Once again, New Jersey Democrats saw their massive voter registration edge dwindle somewhat in January, with both Republicans and unaffiliated voters making up an ever-increasing share of the state’s electorate, according to voter registration data released last week by the New Jersey Division of Elections.
The number of registered Democrats in the state fell by 3,894, from 2,500,412 at the beginning of the year to 2,496,518 on February 1. The number of Republicans grew by 3,931 during the same time period, from 1,545,797 to 1,549,728; unaffiliated voters increased by 13,375, from 2,385,821 to 2,399,196.
The state overall now has 6,524,732 voters, an increase of 13,563 over last month. The pace of new registrations is likely to pick up over the course of the next few months, as more and more voters tune into this year’s presidential election and the competitive Democratic and Republican primaries for U.S. Senate.
Democrats have steadily lost voter registration ground during the Biden era, though of course they retain a substantial edge over Republicans. For a few years, there were more than one million more Democrats than Republicans in the state, but that milestone disappeared last April; now there’s even some threat that unaffiliated voters may at one point overtake Democrats as the state’s largest group.
The news isn’t quite so bad for Democrats, though, in the one place where the party most needs voters: the 7th congressional district. The closely watched district added 195 new Democrats and 388 new Republicans in February; Republicans now have a 207,425-to-190,477 registration edge in the district.