When New Jersey politicians gathered in 1947 to write the state’s new constitution, they established a system wherein state-level elections would be held in odd-numbered years, forever setting them apart from federal elections. “The importance of a gubernatorial election merits an election that will not be overshadowed by a national contest for the Presidency,” Gov. Alfred Driscoll said at the convention, laying out why he believed the two should be separated.
That unusual off-year system, which has lasted to this day and exists in only four other states, has meant that the federal and state politics of New Jersey are somewhat disconnected. The cohorts of voters that show up and the issues at stake in federal elections are very different from those in state elections; as a result, plenty of Republican legislators have been able to win in districts that are deep-blue in federal election years, and vice-versa.
But with all that being said, federal elections still often provide clues as to how voters will approach the following year’s state elections, especially in the more polarized, nationalized modern era of politics. And with Kamala Harris falling to just a six-point win in the New Jersey’s presidential election last month (down from 16 points in 2020), Democrats in particular should look to this year’s results as a warning ahead of the 2025 races for State Assembly.
Harris, though, largely held her own in the state’s wealthier suburbs; five Republican assemblymembers will be running in districts that she carried, and four others hold districts she narrowly lost. If 2025 ends up being a Democratic-leaning year – a serious possibility, given New Jersey’s tendency to swing against the party that just won the presidency – the legislative map could quickly turn brutal for the GOP.
Do the presidential results actually signify anything about how the 2025 election will go? No one knows yet; a high-turnout presidential election can only tell us so much about lower-turnout, lower-profile state-level races. But the results do provide a redrawn roadmap for both parties as they look to expand their footprint in Trenton in the Trump presidency’s second era.
“I think both sides would be remiss if they didn’t consider that these presidential cycles are anomalies,” said State Sen. Doug Steinhardt (R-Lopatcong), a former chairman of the state GOP. “But by the same token, we’d all also be remiss not to roll up our sleeves and sharpen our pencils and look at a lot of the lessons that should have been learned.”
Can Republicans ride a Trump wave?
New Jersey Republicans, who have been in the legislative minority since the early 2000s, currently sit at just 28 out of 80 seats in the New Jersey State Assembly. (They have a slightly better 15 seats in the Senate, which aside from one special election won’t be on voters’ ballots this year.) Those are numbers that they think they can expand on in 2025 – and Trump’s improved showing in New Jersey provides them with some unexpected paths to doing so.
Among the 14 districts that Trump carried are the 3rd, 30th, 36th, and 38th districts, each of which has at least one Democrat representing it in the legislature.
That’s a daunting task, especially without State Sen. John Burzichelli (D-Paulsboro) at the top of the ticket to give them a lift, and Republicans are certain to put up a strong fight against them. But Trump carried the 3rd district in 2016 and 2020 too, so it’s not like Simmons and Bailey are unaccustomed to running in tough territory.
The 30th district, based in Lakewood, almost doesn’t belong on this list at all due to how strange its circumstances are. It supported Trump by a whopping 46 points, 72%-26%, but freshman Assemblyman Avi Schnall (D-Lakewood), who beat a Republican incumbent in 2023, has the unwavering support of the deeply conservative Lakewood Orthodox community and is the favorite for re-election no matter what else is going on in 2025. (In fact, Republican Assemblyman Sean Kean is more vulnerable than Schnall if Orthodox leaders decide they want to kick him out, too.)
That leaves the 36th and 38th districts based in suburban Bergen County, the two most shocking of Trump’s wins in the state. The 36th district supported Trump by 4.5 points and the 38th district did so by 0.1 points (a margin of just 65 votes) – truly flabbergasting results in districts that backed Biden by double digits four years ago and that even stuck with Gov. Phil Murphy in his close 2021 re-election contest.
Those results should not be seen as a sign that Republicans will automatically be competitive there this year, especially since the party struggled to play for either district in 2023. But Trump winning the 36th and 38th means that Democrats won’t be able to ignore either district, especially if a re-energized, Trumpified Republican Party puts serious effort into recruiting candidates and raising money there.
“If you’re a candidate who might have been reluctant to take a look at it before, you look at the numbers in 2024 and maybe you feel a little more encouraged by what that means,” Steinhardt said. “I’m feeling better about our opportunities – the issue is going to be whether or not we are able to capitalize on them.”
There are also the 4th, 11th, and 19th districts, all of which Harris carried by low single digits (1.6 points in South Jersey’s 4th district, 4.4 points in the Jersey Shore’s 11th district, and 0.7 points in Middlesex County’s 19th district). The 4th and 11th districts are perennially competitive seats that Republicans were already likely to try and target in 2025, but the 19th is more interesting: a previously safely Democratic seat and the home district of Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Woodbridge).
“Republicans have a golden opportunity to run hard in Coughlin’s district and make him pay some attention to his own re-election,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “He won’t be able to not pay attention given how close his district was. And so if you can distract him a little bit, that’s a no-brainer.”
(The 14th and 16th districts, meanwhile, supported Harris by 11 and 14 points, respectively. The two suburban Central Jersey districts are often Republican targets, but consistently solid Democratic performances in both mean that they may fall off the playing field next year.)
But Republicans hoping to make gains face a myriad of challenges – not least of which is the candidate quality gulf that has hobbled them in the past. When Democrats nominate battle-tested incumbents while Republicans nominate newcomers who struggle to raise any money, which happened all across the state in 2023, then promising opportunities like the 38th district quickly become uphill battles.
There’s also the fact that no one has any idea yet how durable Trump’s surge across New Jersey will be, particularly in minority communities. Will the thousands of Hispanic voters who supported Trump in, say, the city of Passaic in the 36th district also cast their votes for Republican legislative candidates? Will they even show up to vote at all in an off-year like 2025?
(Even within just this year’s results, there’s evidence that Trump’s appeal was limited to the very top of the ticket; Democratic Senator-elect Andy Kim carried both the 36th and 38th districts in his Senate race, despite never having campaigned for office anywhere near Bergen or Passaic Counties before.)
Republican gains this year were also, unfortunately for them, often concentrated in districts that won’t help them win any Assembly seats. The 29th district in Newark, the 33rd district in northern Hudson County, and the 35th district in Paterson all swung by more than 20 points towards Trump this year – but they all still backed Harris by double digits, so those gains don’t mean anything (yet, at least) for Republicans’ legislative goals.
Given all of that, State Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Long Branch), who won re-election to his competitive 11th district seat in a landslide in 2023, said that he thinks this year’s results should make Democrats more optimistic than pessimistic.
“I see zero impact [of the presidential results] on the legislative races,” Gopal said. “I think there’s actually more bad news in those results for the Republicans than for the Democrats. If they had big wins in some of these competitive districts, that would be easier, but instead they’re doing well in safe districts, and I don’t think that’s going to help them.”
Can Democrats break through in the suburbs?
Gopal’s prediction could turn out to be right – if Democrats are able to capitalize on Harris’s decent showing in a handful of Republican-held suburban districts. At the top of that list are the 8th district in Burlington County and the 21st district in Union and Somerset Counties.
The 8th district witnessed the lone split result of 2023 (not including the anomalous 30th district in Lakewood), with Assemblyman Mike Torrissi (R-Hammonton) and Assemblywoman Andrea Katz (D-Chesterfield) each narrowly winning one seat. Both runners-up – former Assemblyman Brandon Umba (R-Medford) for Republicans, Hammonton Education Association president Anthony Angelozzi for Democrats – are running again in 2025, as is former Democratic Evesham Councilman Eddie Freeman.
That sets up another competitive race, but Democrats should feel emboldened by the fact that Harris still carried the 8th district by one point, doing only a few points worse than Biden in 2020; given that, Torrissi may start out as the most vulnerable Assembly incumbent in the state, at least in a general election.
The 21st district, meanwhile, is Democrats’ white whale: a seat where they consistently win by double-digit margins at the top of the ticket but where they have always struggled to break through downballot. That likely won’t stop them from making an effort to beat Assemblywomen Nancy Muñoz (R-Summit) and Michele Matsikoudis (R-New Providence) in a seat Harris won by 12 points, though.
“LD-21 is always going to be tough because of the incumbents who are there. They’re very smart and they know their district. If they were not there, those would be Democratic seats,” Gopal said. “I think LD-8 is where Democrats are going to compete. That’s where it’s going to be at.”
Atlantic County’s 2nd district also voted for Harris, though by a greatly reduced margin than in past years (1.7 points in 2024, versus 11.6 points in 2020). But the Republican incumbents there have built up an established brand, one that Democrats have been unable to break through in recent elections; few districts more clearly show the difference between federal and state-level elections than the 2nd, where Atlantic County voters are happy to split their tickets and have resisted having their politics be fully nationalized.
Then there’s the 25th district in Morris County and the 39th district in Bergen County, both suburban districts that were narrowly carried by Trump (by 0.5 points in the 25th and 2.2 points in the 39th). If Democrats are having a good night in 2025, expect those to be the second tier of seats where they might look to make gains.
Despite Democrats’ poor 2024 performance, in other words, there are still plenty of opportunities for the party to grow its legislative footprint. The question that they face, though, is the same one confronting Republicans: can they turn a positive result from a presidential election year into something workable in a totally different type of election?
“There is both caution for Democrats and there is hopefulness for Democrats, because it gives them a roadmap of where they should be playing,” Rasmussen said. “There’s absolutely no question about where their offensive plays should be this time around. They’ve got to do some serious defense, and they’ve got some serious opportunities for offense as well.”
How much does it really mean?
This article has been premised on the idea that presidential results do, in fact, mean something for next year’s Assembly races. Many New Jersey politicos on both sides of the aisle would say that such a premise just isn’t true.
Look at the 36th district, for example. In 2023, 36th district Assemblymen Gary Schaer (D-Passaic) and Clinton Calabrese (D-Cliffside Park), who each have very strong bases on either side of the district, won re-election by a combined 61% to 39% margin against an awful slate of Republican challengers. They won the Trump-won city of Passaic, where Schaer is the sitting council president, 81% to 19%.
Trump may have surged in the district this year, but it won’t be Trump on the ballot next year – it’ll be Schaer and Calabrese. And both assemblymen have proven, barely more than a year ago, that they can win handily among the voters who actually turn out in an off-year election. (The same is theoretically true for any legislator who won in 2023 in a district that’s otherwise challenging for their party.)
There’s also the wildcard of the gubernatorial race, which will set the tone for many of the legislative races beneath it; in 2021, only four legislators total won in seats that the other party’s gubernatorial candidate carried. No one knows yet what the 2025 gubernatorial matchup will be, or what national environment the nominees will be running in, both of which will help determine which party is realistically going to be in a position to gain seats in the legislature and which will be stuck on defense.
In other words, breaking down the 2024 presidential results by legislative district may be a bit of a futile task. Come 2025, the state could be full of districts where legislative results don’t come anywhere close to matching how they voted last month.
But Rasmussen cautioned both parties, and Democrats in particular, not to ignore the lessons of Trump’s strong performance, especially in the minority communities that once formed the bedrock of the party’s base. The first step towards making those shifts permanent, he said, would be ignoring them.
“I think it’s malpractice to assume that it can’t happen again,” Rasmussen said. “You cannot assume that it cannot happen again. Do Democrats have a chance to show everybody that they’re right and that these towns will come back to them? Yes they do. But is that going to happen on its own? No, it’s not. They’re going to have to work hard and make it happen.”
“If they want to show that the 2024 presidential election was a one-off, then they need to make it so,” he added.