Illustration by Juan Bernabeu
It was anything but a typical Wednesday morning for Ed Durr as he hit the road to deliver furniture and mattresses. It was a MAGA day, the greatest of them all, and Durr was beaming into a video camera mounted on his dashboard.
He sang out at something like full volume to an audience of Facebook followers.
“Gooooooooooood morning America!…Congratulations to President Trump on an outstanding victory, proving once again: You can’t bankrupt him. You can’t imprison him. You can’t assassinate him. You can’t defeat him.”
Durr, a commercial truck driver from Gloucester County, made national headlines in 2021 when he won election to the state senate by upsetting incumbent Stephen Sweeney, one of New Jersey’s most powerful Democrats.
Even though he was defeated in his bid for reelection two years later, Durr is now running for governor, one of a handful of Republicans buoyed by Trump’s surprising strength in a deep-blue state that hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.
Photo: Shutterstock/Chip Somodevilla
For many Republicans like Durr, Trump’s victory is confirmation that New Jersey is turning red, and doing it quickly. Even though Kamala Harris won the state by 6 percentage points, Trump’s performance jumped dramatically compared to 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden here by 16 points.
Five New Jersey counties that voted for Biden in 2020 flipped to Trump, including traditional Democratic strongholds such as Passaic County. Even counties Harris carried saw droves of voters switching to Trump: Essex, Bergen, Hudson and Middlesex counties all saw double-digit swings to Republican.
Perhaps the scariest trend for Democrats: Huge swaths of New Jersey’s 2 million-strong Latino community voted for Trump, even as he campaigned on the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and their American-born children.
North Jersey towns with large Latino populations like North Bergen, Bayonne, West New York, Kearney and Secaucus saw large shifts to the GOP. Trump won the city of Passaic, which is more than two-thirds Latino, by 6 percentage points.
“There’s no question that the Democratic brand is not strong as it has been in the bluest areas of the country, and that includes New Jersey,’’ says Patrick Murray, the director of Monmouth University Polling Institute, which has charted public opinion in the state for the past 20 years.
“We’ve definitely seen some shifting from Democrat to Trump in areas that have significant Hispanic and African American populations,” Murray says. “But in New Jersey and in other states like New York, a lot of Democrats just sat on their hands and didn’t vote. So is that an endorsement of Donald Trump or a statement about Kamala Harris and the party in power?”
In the wake of Trump’s historic victory and the broadening of his support almost everywhere, New Jersey Monthly sought out a handful of mavens like Murray, as well as some leading political figures, to assess the new electoral landscape. Their insights suggest that, while Jersey Democrats and progressives are definitely in dangerous territory, the state is not turning as red as die-hard Trumpers like “Ed the Trucker” Durr would like.
For one thing, the experts point out, registered Democrats here have an edge of 900,000 over Republicans, as well as big structural advantages in heavily gerrymandered legislative districts. The state Legislature, as well as its congressional delegation, remains firmly in the hands of Democrats.
Photo: Shutterstock/Peter Serocki
Another fact diminishing the Trump boom: State data shows that voter turnout in New Jersey in November was the lowest ever recorded for a presidential election, with just 65 percent of the state’s 6.6 million registered voters casting ballots. The collapse in voter interest, especially among Democrats, suggests that Harris and her party were not offering what their base wanted to hear.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, says Harris simply didn’t talk enough about issues truly important to voters. While she was busy campaigning on abortion rights and warning about Trump’s threat to democracy, Rasmussen says, Harris ceded the pocketbook issues to the GOP.
“Were people concerned about abortion and democracy issues? Of course,” Rasmussen adds. “But a lot more people were concerned about stuff they saw as more front and center: affordability, property taxes, the high cost of car insurance. Things that move the needle for families.”
“New Jersey is an expensive place to live,” he says. “People want their public officials to do something about it.”
The election, Rasmussen adds, proved to be a wake-up call for Democratic party machines in North Jersey that have reliably turned out voters for decades. Losing more African American and Latino voters would make it harder for Democrats to prevail in this year’s gubernatorial race, he says, which is suddenly looking much more interesting.
“Hudson County has been a lazy machine for years,’’ he says. “They should be working with old-school shoe leather, block by block, family by family by family, house by house. But, with some exceptions, they’re just not doing it.”
One of the exceptions is Brian Stack, the longtime Union City mayor and Democratic state senator, whose get-out-the-vote work has become legendary. Every year, Stack gives away some 30,000 turkeys to constituents as he and his crew work the streets, ward by ward. “That’s the old-school way, but we’re watching it disappear,” Rasmussen says. “If Democrats want to reverse the trend and keep the governor’s office, they’re going to have to get back to it.”
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At a time when almost every Republican politician of relevance is paying fealty to Donald Trump, one GOP player in Jersey will have none of it. State Senator John Bramnick, a stalwart member of the opposition in Trenton for 20 years, says his party will lose next year if it appeals only to MAGA voters in the belief New Jersey is turning red.
Bramnick, an amateur comedian who was voted by bar colleagues as the funniest lawyer in New Jersey, sees no joke in Trump’s threat to the Jersey GOP. New Jersey and its diverse, well-educated population, he argues, remains decidedly moderate.
Bramnick, who is seeking his party’s nomination in the governor’s race, recited a list of Republicans who have broken the Democratic voter-registration edge to win statewide office: Thomas Kean, Christine Todd Whitman, Chris Christie.
“What do those names have in common?” Bramnick asks. “They were all moderate, middle-of-the-road conservatives who placed practical good sense over some ideology. Their success tells me that people in New Jersey won’t ever elect a Trumper for governor.”
Despite Trump’s showing in 2024, public opinion polls over the years consistently show that New Jerseyans embrace a broad range of progressive policies, from the preservation of abortion rights to sensible limitations on gun ownership to gay marriage and legal marijuana.
“But people here also want lower taxes and less spending, and the sensible Republican who makes that case will win next year,” Bramnick says. “If we talk just about crazy Trump resentment stuff, we’ll lose.”
In the days leading up to the election, the race for New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District drew serious national attention when Sue Altman, a former pro basketball player and progressive Democrat, appeared poised to unseat GOP scion Thomas Kean Jr., with the political control of the U.S. House in play.
Altman’s aptitude for taking on tough political fights, even with figures from her own party, like Camden County Democratic leader George Norcross, lifted her to prominence among reformers looking to shred New Jersey’s political-boss system.
In challenging Kean, Altman would have to win over voters across New Jersey’s Republican heartland, from Sussex County through Morris, Warren and Hunterdon. The district had also recently been redrawn, making it even more hostile to Democrats: Registered Republicans now held a 16,000-vote edge.
Altman ended up losing to Kean by some 5 percentage points. Today, she concedes the possibility that New Jersey may be undergoing a red shift. But she says the real puzzle is not why Trump did so well in Jersey, but how Democrats did so poorly.
“It wasn’t just that we lost some people who went from D to R,’’ she said in a phone interview about a month after the election. “It’s that the turnout for Democrats wasn’t the boon we expected in a presidential year. And I don’t know why that is.”
“I’ve learned there’s usually a rational reason people don’t exercise their right to vote, and it’s usually because they don’t feel they can make a difference,” Altman went on. “We have to find ways to make people feel like their votes matter.”
As her party retrenches in the wake of 2024’s Trump quake, Altman sees no easy way to reignite flagging Democratic voters. But the way forward, she says, will require a new spirit to fight and a willingness to take on conservative spin that tars too many progressives as dangerous socialists.
Democrats, Altman says, have grown too timid.
“If there’s any takeaway here, it’s that Dems have to develop an appetite for boldness and finally put on the shelf the kind of risk aversion that plagues us,’’ she says. “We have to run campaigns on our own terms, not on the terms of a narrative set by Fox News.”
While Democrats in New Jersey search for answers, emboldened Republicans will continue measuring the state for MAGA furniture and curtains. Many say Jersey is now a swing state and predict that the Trump-led GOP will take over Trenton in the next few years.
“No matter what way you look at this, Trump has changed the party forever,” says Mike Crispi, a South Jersey talk-show host and businessman who is considering a run for governor this year.
“There’s a brand-new coalition forming. You can see it in places like Passaic County. It’s Latinos, it’s working-class people, union members, it’s people who live in urban areas that have been blue forever. You draw 10 percent of new voters in Newark, Paterson, all over Hudson County, and you’ve got a new ball game.”
Jeff Pillets is a journalist based in Trenton who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008.
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