|
 |
Hey fam: It’s a big day so I’ve unlocked the Triad. Today is the first step on the long road out of perdition. And God help me, but I’m actually kind of optimistic.
Come join us. Be part of this community as we try to claw our way back into the light of democracy.
Election Day 2025: The Resistance Strikes Back
A data-driven case for what to look for in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York City.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
1. The Jerz
Let’s start with a recent history of elections in New Jersey, because the story is more complicated than you might guess.
 |
That’s a pretty swingy electorate, yes? In four of the last seven statewide elections Democrats have won by about +15. In two of them Democrats were +3/+5. And in one of them the Democrat lost by 22 points.
The obvious story we might tell is that Trump has slowly turned Jersey purple-ish with his no-nonsense working-class shtick. But I don’t buy that. At all. Let me explain why.
Trump has been directly on the ballot in Jersey three times and indirectly (via the gubernatorial race while Trump was the sitting president) once. Three of those four races (2016, 2017, and 2020) were the best results Democrats have had in the state aside from Obama’s 2012 blowout.
Now look at two weakest Democratic performances, the 2021 gubernatorial election and the 2024 presidential.
In 2021, President Biden had just crossed over from being net favorable to net unfavorable.
 |
Biden was net -8 in November of 2021.¹ So why was the 2021 election close? A few reasons:
Yes, Biden was a small drag on the incumbent Democrat, Murphy.
Murphy actually increased his raw vote totals from 2017 to 2021.
But the pandemic anti-incumbent wave was still rolling through the electorate.
And most importantly, the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, was pretty good.
In New Jersey, candidate quality matters a great deal in gubernatorial elections. Just look at what happened to Barbara Buono in 2013: She earned about half of the raw number of votes a Democratic candidate for governor usually gets.
So what about 2024? Do you believe that 2024 showed Trump winning over New Jersey voters? I don’t.
Here are Trump’s raw vote totals in his three NJ elections:
Trump 2016: 1,601,933
Trump 2020: 1,883,313
Trump 2024: 1,968,215
The big jump is from 2016 to 2020, but that’s an artifact of elevated turnout nationally. Trump actually lost Jersey by a bigger percentage margin in 2020 than he had in 2016.
Trump then closed the gap by 10 percentage points from 2020 to 2024, despite only a modest increase in total votes.
Which tells me that there was a candidate-quality problem. Kamala Harris got 400,000 fewer votes in 2024 than Biden had gotten in 2020.
Put it all together and I expect tonight’s race to be fairly close. Ciattarelli is in a tough environment for Republicans, but he has the rare advantage of being a non-incumbent incumbent: He’s not the sitting governor, but he is on the ballot for a second consecutive time. That means that he has the dual-benefit of running an insurgent campaign but simultaneously working with a base of people who pulled the lever for h