How Trump came within six points of winning New Jersey

This story was originally published on December 23, 2024.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the last-minute replacement on the Democratic ticket for President Joe Biden, won the state just 52% to 46% over former President Donald Trump. Her 5.9-point win was the narrowest Democratic margin in the state since 1992, and it represented a 10-point swing towards Republicans compared to Biden’s easy win in 2020 – the second-largest pro-GOP shift of any state in the country, behind only neighboring New York.

It was a result that blindsided Democrats, who didn’t lose much real power (the party held onto all nine of its House seats and even flipped some county-level offices) but who now have to contend with the possibility that the state is no longer the blue bastion it once was. After Trump’s win in the 2016 election, New Jersey Democrats were despondent, but at least they could take comfort in the knowledge that their own state had soundly rejected him, and that many of its suburban areas were trending in their direction; they can’t say the same this time around.

Why, exactly, did New Jersey voters so resoundingly turn against Democrats? What do the 2024 results portend for future elections, including an open-seat 2025 gubernatorial race that’s already underway? Those are questions that are critical for both parties: for Democrats hoping to make the 2024 election an anomaly, and for Republicans trying to make sure that it isn’t.

They’re also questions that have no concrete answers, but detailed data showing how the state voted and shifted compared to previous years would be a good place for both parties to start. Here are six maps that may help to demystify how New Jersey shifted in 2024– and what it might mean for the future.

Shifts since 2020

The most obvious comparison to make against the 2024 presidential election is, naturally, the presidential election that came right before it: the 2020 presidential race, in which Biden defeated Trump in New Jersey 57% to 41%, a 15.9-point margin.

A side-by-side of that race and 2024 shows almost nothing but bad news for Democrats. Every single county in the state shifted towards Republicans, as did every congressional district, every legislative district, and all but around 30 of the state’s 564 municipalities. (Click on the map to enlarge it.)

As has been explored extensively both in New Jersey and around the country, things got tremendously bad for Democrats in the urban areas that had long been the bedrock of the Democratic base, especially in towns with large Hispanic and Asian American communities. North Jersey’s diverse urban hub in Hudson, Essex, Passaic, Bergen, Union, and Middlesex Counties stands out in a big way, with many towns shifting 20 or 30 points towards Republicans in just four years.

The majority-Hispanic city of Passaic (which also has a large Orthodox Jewish community) is probably more emblematic of those shifts than any other. In 2016, it voted for Hillary Clinton by 52 points; in 2020, it voted for Biden by 26 points; and in 2024, it flipped to Trump by just over six points. Those types of shifts were enough to make Trump the first Republican to win Passaic County since George H.W. Bush in 1992, and they helped him carry both the 9th congressional district and the 36th legislative district, previously both Democratic strongholds.

Results from outside the North Jersey core were still not ideal for Democrats, but they were generally less bad, relatively speaking. Harris lost a fair bit of ground in South Jersey – Gloucester, Cumberland, and Atlantic Counties all flipped to Trump – and in the state’s exurban and rural northwest, but the results were more in line with typical inter-election swings, unlike the electoral apocalypse in places like Paterson or Perth Amboy.

Hunterdon County, in particular, stands out as a solid result for Harris; she lost the county by 6.6 points, only a couple points worse than Biden’s 4.4-point loss in 2020. If New Jersey Democrats ever do get back to winning statewide by double digits again – they haven’t in any election since 2020 – long-Republican Hunterdon County may become the newest part of their statewide coalition.

As for South Jersey, it’s possible that the ad blitz the Harris campaign put on the air in the Philadelphia media market blunted Trump’s momentum somewhat. Nationwide, Trump’s surge was smaller in swing states than it was in many safe states, and South Jersey voters (plus voters in Mercer County, which is part of the same media market) were feeling the full force of campaign season on their TV screens.

But the fact that swings of “only” a few percentage points toward Republicans are being counted as a victory for Democrats shows just how bad last year was for them. Biden’s 16-point win may seem in retrospect like a high point – one that New Jersey Democrats will struggle to replicate again.

Shifts since 2004

The thing is, though, New Jersey has been in this position before. A Republican president hated by liberals manages to win the popular vote and unexpectedly bring New Jersey down to a mid-single-digit margin? It’s 2004 all over again!

The 2004 election, which was until 2024, seen as the low point for New Jersey Democrats in the 21st century, saw President George W. Bush make inroads all across the Garden State and hold John Kerry to a seven-point win, 53% to 46%. That’s about the same as Harris’s performance in 2024, but the differences in the two Democrats’ coalitions are instructive.

The two parts of the state that have shifted the most towards Republicans stand out very clearly: urban North Jersey, where Trump made huge gains in 2024 , and almost the entirety of far South Jersey, where Democrats have been steadily losing ground for decades. The city of Passaic was 44 points more Republican in 2024 than in 2004; Atlantic County’s rural Buena Vista Township went from supporting Kerry by seven points to voting for Trump by 25.

As for where Harris did better, the answer can largely be summed up in two words: nice suburbs. From Camden County to Mercer County to Bergen County, the state’s suburbs – especially its wealthiest ones – are now much more Democratic than they were 20 years ago. Ground-zero for those shifts is Somerset County, which was once a solidly Republican county and is now solidly Democratic; Bernards Township shifted 32 points towards Harris compared to 2004.

None of this is news, necessarily, to anyone closely following politics in New Jersey; it’s been clear for a while that Democrats are doing better and better in the suburbs but losing ground in some other parts of the state that once voted for them unquestioningly. The 2024 election accelerated many of those trends, with some parts of the state zooming away from Democrats and others largely sticking with them even in a bad year for the party.

Looking even more closely, the 2004 to 2024 swing map reveals all sorts of other interesting details about how New Jersey has changed.

Warren County, for example, has a clear divide between the old industrial areas along the Delaware River around Phillipsburg, which have moved right, and the wealthier areas inland around Hackettstown, which have moved left. Southern Ocean County is split between the Democratic-trending Shore towns on Long Beach Island and the much more Republican exurbs on the mainland.

And if you squint, you can see some long-term demographic changes, too. It may be surprising, for example, to see that majority-Latino Belleville shifted towards Democrats since 2004, given that most Hispanic areas lurched to the right – but Belleville was only around one-quarter Hispanic back then, whereas it’s around half Hispanic now.

Shifts in majority-minority areas

Speaking of which, if there was any clear factor that correlated with how towns voted in 2024, it was racial demographics – especially in heavily Latino areas.

In the 36 towns where, according to the 2020 Census, at least 40% of the population is Latino, Harris prevailed by just under 20 points, 58% to 39%. That sounds impressive at first – until it’s compared with the 2020 election, when Biden won those same towns by a collective 43-point margin, 71% to 28%. Some towns, like Perth Amboy and Paterson, swung more than 30 points towards Trump in just four years.

Towns with large Black and Asian populations, too, shifted sharply away from Democrats, though not to quite the same extent. Harris won the state’s eleven predominantly (>40%) Black towns by 66 points, down from Biden’s 79-point margin in 2020, and its eight predominantly Asian American towns by 21 points, down from 33 points in 2020. (Trenton’s population is more than 40% Black and Hispanic, so it’s counted as part of both groups here.)

Looking at town-level data alone can’t definitively tell us how racial groups voted; Newark, for example, is majority-Black, but much of its 17-point shift to the right can be attributed to its Hispanic neighborhoods. But it does seem to generally corroborate nationwide trends of nonwhite voters shifting to Republicans, in many cases by greater margins than white voters.

That’s not to say that those majority-minority towns are entirely sold on Republicans; Harris still won nearly all of them, and they still do make up the backbone of the state Democratic coalition. The data indicate, however, that the delta between New Jersey’s nonwhite voters and white voters was probably smaller in 2024 than it’s been in a long time.

Voter turnout

Any politician worth their salt will tell you that it’s not just the margins that matter; it’s also how many of their own voters actually show up at the polls. That’s usually less of an issue in presidential election years – plenty of voters might skip off-year races for the state legislature, say, but most will always show up to vote for president – but there were still some turnout disparities in 2024 that seemed to disproportionately hurt Democrats.

Overall, the state cast 4,287,740 votes for president, around 94% of the total cast in 2020, when every eligible voter was sent a vote-by-mail ballot and turnout reached record levels.

Turnout in some heavily Democratic areas, though, was often much lower. Newark’s voter turnout was 85% of its 2020 rate, Trenton’s was 86%, Paterson’s was 84%, and Camden’s was 83%. Those types of dropoffs – replicated across the rest of the state in deep-blue, majority-minority areas – may have cost Democrats tens of thousands of votes.

(To be clear, voter turnout has historically always been lower in New Jersey’s poorer and urban areas than it is in wealthier and whiter areas, and politicians from both parties know to account for that. But this analysis is comparing 2024 turnout to 2020, so those disparities are already baked in; voter turnout in minority areas was low in 2024 even compared to its already below-average level.)

The same was not true in many of the state’s more Republican-leaning suburbs and rural areas, however. Deep-red Warren and Ocean Counties, for example, each cast 99% of their total vote from 2020, with many towns exceeding their total vote; the fast-growing Orthodox Jewish hub of Lakewood cast 42,077 votes, up from 37,162 in 2020, and almost all of them went to Trump.

One other area clearly stands out on the turnout map: Burlington County, where voting machine issues on Election Day led to many voters having to wait four hours or more to vote. Those issues clearly dissuaded some voters from participating at all; the county had the lowest turnout relative to 2020 of any county in the state, and some towns like Hainesport and Palmyra cast less than 80% of their total 2020 vote.

It’s possible that those Election Day issues impacted how Burlington County voted, too. The county’s three-point GOP swing compared to 2020 was the second-smallest pro-Republican shift in the state, behind only Hunterdon County; could that have in part been because some Republicans, who are more likely than Democrats to vote on Election Day, decided not to brave the long lines?

Raw margins

Something that always has to be accounted for on election maps is the fact that land does not necessarily vote. A political novice looking at a typical election map in New Jersey might think the state leaned Republican, given how much of its land area is colored red; it takes some knowledge of New Jersey’s population distribution to know that all that red territory is mostly sparsely populated, while the blue strip running diagonally through the heart of the state is where a majority of its population lives.

One way of getting around that is by mapping out raw vote margins, where each county or town is assigned a dot scaled by how many votes the Democratic or Republican candidate received from it on net. (These are net margins; a town that cast 20,000 votes but only supported Trump over Harris by 20 votes will have a very small dot.) There are flaws to this type of map – it’s hard to read, for one – but it does a good job of showing where, exactly, each party gets most of its votes from.

For Democrats, the answer lies mostly in urban North Jersey, even accounting for the swings against the party that region experienced in 2024. Jersey City alone gave Harris a net 43,513 votes, and Newark gave her another net 38,789; more big clusters of blue votes continued all the way down the Turnpike corridor to Camden.

As for Republicans, the answer is very definitively Ocean County, which provided Trump with slightly more net votes than every other red county in the state put together. Lakewood gave Trump a net 32,044 votes, and nearby deep-red towns like Brick, Toms River, and Jackson gave him tens of thousands more.

Notably not included on the list of most critical GOP voter bases are the two areas that stand out the most on standard geographical maps: the state’s northwest and far south. Both areas lean Republican, but are simply not populated enough to seriously contest the state’s Democratic hubs; the votes Trump netted out of Salem, Cumberland, Cape May, and Atlantic Counties combined (Trump +22,493) are erased by the two mid-sized Essex County suburbs of Montclair and Bloomfield (Harris +25,172).

Swing towns

Another way to show the extent of Trump’s inroads in New Jersey in 2024 year: simply count the number of towns he flipped from Biden.

 

In total, Trump won 61 municipalities that Biden had carried in 2020, spanning North Jersey to South Jersey and major cities like Passaic to tiny towns like Wrightstown in Burlington County. He flipped at least one town in all but five of the state’s 21 counties, with 22 coming in Bergen County alone.

Trump also flipped five counties that Biden had won: Morris, Passaic, Gloucester, Atlantic, and Cumberland. The latter two hadn’t supported a Republican for president since 1988, and Passaic County hadn’t done so since 1992.

It should be noted, though, that the list of town flips doesn’t give an entirely accurate picture of where Trump made his biggest gains, since many of his wins came in the types of competitive suburban towns where Harris actually did relatively well. Morris County’s Denville, for example, flipped from Biden to Trump, but the well-to-do town only shifted four points rightward; nearby Hispanic-majority Dover, meanwhile, stuck with Harris but still shifted towards Trump by 22 points.

Harris, for her part, was able to flip three Trump-won towns into her column: the minuscule borough of Millstone in Somerset County, the Shore town of Barnegat Light in Ocean County, and Hunterdon County’s Delaware Township, which (like most of Hunterdon County) has been trending indefatigably towards Democrats in recent years.

All Biden -> Trump towns: Aberdeen, Alpine, Bedminster, Berlin Borough, Clifton, Denville, East Rutherford, Eatontown, Egg Harbor Township, Elmwood Park, Englewood Cliffs, Fairview, Galloway, Garfield, Hasbrouck Heights, Highlands, Hawthorne, Jamesburg, Kearny, Little Falls, Little Ferry, Loch Arbour, Lodi, Long Hill, Mahwah, Marlboro, Matawan, Midland Park, Millville, Mine Hill, Monroe Township (Gloucester), Montvale, Moonachie, Mount Olive, North Caldwell, Northvale, Nutley, Ocean Township (Monmouth), Passaic City, Phillipsburg, Ramsey, Raritan Borough, Ridgefield, River Vale, Rochelle Park, Rockaway Borough, Rockaway Township, Sayreville, Somers Point, South Hackensack, South River, South Toms River, Upper Saddle River, Ventnor City, Waldwick, Warren Township, West Caldwell, Westville, Wood-Ridge, Woodland Park, Wrightstown.

All Trump -> Harris towns: Barnegat Light, Delaware, Millstone (Somerset).

See here for detailed maps of every congressional and legislative district. And click here for the dataset featuring results for every town in the state.

Want even more maps? Read our previous coverage on the state’s congressional map, what the 2024 results mean for 2025 legislative races, Trump’s shocking surge in the 9th congressional district and among Hispanic voters, how the competitive 7th district voted, how gubernatorial candidates Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer performed, and what new Senator Andy Kim’s victory looked like.