Here are the final results in the NJ-11 special election

This story was originally published on April 17, the day after Analilia Mejia’s special election victory; now that election’s results have been finalized, the New Jersey Globe is republishing it with minor edits to reflect the official outcome of the race.

Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-Glen Ridge)’s April 16 special election victory in the 11th congressional district was a massive landslide, one that sends the progressive Democrat to Washington with a clear mandate to represent the suburban district and signals a potentially rough year for New Jersey Republicans.

It was also, in a few key towns with large Jewish populations, a historic Democratic flop, one that demonstrates there’s a faction of the Democratic base that remains very uncomfortable with Mejia. The fact that those two seemingly contradictory results coexisted in one election is unusual, to say the least.

Mejia, a former grassroots organizer and Bernie Sanders staffer, won the February special primary for the district in an upset, beating a number of Democratic foes with more establishment support and moderate pedigrees. For a district that had been represented for seven years by ex-Blue Dog Mikie Sherrill, and before that by a series of Republicans, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive was an unlikely and unexpected nominee.

Her Republican opponent, Joe Hathaway, did everything he could to drive a wedge between Mejia and the district’s more moderate voters, Jewish voters in particular. Mejia’s stance on Israel, he warned, presented a danger to the Jewish community, while her progressivism on taxes and housing would harm New Jersey’s suburbs. In some parts of the district, that message began picking up steam.

At the same time, every other factor in the race seemed to be going Mejia’s way: she had a substantial fundraising edge, a big lead in the one poll of the race (sponsored by her campaign), and a huge bulwark of votes cast by Democrats by mail or early in-person. Registered Democrats made up more than three-fifths of the votes cast before Election Day; they were simply much better prepared for, and enthusiastic about, a special election on a random Thursday in April.

Those kinds of advantages have propelled Democrats to huge overperformances in other special elections around the country. According to the New York Times, of the six House special elections that have occurred during Donald Trump’s second term (not counting the 11th district), Democrats have done between 13 and 25 points better than Kamala Harris’s margin.

Mejia’s 60%-39% victory margin falls on the low end of that spectrum: Harris won the 11th district by just under nine points, so Mejia did around 12 points better. Mejia also did better than Sherrill in 2025, 2024, or 2022, though not by much in the latter case (Sherrill won re-election to the House that year by 19 points).

In most of the district, Mejia ran far ahead of the Democratic baseline – especially in the district’s most diverse towns, which were also her base in the primary. Her 45-point victory in majority-Hispanic Dover was 31 points better than Harris’s margin there, and she also did at least 25 points better than Harris in Bloomfield, Belleville, Woodland Park, and Victory Gardens. Parsippany, the district’s largest town and the home base for Morris County’s growing Asian American population, shifted 17 points toward Mejia.

The new congresswoman’s strength also extended into areas that, just a few years ago, would have seemed completely unwinnable for a candidate with her progressive bent. She flipped thirteen towns that Harris lost in 2024: Cedar Grove, Denville, Florham Park, Lincoln Park, Little Falls, Nutley, Pequannock, both Rockaways, Roseland, West Caldwell, Woodland Park, and the 11th district’s portion of Wayne.

(For what it’s worth, in her fifteen-point 2024 win against a no-name opponent, Sherrill won eight of those thirteen towns in 2024 on the same ballot as Harris. A couple of Mejia’s town flips, though, are unprecedented in the modern era; no Democrat has won Pequannock in a federal election in decades.)

Much of that shift is likely due to turnout. Only around 136,000 voters cast ballots, one-third of what was cast in the 2024 race for the seat, and it’s clear Democrats were simply more motivated to go to the polls – any grand proclamations about what Mejia’s win means need to be tempered by that fact.

Still, it’s tough not to see the result as a foreboding sign for Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), who represents a competitive neighboring district with a lot of demographic similarities to the 11th. Trump won Kean’s 7th district by one percentage point, so a swing anywhere in the neighborhood of what Mejia got would be enough to sink the two-term congressman.

But in Millburn and Livingston, both wealthy suburbs with large Jewish populations, the story was completely different. Millburn went for Mejia by 15 points, 22 points worse than Harris, while Livingston voted for her by just three points, 16 points worse than Harris. Those results came despite the fact that the registration of the electorate in both towns was fairly blue.

“As the results were coming in … you could see that something was happening in Livingston and Millburn,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Could protest votes of this magnitude – that’s what I’m calling them, because that’s what they resembled to me – impact a close election? Yes, absolutely.”

Other wealthy suburbs showed some hesitation to support Mejia, too: Harding, Mountain Lakes, North Caldwell, and South Orange, the latter two of which have not-insignificant Jewish populations, all swung slightly to the right compared to 2024. So did Randolph, though that’s likely explained by the fact that Hathaway is a councilman and former mayor there.

In other words, voters were not just voting blindly along party lines; for a particular slice of the electorate, supporting Mejia was a line they were unwilling to cross. That could be a phenomenon unique to her, or it could be an early warning sign that a once-reliably Democratic bloc is slipping away.

Then again, there may be Mejia voters who wouldn’t have voted for another Democrat, or who wouldn’t have shown up at the polls at all. Politics isn’t always a zero-sum game, but few elections have been clearer at demonstrating the tradeoffs of running certain candidates. (The effect of Livingston’s and Millburn’s protest votes also was not enormous: had the two towns voted more in line with the rest of the district rather than shifting dramatically to the right, Mejia would have won by around 23 percentage points instead of by 21.)

And Mejia’s supporters, rightly, will wonder why there’s so much handwringing about a few towns’ results given her districtwide landslide. Clearly, even an avowed progressive can win over towns that supported Republicans just a year or two ago. Should that, Rasmussen wondered, reshape our understanding of “electability”?

“Maybe the lesson for party leaders is, your tendency to want to swoop in and decide this stuff because you want to pick the most electable candidate – maybe your notion of what’s most electable is yesterday’s electability, not today’s electability,” Rasmussen said.