Okay, now that two months have passed and final results have been posted, it might be time to explore this near upset in more depth (
link to the town results spreadsheet):
Back in 2017, Phil Murphy won NJ-GOV against Kim Guadagno by 14 percentage points, an almost-identical margin of victory to that of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in New Jersey in 2016. Murphy underperformed Clinton in the wealthy suburbs of NJ, as many expected, but was able to slightly exceed her overall performance by garnering unusually high support among minority and white working-class voters, particularly in South Jersey. (Looking back, it really is remarkable how much 2017 NJ-GOV was the one major statewide election in the country over the last five years that was completely immune to TRENDZ. I remember looking at the results that night and thinking that maybe the Trump-induced changes in our national political landscape were a one-off fluke, which, lol.) Needless to say, Murphy’s performance in 2021 was…less good. His WWC strength completely collapsed, as shown by the terrible Dem performance in South Jersey this time around, while his standing with nonwhites seems to have regressed to a little less than that of Joe Biden in 2020, an already weak benchmark given the President’s well-documented struggles with minority voters. Murphy was able to make small gains with wealthy suburbanites (although how much of that is simply due to trends extending into downballot races is an open question), but he still fell well short of Biden’s 2020 levels of support among them. Add in the big turnout disparity between blue and red parts of the state (in an election where statewide turnout was just over 40%, Essex and Hudson were at 30% turnout while Monmouth and Ocean posted close to 50% turnout), and you have the perfect recipe for Republican overperformance.
Of course, it would have been foolish to expect that Murphy could match Biden’s historically good margins for a Democrat in wealthy, well-educated suburbia. For one thing, Trump was likely uniquely toxic among those voters and any Republican without his baggage would have been able to recapture a good amount of support that he had lost, especially with an off-year electorate. Also, as this thread has already noted, Jack Ciattarelli and the rest of the NJ GOP focused their campaign primarily on taxes, an especially salient issue in suburban New Jersey, and steered well clear of the socially conservative stances that have made national Republicans unpalatable in the state. The governor’s problem was with everyone else. Only being able to match, if not falling a bit short of, Biden’s margins among urban voters is certainly a disappointment. The president’s 2020 performance was already considered underwhelming for a Democrat, and the fact that it has been repeated in a low-turnout off-year race seems to be further evidence that Republican gains with minorities in the Trump-era are beginning to stick. (It should also be noted that urban areas were the only places in NJ where fewer people voted compared to the 2017 election, further evidence that base turnout was depressed.) And of course, that WWC swing. Good lord. While nobody should have expected that Murphy’s inflated margins from 2017 would be repeated now that a Democrat is in the White House, I don’t think anyone saw a collapse of that magnitude coming. As others have noted, it certainly doesn’t bode well for Dems in this year’s midterms, who can ill-afford to suffer further losses among such voters, particularly in the Midwest.
A few scattered observations:
• It really seems like Murphy ended up getting bailed out by the leftward suburban trend. His losses were minimal (and big improvements from Jon Corzine’s 2009 margins against Chris Christie) in virtually all of NJ’s affluent, educated towns, as shown by Somerset and Hunterdon being the only counties that swung toward him from 2017. He even flipped some towns (Randolph, New Providence, Mountain Lakes) that had barely voted for Guadagno.
• Right after the election, there were some rather premature takes about how the result was
a referendum on Murphy's handling of school closures. While that may be true to some extent (for all pandemic restrictions, not exclusive to schools), extremely blue progressive suburbs like Montclair and SOMA did not see a notable drop in support for Murphy compared to elsewhere in the state.
• Two of the biggest pro-Ciattarelli swings could be found in the towns of East Hanover in Morris County and Fairfield in Essex County, both of which are extremely red and among the municipalities with the highest rates of Italian ancestry in America. (Basically if the southern end of Staten Island ended up in Jersey somehow.) In both towns, Ciattarelli received more votes than the total number of votes that had been cast there for all candidates in 2017. Fairfield actually voted for Ciattarelli by a larger margin than for Christie in
2013. Similar GOP turnout surges were also seen in North Jersey conservative blue-collar strongholds like Clark and Wallington. Really shows how much Murphy’s WWC standing deteriorated.
• Asian voters seem to have been a mixed bag for Murphy (although, luckily for him, there was nothing like the
massive red shifts that were seen in the NYC mayoral race). The heavily South Asian suburbs of Central Jersey (Edison, South Brunswick, Piscataway, West Windsor, Plainsboro) all swung toward him, some by double digits. Further north, Fort Lee and Bergenfield, which have major communities of Koreans and Filipinos respectively, gave Murphy about the same percentage as Joe Biden. But notably, the majority-Korean Palisades Park gave Murphy only a 9-point win, a big decline compared to his 29-point win in 2017 and Biden’s 22-point win there in 2020.
• Compared to WWC towns in North and Central Jersey, it's curious how blue-collar municipalities in Camden County like Bellmawr, Gloucester City, and Runnemede showed much smaller swings despite their demographics being even more hostile than the towns further north. Machine influence?
• Conversely, minority-heavy cities and towns in South Jersey like Vineland, Atlantic City, and Pleasantville saw big % decreases in Murphy's vote compared to Biden's, unlike in places such as Newark, Paterson, Hackensack, and Trenton where he mostly broke even. I'm not really sure why this was, are those towns whiter than cities in North Jersey, have weaker party infrastructure, etc.? (Also, in AC and the rest of Atlantic County, was there backlash against Covid restrictions that affected tourism?) In addition, Ciattarelli managed to narrowly flip longtime Dem strongholds like Pemberton Township, Egg Harbor City, and Woodbine, likely because of a combination of the WWC swing and nonwhite voters staying home.
• It's notable how the wealthy shore communities and poorer mainland towns in South Jersey diverged in this race. Ciattarelli tended to underperform Christie '09 in the former (although they mostly stayed very red) and match/surpass him in the latter. (Murphy did flip Cape May City and Harvey Cedars.) This likely has to do with trends among wealthier voters nationwide, as well as pandemic relocations.
• There were two municipalities where Murphy
massively overperformed Joe Biden, and in both cases unique local factors were at play. In Lakewood, Murphy secured some key endorsements from the ultra-Orthodox community and ended up only losing it by 23 points, compared to Biden’s massive 65-point loss. In Union City, Murphy benefitted from Mayor Brian Stack’s legendary GOTV operation, which swung the town from Biden+44 to Murphy+70. The governor received 77% of Biden’s raw vote total, an extremely impressive feat for the Stack machine in a year where base turnout in other NJ cities fell through the floor.
• A final set of curious results: Monroe in Middlesex County and Manchester in Ocean County, both home to a number of retirement communities, both registered small pro-Murphy swings despite being surrounded by towns that swung hard to Ciattarelli. Maybe a pro-pandemic-restriction effect among elderly voters?
