Republicans improved on their prior showings almost everywhere – but those improvements were far from consistent.
In wealthy, exurban Hunterdon County, for example, Trump leads by seven percentage points, 52% to 45%. That’s a modest improvement from his four-point win in 2020, and it dashes Democratic hopes of turning the historically Republican county blue, but it’s far from doomsday for Democrats; after all, Trump carried the county by a much larger 14-point margin in 2016.
In urban, plurality-Hispanic Passaic County, meanwhile, Trump leads by three percentage points, 50% to 47% – a whopping 19-point swing from 2020, when Joe Biden won the county 58% to 41%. (Again, these numbers are not final – but the general trends are clear.) Similarly gigantic swings against Democrats were present in some other majority-minority counties like Middlesex and Hudson Counties.
One of the main reasons New Jersey has a reputation as such a blue state is its minority population, with large communities of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans all calling the state home. Those groups have traditionally voted strongly Democratic, but based on results this year, many of them seem to be taking a newfound interest in the GOP.
Democrats did themselves a massive favor when they drew the state’s congressional map. Democrats on the Congressional Redistricting Commission in 2021 had one goal for the state’s new map: make it as wave-proof as possible, protecting nine Democratic seats even in a very favorable year for Republicans. Tonight’s results show that it seems to have worked.
On the state’s old congressional map, the 3rd, 5th, and 11th districts were all highly competitive, and Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Delran), Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff), and Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) could have all been forced into close races. Instead, all lead by decent if not overwhelming margins: Conaway is up 53% to 45% (with many votes still uncounted thanks to technical issues in Burlington County), Gottheimer leads 54% to 44%, and Sherrill is up 56% to 42%.
Pou, on the other hand, should blame the state’s new map for her race being so close, since the 9th congressional district was made more Republican in order to shore up neighboring districts. But it was still kept just blue enough for her to pull out a win despite strong movement against Democrats in Passaic and Bergen Counties.
Democrats did sacrifice one seat on the map they drew in 2021: the 7th district, which elected Kean over Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) in 2022 and re-elected Kean against Altman tonight. But given how a less sturdy map might have resulted in even more Democratic losses tonight, Democrats are probably feeling okay about that choice.
Neither party really saw this coming. Republicans – both in New Jersey and nationwide – are sure to brag about how they made Democrats sweat tonight in true-blue New Jersey. Given how close things are, they’ve earned that right.
But in reality, neither they nor Democrats knew a result like tonight’s was on its way. If they had, the spending patterns in the state would have looked entirely different: far more investment in the 9th district (which received absolutely no outside interest), possibly less investment in the 7th district (which will top more than $20 million overall), and maybe even some attention from the Trump campaign, which occasionally hinted that it was playing for New Jersey’s electoral votes but which never made any real effort to make that happen.
Is this the new normal? We don’t know.
In 2004, John Kerry turned in a surprisingly anemic performance in New Jersey, winning the state by less than seven percentage points, similar to the margin Harris will likely end up with this year. But in 2005, Democrats sprang back to easily win the governor’s office, and then in 2008 Barack Obama won the state in a landslide.
It could be that this year’s result is like that: something of a fluke, driven by the conditions of a particular election year that won’t be replicable in the future. Or it could be the beginning of a new baseline for New Jersey, one where Democrats will have to work hard for every vote even in federal elections, and where Republicans are resurgent in parts of the state that have been rejecting them for decades.
That’s something no one will know until the state’s voters go to the polls again in upcoming years. And with Trump very likely to become president once again, it’s Republicans who have the more immediate uphill climb in 2025 and 2026: as the 2017 and 2018 election cycles showed, New Jersey voters have tended to elect lots of Democrats when Trump is in the White House.
But for now, all we have are tonight’s results, and they tell a story that is bad for Democrats essentially no matter how you spin it.