Close Assembly results in suburban districts may augur GOP difficulties in 2025

New Jersey Assembly Republicans didn’t have a great Election Night this year, losing six of their own seats and failing to make any headway in Democratic-controlled districts. But if they aren’t careful, 2025 could be a whole lot worse.

In several suburban districts around the state, voters elected Republicans to the Assembly last week by relatively narrow margins, even though in most cases Democrats had not made significant investments into their races. Republicans in the 21st, 25th, and 39th districts all won by modest single-digit margins, and in the 8th district, one Republican assemblyman lost while the other was only re-elected by 461 votes.

The GOP Senate contender at the top of the ticket in all four districts did better than their Assembly running mates, likely aided by their higher name recognition among voters. But in 2025, those senators won’t be on the ballot, and assemblymembers will instead have to deal with running solo under the shadow of a gubernatorial election – perhaps with a newly elected President Donald Trump hanging over their heads as well.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that 2025 will be a better year for Republicans than this year was. If Joe Biden is re-elected president and Republicans are competitive in the governor’s race, then any worries about the Assembly GOP losing more seats may be moot.

Even still, now is the time for Republicans in competitive districts to begin charting out their 2025 strategy: making themselves formidable enough that they can win re-election even without their local senator at the top of the ticket, and even if the concurrent governor’s race is going badly for their party.

“If Republicans are wise, they’ll use [this year’s results] as the same kind of wake-up call as Democrats used Jack Ciattarelli’s close result in 2021,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Democrats were not caught with their pants down this time. They were not caught unaware.”

Republicans certainly won’t be caught unaware in the 8th district, which hosted this year’s biggest surprise. Democrats spent a decent amount of money in the suburban Burlington County district, but it was still a substantial upset when Chesterfield Democratic municipal chair Andrea Katz unseated freshman Assemblyman Brandon Umba (R-Medford) by 238 votes after late-counted ballots were added to the tally.

Assemblyman Michael Torrissi (R-Hammonton) narrowly won re-election, and former Burlington County Freeholder Latham Tiver (R-Southampton) won the district’s open Senate seat 51%-49%. Both may have lost as well had it not been for the state’s new legislative map, which made the 8th district modestly more Republican. 

Now that they’ve got their foot in the door, 8th district Democrats will undoubtedly be intent on keeping their momentum going in 2025.

The same goes for the 21st district, a district in well-to-do parts of Union and Somerset Counties where local Republicans have long defied national trends. The current iteration of the 21st district supported Biden by a whopping 17 percentage points in 2020, but remains far friendlier to Republicans downballot.

This year, GOP Assemblywomen Nancy Muñoz (R-Summit) and Michele Matsikoudis (R-New Providence) won 26.1% and 25.7% of the vote, respectively, against Democratic challengers Elizabeth Graner and Chris Weber, neither of whom attracted any real outside support.

In doing so, Muñoz and Matsikoudis ran more than 1,000 votes behind State Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield), an energetically moderate Republican with a strong profile in the district. Unless Bramnick manages to defy the odds and become the Republican nominee for governor, 2025 will be the first time both Muñoz and Matsikoudis have to run without Bramnick on the ballot alongside them.

“We saw that the Senate races were the draw in many cases,” Rasmussen said. “So can the gubernatorial race replace the senators as draws? The answer is, from the top down they may, but from the grassroots up, they may not have the same ties to the community that a senator may have.”

There was also an interesting factor at work this year in Summit and Westfield, two normally solid-blue 21st district towns that weren’t too happy with Democrats this year. Both towns ousted Democrats from every local office on the ballot and were very amenable to Muñoz and Matsikoudis; the two Republicans collectively won Summit 51%-49% and lost Westfield 49%-51%. (For comparison, Biden won the towns by 37 and 33 points, respectively.)

Hypothetically, if Graner and Weber had simply done as well as Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2021 performance in those two towns, with every other result remaining the same, one or both of them could have won an Assembly seat this year. That’s a big potential vulnerability for Muñoz and Matsikoudis, who may not be able to draw the same kind of support in Summit and Westfield in a gubernatorial year as they did in this year’s unusual off-year scenario.

Up in the Morris County-based 25th district, Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-Mendham) and Assemblyman Christian Barranco (R-Jefferson) won re-election by a combined 52%-48% margin against Democratic challengers Diane Salvatore and Jon Torres. Senate Minority Leader Anthony M. Bucco (R-Boonton) won by a slightly larger 53%-47% at the top of the ticket.

Barranco in particular came surprisingly close to losing, getting 25,886 votes to Salvatore’s 24,248, or 25.7% to 24.1%. Salvatore narrowly won the district’s Morris County portion, only losing thanks to the district’s inclusion of deep-red West Milford in Passaic County.

Democratic legislative leaders completely ignored the 25th district, which may seem like a mistake in retrospect, especially since Barranco had been redistricted from another district and was unknown to the vast majority of his new district’s voters. But Rasmussen cautioned against retroactively castigating Democrats for what was overall a very successful election cycle.

“It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback,” Rasmussen said. “I have a hard time even being a little bit critical of such a successful strategy. They won everywhere that they played. So of course you want to say, well, they should have played in more places.”

Finally, in the 39th district in northern Bergen County, the GOP Assembly ticket of Assemblyman Bob Auth (R-Old Tappan) and Saddle River Councilman John Azzariti collectively won by a modest 7-point margin against Democrats John Vitale and Damon Englese.

That’s a bit more robust than in the 21st or 25th district, and the 39th district will likely be farther down the Democratic target list in 2025. But some of the same factors will still be in play; popular State Sen. Holly Schepisi (R-River Vale) won’t be on the ballot, and Auth and Azzariti could be vulnerable if Trump is in the Oval Office and Democrats have a big lead in the governor’s race.

In order to make a serious play for any of these districts, of course, Democrats have to put in some serious work of their own. They’ll need to spend the next year and a half actively seeking out top recruits – something they didn’t do in the 21st, 25th, or 39th districts this year – and then put their money where their mouth is during election season.

If the political environment isn’t looking good for Democrats in 2025, they may not do any of that. This year’s unexpectedly close results could simply be a blip on the radar of long, successful legislative careers for some Assembly Republicans.

But in order to ensure that those legislative careers continue, Republicans should take last week’s election as a warning. Voters in the 21st, 25th, and 39th districts have grown increasingly willing to support Democrats at the federal level, and the close results this year show that their local Republicans can’t take anything for granted.