How did New Jersey become a non-Atlas blue state after going for Bush so strongly in 1988?

[darklordoftech]

Demographic change? Generational turnover? Bush 1988 voters voting Democratic in subsequent elections?

[Big Abraham]

A combination of all three to a certain extent, but it's really part of a broader narrative of Northeastern liberal bastions of old-school Republicanism repudiating the increasingly evangelistic and corporatist Republican Party, which by the early '90s was (at the presidential levels) solidly based in the South and rural areas and in conservative exurbs, in favor of the more secular and more urban Democrats. See also: Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, Delaware, Maryland, etc.

[Padfoot]

Looking at the raw votes it looks like Bush '88 voters moved to Perot in '92 because the total number of Democratic voters only went up by about 116,000 votes from '88 to '92 but Bush lost almost 400,000 voters between those two elections.  Also the Democratic share of the vote was basically stagnant between those two elections.  It wasn't until '96 that they actually started winning a majority of the vote consistently.

[Brittain33]

NJ took a real economic hit in the recession of 1990-91, in particular home values. Clinton didn’t do that well in the state in 1992. He only won it narrowly. It took an economic boom and the rise of the religious right + Republican attacks on environmental laws to swing the state so Democratic starting in 1996.

[Schiff for Senate]

Bush won NJ by 14%. Clinton did much better than Dukakis throughout the Northeast, winning NJ by two points. In 1996, he did much better in the Northeast than in 1992 (winning NJ by 18%). Again, this trend is true for much of the northeast. From 1988-1996, NJ swung 31.5 points to the left. In comparison, DE swung 27.7 points, ME swung 32.3 points, and NH swung a whopping 36.2 points. Most of those voters never rejoined the GOP as it became increasingly less moderate; every New England state shifted at least 13.5 points to the left from 1988 to 2000, and NJ was a part of this trend, shifting blue by a solid 29.5 points (more than any New England state). So yes, NJ shifted hard leftward in those eight/twelve years, but that was true across the Northeast, since Clinton was center left, attracting swaths of moderate (and previously Republican) voters (the kind that supported Ford in 1976 and Anderson in 1980 but distrusted Reagan), who were disillusioned by an increasingly radical GOP and pleased with Clinton's Democratic Party as it actually shifted slightly rightward (by the time Gore and Kerry, more staunch liberals, were nominated, the GOP had shifted so far to the right that Northeasterners were permanent Democrats; it only helped that Kerry was a New Englander).

[Nyvin]

Once the NYC and Philly suburbs shifted left, they never really went back.   The Republicans have kept the margin the same with gains in the southern part of the state though.

[CookieDamage]

The Republican party becoming an evangelical conservative party was anathema to the northeast, and NJ was the epicenter of this collapse. NJ also saw some of the first suburbs to vote Dem, and since NJ is a predominantly urban-suburban state, the swing was massive and the state has never looked back.

[Pink Panther]

Generally, when voters are starting to become disillusioned with their party, the opposing party's candidate can bridge those voters to their party permanently with the right policies and rhetoric, as these voters start transitioning to the opposing party's beliefs and rhetoric. Examples include: Evangelicals, especially rural, becoming Republican during Reagan, Blacks becoming Democrats under FDR and LBJ, and more recently, the WWC under Trump and most Suburbanites under Biden. In this scenario, it was Northeastern Suburbanites and modestly wealthy areas under Clinton.(Also, campaigning and grassroots efforts helped tremendously with these shifts.)

[Хahar 🤔]

This isn't directly related to the subject of the thread, but it does pertain to the thread in a more general sense.

Something that has always been true of this forum is that the US Election Atlas color scheme has made it impossible to refer to "red states" and "blue states" in the sense that became popular in the early 2000s. This is something I've always appreciated about the forum, because those terms lead to overly reductive and lazy analysis.

More recently, there's been a shift where "red" and "blue" have come to be used not just as geographic descriptors but simply as all-purpose shorthand for "Republican" and "Democratic"; you see constant talk of "voting red" or "voting blue" to mean "voting Republican or "voting Democratic", which is usage that would have sounded strange a decade and a half ago. I'm not sure why this happened or whether this relates to the popularity of ActBlue, but probably it's just cable news usage. Obviously the Atlas color scheme makes that difficult here, too.

What I find baffling is that the creator of this thread was clearly aware of all of this and chose to resolve the problem by writing "non-Atlas blue" in the thread title. The term "non-Atlas blue" is unnecessarily convoluted, but more than that it just looks like baby talk, like the work of someone who's not yet big enough to use big words. By contrast, "Democratic" would have carried exactly the intended meaning and would have been perfectly clear and would have sounded like the sort of thing that an adult would say.

This isn't necessarily to single out the creator of this thread in particular; I've seen this sort of thing before on this forum (as I'm sure everyone else has), but this time is what drove me to make note of it. It's very strange to me.

[CookieDamage]

This isn't directly related to the subject of the thread, but it does pertain to the thread in a more general sense.

Something that has always been true of this forum is that the US Election Atlas color scheme has made it impossible to refer to "red states" and "blue states" in the sense that became popular in the early 2000s. This is something I've always appreciated about the forum, because those terms lead to overly reductive and lazy analysis.

More recently, there's been a shift where "red" and "blue" have come to be used not just as geographic descriptors but simply as all-purpose shorthand for "Republican" and "Democratic"; you see constant talk of "voting red" or "voting blue" to mean "voting Republican or "voting Democratic", which is usage that would have sounded strange a decade and a half ago. I'm not sure why this happened or whether this relates to the popularity of ActBlue, but probably it's just cable news usage. Obviously the Atlas color scheme makes that difficult here, too.

What I find baffling is that the creator of this thread was clearly aware of all of this and chose to resolve the problem by writing "non-Atlas blue" in the thread title. The term "non-Atlas blue" is unnecessarily convoluted, but more than that it just looks like baby talk, like the work of someone who's not yet big enough to use big words. By contrast, "Democratic" would have carried exactly the intended meaning and would have been perfectly clear and would have sounded like the sort of thing that an adult would say.

This isn't necessarily to single out the creator of this thread in particular; I've seen this sort of thing before on this forum (as I'm sure everyone else has), but this time is what drove me to make note of it. It's very strange to me.

I think it's fun.

[CookieDamage]

Also:

NJ in 1970:
White - 88.6%
Black - 10.7%
Asian - 0.5%

NJ in 1990:
White - 79.3%
Black - 13.4%
Asian - 3.5%

These are pretty massive shifts in ethnic composition. https://nj.gov/labor/lpa/census/2kpub/njsdcp1.pdf on page six, the growth in population at the dawn of the 21st century is partly attributed to foreign immigration. And in NJ, Asians tend to be a pretty Democratic bloc. This, in addition to the transformation of the GOP into an evangelical southern party and the transition of NJ burbs into the democratic column meant that the republicans had very little support here at the presidential level.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

NJ took a real economic hit in the recession of 1990-91, in particular home values. Clinton didn’t do that well in the state in 1992. He only won it narrowly. It took an economic boom and the rise of the religious right + Republican attacks on environmental laws to swing the state so Democratic starting in 1996.

Even then, the end of the Cold War (important in shifting the identity of hiterto-RW suburbanites) was probably needed to get Clinton over the top in 1992. A huge part of why NJ flipped was that all the major reasons it voted for Bush in 1988 were no longer in effect come 1992. Cold War? It's over, no need to vote against communism anymore. Taxes? Bush had signed into law a tax hike. Foreign policy? Not relevant, 1992 was a purely domestic policy election. Economic growth? NJ's wealthy suburbs had undergone their first true economic hardship since eons (economic downturns in earlier decades had mostly hit working-class communities).
What new issues arose? Well, one can argue the shift in the GOP's image from 1988 to 1992 hurt especially in places like NJ, and I doubt too many liked Buchanan's high-profile speech before the GOP convention. 'It's the economy, stupid' was really quite genius, and Clinton's brand, tailor-made for competitive states like NJ, was able to get a significant amount of once-GOP-base voters to defect in one election, as he used gun control as an effective wedge issue. In a dozen years the state went from fiscon right-leaning to practically safe Dem on presidential level.