Vice President Kamala Harris has won New Jersey’s 14 electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election, the New Jersey Globe projects, defeating former President Donald Trump and keeping a three-decade Democratic winning streak alive – though by a smaller margin than many expected.
As of 1:20 a.m., Harris leads Trump just 51.4% to 46.7% – far down from Trump’s 16-point loss in the state in 2020 and his 14-point loss in 2016. There are still a few votes that have yet to be counted, but it’s clear by now that Harris will substantially underperform both expectations and past results.
The last time New Jersey voted for a Republican for president was in 1988, when George H.W. Bush carried the state by 14 percentage points against Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton narrowly flipped New Jersey into the Democratic column in 1992, and the state has voted for Democratic presidential candidates consistently since then, usually by double digits.
Trump made some feints at competing for the state this year, coming to Wildwood for a campaign rally in May and saying that he believed the state was winnable for Republicans. As recently as this weekend, Trump said at a rally that “a little birdie told me that we’re leading in New Jersey.”
But Trump never made an actual investment in flipping the Garden State into his column, and once Harris took over from President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, any Democratic fears about the state being in play dissipated. Polling was relatively scant in New Jersey this year, but the few polls that were released all found Harris up big: by 20 points in a Rutgers-Eagleton poll, 12 points in a Cygnal poll, and 17 points in a Research Co. poll.
Those polls, as it turns out, appear to have been overestimating Harris’s support level by quite a bit. Of course, New Jersey was never going to be where the race between Harris and Trump was going to be decided anyways; the fates of their campaigns rest in the swing states, where Trump is the favorite.