With the presidential election raging in swing states around the country, everyone in New Jersey has been operating under the assumption that their state is safely in Democrats’ column. Now, at last, there’s some publicly available data to back that up.
Cygnal, a GOP-affiliated private pollster, released a poll yesterday finding Vice President Kamala Harris up over former President Donald Trump by a 12-point margin, 52% to 40%. That result would continue New Jersey’s three-decade streak of voting for Democratic presidential candidates – though as Cygnal pollster Brock McCleary noted, Harris’s margin represents a decrease from President Joe Biden’s 16-point win in 2020.
“Trump is already performing near his 2020 numbers while Harris is underperforming Biden in 2020 by 5%,” McCleary said. “No surprise Harris is leading, but she shows weakness among a group of Democrats who are female, diverse, working class, and middle-income. Forty percent of these voters have an unfavorable view of Harris.” (Though Cygnal frequently works with Republican candidates and groups, the poll does not seem to have been conducted on behalf of any client.)
The poll found that Harris is not overwhelmingly popular in New Jersey, with 50% of poll respondents having a favorable opinion of her and 46% having an unfavorable one – but that’s still dramatically better than Trump, whose favorability ratio is 38%-59%.
In the race for U.S. Senate, Democrats are leading by substantially more: Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) has a 51% to 32% advantage over his Republican opponent, Curtis Bashaw. Kim also has strikingly high favorability ratings at 40%-16%, while Bashaw, who has struggled to introduce himself to the broader statewide electorate, is at 13%-12%.
One the generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead by 11 percentage points, 51.5% to 40.3% – similar to the party’s ten-point win in 2022, when 7th district Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) lost re-election but Democrats still won 9 out of 12 of the state’s congressional seats.
Cygnal is the first established pollster to take a look at New Jersey’s statewide presidential race since Harris became the Democratic nominee, a shockingly long polling drought for the state. Back in June and July, a pair of Republican pollsters found a close race between Trump and Biden in the state, but that came at Democrats’ low point in polling that Harris’s candidacy seems to have turned around.
Cygnal’s results do match up, though, with a Monmouth University poll of just the 7th congressional district from two weeks ago. That poll put Trump up over Harris 47% to 46% in the swing district while Kim led Bashaw 46% to 40%, which (given that the 7th district is much redder than the state as a whole) would be approximately in line with the statewide leads that Cygnal found.
Bashaw himself also released an internal poll of the Senate race in August that gave Kim a small 38% to 33% lead, but there’s been little other data to back up the idea that the race is that close. Bashaw’s poll release did not include presidential numbers.
At least one more pollster, Fairleigh Dickinson University, plans to release a New Jersey statewide poll before Election Day.
The Cygnal poll was conducted from October 23-24 with a sample size of 600 likely New Jersey voters and a margin of error of +/- 3.95%.