Here’s how New Jersey’s congressional and legislative districts voted in the Democratic primary for governor

What might this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary tell us about future primaries for Congress and the State Legislature in New Jersey? That’s an incredibly thorny question to answer – but if one wants to attempt to do it, data on how each congressional and legislative district voted in last month’s election will be helpful.

The Democratic nominee, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), won eight out of 12 districts on the state’s congressional map, ranging from her own 11th district – which she won by a whopping 39 points – to districts like South Jersey’s CD-2, which she’d never represented any part of before.

Sherrill also won 24 out of 40 districts on the state’s legislative map; her closest competitor was Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whose strength in majority-minority areas powered him to wins in eight districts. The only one of the six candidates who didn’t win any legislative or congressional districts was New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller, who got 11% of the vote statewide but didn’t have a strong home base anywhere.

(Had the GOP primary been closer, the Globe may have undertaken a similar analysis of that race – but Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli won by such a landslide that he carried every single district on both maps, so there wouldn’t be much to discuss.)

Here’s a detailed look at how each district voted; click here for a spreadsheet with data on every district.

Congressional districts: 8 Sherrill, 2 Baraka, 1 Gottheimer, 1 Sweeney

Sherrill was always going to do best on her home turf, and she did; the 11th congressional district she’s represented for the last seven years gave her more than 60% of the vote, far more than any other candidate got out of any single district. But as was also visible in the statewide municipality map, Sherrill’s support ran far deeper than just voters who already knew her and liked her, and she won another seven districts in addition to her own: the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 12th. 

Some of those, like the sprawling suburban 7th district, are demographically similar to the seat she currently represents. Others, such as deep South Jersey’s 2nd district and the majority-Hispanic 8th district, are extremely different from her home turf; Sherrill, with the help of party bosses in some counties, simply proved to be the most widely popular candidate among a wide array of voters.

The primary’s runner-up, Baraka, won two districts of his own: the Newark-based 10th, which he won by a colossal 30-point margin margin, and the Paterson-based 9th, in which he eked out a 75-vote win over Sherrill, 28.1% to 27.9%.

Both districts are full of Black and Hispanic voters, who turned out in droves to support Baraka across the state, especially in urban North Jersey. Baraka also came somewhat close to winning the 12th district thanks to strong support in Trenton and Plainfield, but the district’s whiter suburbs powered Sherrill to a 34% to 27% win.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), like Sherrill, won his own congressional district, the Bergen County-based 5th district. But he won it by a far smaller margin than Sherrill won hers – he beat Sherrill there by around 15 points, getting 39% of the vote – and proved to have far less statewide appeal, failing to crack 25% in any other district.

Former State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford), a heavily regional South Jersey candidate, won the 1st district in Camden County, the longtime home base for the South Jersey Democratic machine. He didn’t win it by much, though, beating Sherrill by just 4 points – and more ominously, he lost the 2nd district, evidence that the influence of George Norcross’s Democratic machine is waning in South Jersey’s further-out regions.

The other two candidates, Spiller and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, failed to carry any congressional districts. That’s despite the fact that Fulop got third place statewide, besting both Gottheimer and Sweeney; he did decently well across most of the state, but not well enough in any of them to win a House district.

What does any of this mean for future congressional races? Perhaps not much, given how different the dynamics of a six-way gubernatorial primary are than any potential House primary that might develop. The 7th and 9th districts are set to host competitive general elections next year, with a crowded Democratic primary already developing in the 7th, but what this year’s results mean for those races is anyone’s guess.

For Gottheimer, the fact that he still handily won his own district despite faltering statewide is good news, assuming he chooses to run for re-election next year (which he very likely will). Still, the fact that three-fifths of voters in his district opted for someone else should at least make him prepared for the possibility of a primary challenge after two cycles of running uncontested in the primary.

And for Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), Sherrill’s convincing 11-point win in his 8th district, despite going up against the mayors of two of the district’s largest cities, is evidence that the power of local party leaders, especially in Hudson County, remains very strong. That’s good news for him, in theory – unless those leaders decide to support someone else for Congress next year.

Legislative districts: 24 Sherrill, 8 Baraka, 4 Gottheimer, 3 Sweeney, 1 Fulop

Shifting to state legislative districts, Sherrill maintained her clear advantage, winning 24 out of 40 districts while four of her opponents split the remaining 16.

Sherrill’s strongest districts were the 25th, 26th, and 40th districts, three districts that heavily overlap with Sherrill’s congressional seat in Morris, Passaic, and Essex Counties. Her next-best district? The 33rd in northern Hudson County, where Union City Mayor/State Sen. Brian Stack delivered her enormous margins out of Union City and West New York; the district cast the third-most votes of any district in the state, an incredible statistic in an urban, majority-Hispanic district.

But just as was the case on the congressional map, Sherrill’s support extended far beyond her home territory, and she won nearly every district across the state that wasn’t clearly part of one of her opponents’ political bases.

The legislative breakdown also does a good job of showing how widespread Baraka’s support was among minority voters. He won the 17th (New Brunswick and suburbs), 20th (Elizabeth), 22nd (Rahway, Linden, and Plainfield), 28th (Newark and suburbs), 29th (Newark), 31st (Jersey City and Bayonne), 34th (East Orange and suburbs), and 35th (Paterson) districts – all of which have huge Black or Hispanic populations, or both.

Fulop, meanwhile, carried only the 32nd district, which covers his home base of downtown Jersey City and Hoboken.

Notably, of the nine districts either Baraka or Fulop (the race’s two most progressive candidates) carried, seven – the 17th, 20th, 28th, 31st, 32nd, 34th, and 35th – had hotly contested Democratic primaries for Assembly. In the 20th, 32nd, and 35th districts, at least one party-backed Democratic candidate lost the nomination to independent challengers.

That should put a number of Democratic legislators, especially those like Assemblymen Joe Danielsen (D-Franklin) and Mike Venezia (D-Bloomfield) who nearly lost their own primaries last month, on high alert heading into 2027. With the county line dead and gone, party leaders were unable to stop voters from flocking to anti-establishment challengers in many of the state’s most diverse and progressive districts, a dynamic that showed up in both the governor’s race and State Assembly campaigns.

Then again, it may be that in some districts, Baraka (and to a lesser extent Fulop) led renegade candidates to greater success than they would have found on their own. Baraka’s activation of Black and Hispanic voters in East Orange, Paterson, and Piscataway, for example, likely assisted local Black candidates in ways that may be more difficult to replicate in an off year like 2027.

Down in South Jersey, Sweeney won his old 3rd legislative district in a landslide, and also carried the 4th and 5th districts, both of which include parts of his longtime base of Gloucester County.

In Bergen County, Gottheimer won the 37th, 38th, and 39th districts, all of which are at the heart of his congressional district. (He did not, however, win the 36th district, which is based in Bergen but doesn’t overlap with Gottheimer’s congressional district.) Gottheimer also carried the 30th district in Ocean County thanks to his landslide victory in the Orthodox Jewish hub of Lakewood.

And as for Spiller, he failed to carry any legislative district despite winning Cumberland County and a handful of towns throughout South Jersey. The $40 million that the NJEA spent on Spiller’s behalf certainly helped the former Montclair mayor stay in contention, but it didn’t create a coherent geographical base for him.