Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) both have huge leads in New Jersey in a new Rutgers-Eagleton poll, the second poll just this morning to find Democrats doing about as well as they usually do in the reliably blue state.
55% of registered New Jersey voters surveyed in the poll said they would vote for Harris, while just 35% said they would vote for former President Donald Trump. That’s largely in keeping with prior presidential elections in the state, though if Harris were in fact to win New Jersey by 20 points, it would be the best Democratic margin since Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide in 1964.
Republicans are faring similarly poorly in the race for U.S. Senate, though a high number of undecided voters makes the result more volatile: Kim, the Democratic nominee, leads Republican challenger Curtis Bashaw 49% to 26%, with a hefty 19% of respondents unsure of who they’ll vote for.
On a generic congressional ballot – the partisan baseline for candidates running in House races this year – Democrats lead by 15 points, 48% to 33%. That matches the 57%-42% margin Democratic House candidates achieved statewide in 2020, when they won ten of the state’s twelve congressional seats (albeit under different district lines).
“Despite pre-election polls showing a statistical dead heat on the national stage and in every battleground state right now, New Jersey will likely remain a win in the blue column this election cycle,” said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, in a release accompanying the poll.
The Senate result is in line with another poll this morning from Fairleigh Dickinson University, which put Kim up by a 57% to 39% margin. The GOP pollster Cygnal similarly found Kim leading 51% to 32%, but their poll had Harris up by a noticeably smaller 12-point margin, 52% to 40%.
Part of the reason Kim may be doing so well is that Bashaw is still largely unknown even with just six days left until Election Day (though the Rutgers-Eagleton poll was last in the field a little over a week ago). 58% of respondents had never heard of Bashaw, and just 6% said they had a specifically favorable opinion of him; by comparison, 24% had never heard of Kim and 39% viewed him favorably.
“Voters’ continued lack of awareness of these Senate candidates – particularly Bashaw – is why party affiliation is so important in this race and why it will likely be the driving factor, along with what happens at the presidential level, of how Kim and Bashaw perform,” said Jessica Roman, the Eagleton polling center’s director of data management and analysis. “Voters simply have not dedicated enough time and energy to following this contest, despite its dramatic beginning late last year.”
The presidential nominees, unsurprisingly, are far better known: Harris posts a 52%-42% favorable-unfavorable ratio, while Trump is deep underwater at 34%-59%. Ever since his first election in 2016, Trump has never been a popular figure in New Jersey, and that doesn’t seem to have changed.
But even with Democrats in the White House, many voters still reported feeling pessimistic about the future of the country. A whopping 69% of poll respondents said they believe the country has “gone off on the wrong track” – though they’re evidently not holding it against Democrats currently in power like Kim and Harris.
The Rutgers-Eagleton poll was conducted from October 15-22 with a sample size of 929 registered New Jersey voters and a margin of error of +/- 4.2%.
The presidential and Senate numbers cited here both come from a smaller sample of 451 respondents who were given the party affiliation of the candidates running. In a separate sample of respondents who were not provided with any partisan information, Harris leads Trump 51% to 37% and Kim leads Bashaw 44% to 12%.