More than 100,000 unaffiliated voters registered with Democrats or Republicans in the days leading up to last month’s primary, with Democrats undoing recent gains from Republican registrants, according to state voter registration data.
Democrats entered June with 2,451,752 registered voters and July with 2,534,153, a jump of 82,401. The GOP entered June with 1,624,437 and July with 1,665,276, an increase of 40,839.
Most of those new registrants are not new voters, but rather unaffiliated voters who declared to a party while voting in the primary. There were 2,423,449 unaffiliated voters in the state heading into June — by the time the month was over, 2,306,930 remained, a drop of 116,519.
Still, the state added 5,924 total registered voters in the month of June. A total of 6,580,616 people are now registered to vote in New Jersey. About 38.5% of the state’s voters are Democrats, beating the 25.3% who are registered Republicans and the 35.1% who are unaffiliated.
The Democratic gubernatorial primary was generally considered a more competitive race (and featured significantly more spending) than the Republican primary. Democrats also had many more competitive Assembly primaries throughout the state.
The Democratic gains over the GOP are a break from the pattern of GOP gains and Democratic stagnation. Democrats at one point held a one-million-voter gap over Republicans, a buffer that fell to 827,000 last month. With the strong June, the gap is back up to about 869,000, undoing months of GOP improvement.
Still, voter registration numbers are not the best measure of a party’s strength.
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