​​A Very Rough Day in New Jersey

“It’s a sobering moment,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy of the Democratic losses nationally in his home state the morning after the election.

No kidding.

This was especially true in the Garden State, which has gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, usually by huge margins—but not this time.

Vice President Kamala Harris only won the 13th most populous state by 5 percent. Compare that to 2020, when Joe Biden won by almost 16 points over Donald Trump, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton bested the star of The Apprentice by 13 points as she lost nationally. Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney by 18 points in 2012. Democrats were stunned to find their top-of-the-ticket only winning by a small margin.

Not that New Jersey was alone, of course. The Democratic margin in once safe Virginia was similarly narrow—and alarming.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: All Democratic victories are the same, but each loss is miserable in its own way.

New Jersey’s loss is unique but also instructive. It’s a place where Democrats climbed out of a decades-long hole in presidential contests, achieved great success, and are now slipping again. At the same time, its angry politics—fueled by talk radio in our most densely populated state where a lot of time is spent in traffic but also one without its own media market—is instructive of where the country is going. It’s the most Hispanic state east of the Mississippi, save Florida. As our most suburban state in an increasingly suburban nation, its 9 million residents bounce between 564 municipalities, mostly small towns and a few medium-sized cities. It had seemed like a safely blue state until Tuesday, and Democrats nationally have every right to worry about what this might augur for the northeast and suburbs in general, which have been crucial to Democratic gains.

First, some background.

All states are political battlegrounds, but New Jersey has been contested in odd ways. In presidential races, it was very Republican until it suddenly stopped being so and became unwaveringly Democratic.

For 40 years, in the post-World War II era, New Jersey was solidly Republican in presidential contests except for the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide. It went for Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman, twice for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. It went for Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush over Michael Dukakis. 

But starting in 1992, it went Democratic and never looked back.

By the 1990s, it was ripe for change but Bill Clinton did a lot to help speed the Democratic shift at the presidential level. His tougher-on-crime approaches appealed to a suburban state where many residents had fled urban blight. Gun control played well in a crowded state where families feared crime but had less of a hunting culture than larger, more rural neighbors like Pennsylvania. And the state is solidly pro-choice. Republicans of the genteel variety continued to do well. Pro-choice Christie Todd Whitman won two terms in the 1990s, just as her mentor, Tom Kean, won two in the 1980s. Chris Christie lacked his Republican gubernatorial predecessors’ preppy gentility, and his pro-life leanings reflected his Catholic upbringing in Livingston. He leaned more right but was still in the mainstream of the GOP.

Weirdly, though, New Jersey has not elected a Republican U.S. Senator in 52 years. (It’s had Republican appointments to replace senators who have died or been sent to the slammer, but it can’t seem to vote for one. In 1972, a longtime liberal Eisenhower Republican, Clifford Case, won his last U.S. Senate term. He was shockingly ousted in the 1978 GOP primary by Jeff Bell, the late supply-sider. (I was young at the time but I remember my liberal parents flipping out.) Bell lost to first-time candidate Bill Bradley, a Missourian who became famous playing basketball at a New Jersey university called Princeton and across the Hudson River for the New York Knicks.

But while the state pivoted from predominantly Republican at the presidential level to overwhelmingly Democratic at the U.S. Senate and presidential levels, its internal politics roiled.

When I grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s, taxes—especially property taxes—were always IEDs ready to go off on an unsuspecting candidate. Tom Kean had lost a 1977 gubernatorial bid against Brendan Byrne, the incumbent Democrat who brought gambling to Atlantic City, with a campaign slogan: “Byrned Up? Let’s raise Kean!” Four years later, in 1981, Kean won narrowly against Representative Jim Florio because of taxes. He won a handy reelection in 1985 against Essex County Executive Peter Shapiro, once touted as the first Jewish President, who died last year and was a neighbor of mine. 

In 1989, Florio, an accomplished boxer, finally won. But in 1993, he got knocked out for hiking taxes and shifting school funding to the state’s poorer districts in response to a court order. It was everything Democrats feared—a toxic amalgam of race and taxes, urban versus suburban, our schools and their schools. Clinton might have won the presidential race the year before, but the temper of Jersey voters was still something to fear.

Likewise, Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs executive turned Democratic senator and then governor, got tossed out of office in 2009, replaced by a former U.S. Attorney named Chris Christie. Christie won partly due to disdain for Barack Obama and the state’s rising auto insurance rates. In 2017, Murphy, another former Goldman Sachs executive, succeeded Christie—by then super unpopular over the George Washington Bridge scandal. Murphy came close to losing to a GOP unknown in 2021, owing to inflation, Covid rage, and so on. It’s a populace that can easily redirect its rage.

The state’s off-year governorship contests are often a repudiation of the incoming president, which helped Whitman, Christie, and Murphy rise in the first years of the Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations. Kean was the rare exception, as Reagan remained popular in the state.

Political science students may know that New Jersey has the nation’s most powerful governor. No other offices, save the lieutenant governor who shares the ticket, are elected statewide, making it an attractive perch and making next year’s race particularly interesting.

In the hothouse atmosphere of 2025, when Trump will be in the throes of his first year, it could be a promising contest for U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran, moderate, bipartisan Democrat who proved a very good crossover candidate. The state has only elected one woman governor, Whitman, and none to the U.S. Senate, but I’d put money on Sherrill to take the nomination and the race if she runs.

But this year’s results has to unsettle Democrats, even very strong ones like Sherrill, an Annapolis grad and Navy helicopter pilot.

Five New Jersey counties flipped to Trump last week—including Passaic, home to very Hispanic Paterson with a considerable Muslim population and Morris, a historically leafy Republican-leaning county, home to George Washington’s Revolutionary War Headquarters and Trump’s Bedminster golf club, that Democrats have been chipping away at for years. Part of it lies in Sherrill’s 11th district.

But Passaic was the most alarming for Democrats. Hillary won it with a whopping 74 percent of the vote in 2016, Biden won by a 16 percent margin over Trump in 2020, and Harris lost by about 3.5 percent. That’s a giant swing. Since the county is 45 percent Hispanic, Latino defections there seem to be massive, or this once predictably Democratic constituency didn’t show up. We’ll know more as more data comes in.

Some down-ballot Democrats survived the slaughter in Passaic, including the Democratic candidate for sheriff. Representative-elect Nellie Pou, a Democrat and statehouse veteran, barely won a race she was expected to win more easily. That’s small comfort.

As Governor Murphy acknowledged in his day-after press conference, the lessons from the state will take some time to sort out, but here’s an obvious one.

In this state, which is over 20 percent Hispanic, Democrats can’t be slow to acknowledge economic pain and assume that immigration is a winning issue with Latinos of any stripe. (New Jersey has large Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other communities.) In those Republican counties like Morris, Democrats need to assuage voters with more than reproductive rights and democracy. In a state that’s built on the suburban dream of single-family homes, they’ll need to tread the YIMBY/NIMBY divide carefully as they push for more housing.

The Essex County suburb where I grew up was always Democratic. I interned for Peter Rodino, the long-time House Judiciary Committee chairman and leader of the Watergate impeachment. At other times, my congressmen were Black pioneers like Donald Payne, then Donald Payne’s son, and Bill Pascrell, a blunt political lifer who died this year. My town, South Orange, was typical North Jersey fare: a burb of Italians, Irish, Jews, Blacks, and a smattering of an obscure minority called Protestants, its high school the alma mater of Lauryn Hill and SZA, Zach Braff and Max Weinberg, Paul Auster and Alfred Kinsey. Above all, it was a place of earnest ambition on the border of Cory Booker’s and Philip Roth’s Newark. As Roth wrote about Essex County Jews in Goodbye, Columbus, they ventured west, crossing the gentle slopes of the Watching Mountains across the river from New York City with all the determination of Conestoga settlers heading to California. Democratic pols in New Jersey are always better off appealing to ambition over grievance, but acknowledging fears and frustrations that can detonate like the landmines that came perilously close to making Harris the first Democrat to lose the quadrennial contest here in 36 years.

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