Chris Smith did best in the towns that already know him well

Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester) may have beaten podcaster Mike Crispi with relative ease in last week’s primary in the redrawn 4th congressional district – “Crispi Creamed,” the New Jersey Globe declared – but his margin was far from a landslide.

Even though Crispi was outraised 10-1 and didn’t have the line in either county, Smith only beat him 58%-37% – and that margin may have been even smaller had there been only one anti-Smith candidate on the ballot rather than three. Compare that to 2020, when Smith defeated a minor primary challenger by an astonishing 95%-5% margin.

Crispi, who eagerly sought and expected an endorsement from former President Donald Trump that never came, tried to make the contest with Smith an ideological one. A look at the towns where Smith and Crispi each did best, however, shows that the primary may have been fought more on geographical grounds.

In general, Smith tended to do significantly worse in the towns that he hasn’t represented recently, while the ones that make up the base of his current district mostly gave him dominant margins.

First elected in 1980, Smith has represented a preposterous number of different places in Central Jersey, including parts of the Jersey Shore, Trenton, Middlesex County, and even Pennsauken for a brief period in the 1980s. Since 2012, the 4th district has included big, conservative chunks of Monmouth and Ocean Counties as well as Smith’s home of Hamilton Township in Mercer County.

The new map drawn for this year, however, takes Hamilton and several other competitive municipalities out, replacing them with dark-red Ocean County towns like Toms River and Berkeley that were previously in Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown)’s competitive 3rd district. Smith himself had to change residences, moving to Manchester as soon as the new lines were adopted – the second time the congressman, long ago a resident of Old Bridge, has needed to move to stay within his own district.

Those changes made the district significantly redder, meaning that whatever Republican is nominated for the 4th district will have no problem against a Democrat anytime in the near future. But they also meant that Smith had to run in territory that he either hadn’t represented in decades or has never represented at all – and last Tuesday’s results made the divide between new and old territory very clear.

In the 27 towns Smith has already represented for at least the last 10 years, the congressman beat Crispi by 27 points, 61%-33%. (This calculation includes Point Pleasant and Middletown, both of which were already partially in the district but had some areas added under the new lines.) Towns along the Shore in Monmouth County were especially favorable to Smith, as was Lakewood, whose predominantly Orthodox Jewish voters backed Smith 81%-16%.

The 13 towns that are new to the district, on the other hand, backed Smith by only 10 points, 53%-43%. Smith won by 15 points in Berkeley, eight points in Brick, and just five points in Toms River, the district’s second-largest municipality after Lakewood.

The boundaries of the old and new districts don’t explain every town’s result. Smith performed very well, for example, in the Barnegat Peninsula towns of Mantoloking and Lavallette despite neither being in the current 4th district; Crispi, on the other hand, won Lakehurst and Farmingdale, two small towns Smith has represented for decades.

There were also some factors at play besides geography. Crispi ran with county commissioner candidates in each county, and was lucky enough to get the first ballot position in both, which may have given him a boost. And in Toms River specifically, a hotly contested set of primaries for county committee between candidates running on the party line and those backed by former county chairman George Gilmore, who endorsed Crispi, could have affected the congressional race.

Still, the clear trend overall is that Smith, who has a reputation as an active and engaged congressman, did best in the places that already know him.

That could mean Smith will be safer in future cycles than this primary election made him look; once he establishes himself in places like Toms River and Berkeley, voters there may be less inclined to oust him.

But for conservatives eager to kick out any Republican who strays even minutely from Trump, the results are still a sign that Smith, who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill last year, could be in danger in the future. New Jersey’s longest-serving congressman, and the runner-up Dean of the House, has weaknesses in huge swaths of his new district – weaknesses that a better challenger than Crispi might be able to exploit.