Mejia scored an NJ-11 landslide – but not everywhere

Rep.-elect Analilia Mejia (D-Glen Ridge)’s special election victory last night 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 progressive 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%-40% victory margin – which may still shift slightly, probably in her direction, as straggling votes are counted – falls on the low end of that spectrum. Harris won the 11th district by just under nine points, so Mejia did around 11 points better; she also did better than Sherrill in 2025, 2024, or 2022, though only barely 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 44-point victory in majority-Hispanic Dover was 30 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 home to a large Asian American population, shifted 15 points toward Mejia.

Her strength, though, extended even into areas that, just a few years ago, would have seemed completely unwinnable for a candidate of her ideology. She flipped ten towns Harris lost in 2024: Cedar Grove, Denville, Florham Park, Little Falls, Nutley, Rockaway Borough, Rockaway Township, Roseland, West Caldwell, and Woodland Park. Three others – Lincoln Park, Pequannock, and Wayne – all voted for Hathaway by less than one percentage point, and could conceivably flip thanks to late-counted ballots.

(For what it’s worth, Sherrill won eight of those ten towns in 2024 on the same ballot as Harris, though that was as an incumbent against a no-name opponent; Sherrill won that year by 15 points, around five points worse than Mejia.)

Much of that shift is likely due to turnout; only around 130,000 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 two points, 17 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 last night, 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: Chatham Township, Harding, and Mountain Lakes all swung slightly to the right compared to 2024, as did North Caldwell and South Orange, two other towns with not-insignificant Jewish populations. (So did Randolph, though that’s likely explained by the fact that Hathaway is a councilman and former mayor there.)

In other words, voters clearly 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.

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.