Credit: george keating via pixelsThe strong showing by Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the race for governor and GOP candidates for legislative seats should be a warning to the state’s Congressional Democrats that those swept into office by the 2018 blue wave could be swept out by a red one next year.
The large GOP vote compared to the 2017 gubernatorial election could portend trouble for three or four Democrats in particular. But that could be countered by precision shifts in congressional district boundaries. The New Jersey Redistricting Commission has held four hearings so far, with two months remaining to redraw the maps for congressional districts. The six-member delegations of Democrats and Republicans are going to try to remake boundaries to help their party’s chances of winning seats.
“To what extent we think any of these incumbents are in trouble, we won’t know until we actually see what the districts look like,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “What we can say in general is that there is a concern that differential partisan enthusiasm can have a significant impact on the outcome.”
If anything, the results of the Nov. 2 elections have further complicated the Democrats’ efforts at map making. Murray said they “will actually have an impact on the strategy that each of the partisan teams were going to use going into redistricting.”
“So long as redistricting doesn’t save them, they are in real trouble,” Chris Russell, Ciattarelli’s campaign consultant, said of three Democrats who won their seats in traditionally red districts during New Jersey’s 2018 blue wave.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institue for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said there is every reason to believe the increased turnout by Republicans and for GOP candidates over the past two years will continue.
“If an additional 300,000 Republicans voted in 2020 and in 2021, then there’s every reason to believe they will vote again next year,” he said. “Democrats will need to find a way to turn out a similar increase in their voters going forward. Democrats had enough statewide voters to account for this difference, but in several individual districts that was not enough. Every House election next year will be in individual districts, and none will be statewide.”
The state’s 2.58 million registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 1 million, but another 2.41 million registered voters are not affiliated with either party. No one knows how the partisans and the unaffiliated voted, but comparing the totals each candidate got against the number of partisan registrants shows that in the governor’s race, the Republican candidate did much better. Murphy’s 1.34 million votes are about 52% of the number of registered Democrats; Ciattarelli’s 1.25 million votes equal some 83% of registered Republicans.
Mollie Binotto, manager of Gov. Phil Murphy’s re-election campaign, agreed that “these energized voters on the Republican side are here to stay.” To counter that, she said that Democrats need to learn lessons from this year’s gubernatorial race and use what worked to propel the governor back to the State House despite historical precedents and the red wave that were against him.
“Here’s what we think: Vote by mail worked, early in-person voting is going to work,” Binotto said. The 2018 blue wave that flipped four of five Republican districts in the state “was a pendulum swinging one way and the pendulum is coming back.” Binotto added that targeting early voters whether those voting in person or by mail is going to be key. “I do think how we track this and how we bank those can make a huge difference.”
Murphy won only two South Jersey counties this year — he won five in 2017. And Republicans picked up eight seats in the Legislature in the south and along the shore. That could hurt two-term Rep. Andy Kim, D-3rd, whose district spans Burlington and Ocean counties. Murphy won Burlington again, and with about 18,000 more votes than four years ago, but his margin over his GOP opponent was less than half of what it was in 2017 due to high Republican turnout. Murphy lost Ocean County this year by an even wider margin than four years ago.
If GOP enthusiasm remains high in next year’s midterm election, Kim could be in trouble. His district was reliably Republican until the 2018 midterms, when backlash over the election of President Donald Trump brought a Democratic wave to New Jersey. Last year Kim won by a comfortable margin of nearly 8 points. The population in Kim’s district grew at a smaller rate than the state did as a whole, meaning the district itself will need to get bigger in the new map. His re-election could hinge on where the lines are drawn.
“If the current mood stays the way it is, folks who are in tight districts — like Andy Kim in South Jersey, in particular — will have more of a difficulty,” Murray said.
Any hopes Democrats may have had of trying to unseat Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, would seem to have vanished given Republicans’ domination in the southernmost counties he represents in Congress. Van Drew won as a Democrat in 2018 but switched parties a year later when he refused to vote to impeach Trump the first time.
Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-7th, was considered the most vulnerable Democrat because of his razor- thin victory margin of 5,000 votes or 1.2%. Malinowski may have gotten some good news out of the election as Somerset County, a large part of his district, continued to vote Democratic. Still, his district needs to grow, too. And because Malinowski faces questions about personal stock trades he made that appear to be conflicts of interest, there have been discussions of whether to sacrifice his interests when drawing the map to ensure other Democrats can keep their seats. Malinowski faces a potential rematch against state Sen. Tom Kean Jr., a Republican who is retiring from the Legislature in January and plans to devote more time to his congressional campaign.
“If you’re Democrats, are you going to try to go for nine safe seats, or are you going to try to go for 10 seats?” Murray said. Based on the general election results, Democrats may now be asking, “What’s more realistic or what we can accomplish?” he continued. “And if you’re reducing the number of safe seats, obviously, you’re putting somebody’s neck on the line.”
Both the 5th and 11th Districts, which border the 7th as well as each other, will also need to expand due to smaller than average population growth.
In the 11th, Rep. Mikie Sherrill easily rode the Democratic wave into office in 2018 and won her re-election margin last year by 6.6 points, but her district includes some traditionally red Morris County communities. Still, Murray said the Democrats did not lose as much ground in college-educated, formerly Republican suburbs in North Jersey.
In the 5th, Rep. Josh Gottheimer won against the odds as a Democrat in 2016 when his north- and western-most district backed Trump and has won twice since. Yet this year, Republican enthusiasm in Bergen County — the lion’s share of the district — cut Murphy’s victory margin by two-thirds from 2017.
The biggest unknown in all of this is where the candidates will be running. The 13-member commission is planning to hold more hearings: The next is virtual, scheduled for Saturday at 10 a.m. If the process works as it has in the past, the Democratic members will propose one map, the Republicans will present their own and chair John E. Wallace Jr., a retired state Supreme Court justice, will choose between them. The commission must decide on a map by Jan 18, 2022.
