Summary

Recently, I published version 1.1.0 of the njelections data package for R, including election results up through 2024 ¹. I’m going to dig into the new data a little bit.

Comparing 2007-2012 with 2019-2024

Democrats received 55.6% of the two-party vote in statewide elections in the six-year period 2019-2024 (two presidential elections, two senate elections, and one gubernatorial election). This is a 1.5% decrease of their share in the corresponding six year span in the previous 12-year election cycle (2007-2012), when Democrats received 57% of the vote.

First, let’s take a look at which parts of the state are more Republican, and which are more Democratic.

(The R code for the maps in this section can be found here. I’m using the tigris package to get the map of New Jersey along with njelections.)

Next, let’s highlight the changes in these two maps: which towns got comparatively more Democratic, and which became comparatively more Republican. In this map, you can see how the northern and Philadelphia suburbs shifted Democratic (relative to the state average), while most of South Jersey and the more urban parts of North Jersey shifted Republican.

Comparing Kim and Harris in 2024

In 2024, New Jersey had two statewide races: A US Senate race (Kim/Bashaw) and the Presidental race (Harris/Trump). Kim ran ahead of Harris statewide by about 1.9% in the two-party vote share. Let’s take a look at which parts of the state were strongest for Kim and which were strongest for Harris.

Kim generally did better in the more Democratic areas, but, again, it is the North Jersey suburbs which jumps out at me: Harris did best relative to Kim in exactly the region that has shifted hardest towards Democrats. Kim’s old house district, NJ-03, is also shown.

The R code for this map can be found here.