Credit: (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)WASHINGTON — The voters who will decide control of the White House and Congress next year live in a minority of states and congressional districts.
Hardly any of them live in New Jersey.
Presidential candidates are criss-crossing the country, hopping between Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — the states that will determine the next commander in chief.
Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat from South Jersey running for the U.S. Senate, is likely to win his race against Republican businessman Curtis Bashaw, and 11 of New Jersey’s 12 House seats are unlikely to be close races.
That leaves the race for control of the 7th district, where Rep. Tom Kean, a Republican, son of the former governor and grandson of a congressman from the mid-20th Century, is trying to fend off progressive Democratic organizer Sue Altman and win a second House term as the lone competitive federal election in the state.
A week from Election Day, next Tuesday, Nov. 5, the electoral landscape has narrowed to a few dozen competitive House races and a handful in the Senate as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump jockey for swing voters in just seven states.
Because the winner of the presidency is determined by the Electoral College, a process that requires candidates to win states rather than the overall popular vote of the country, swing-state votes are significantly more valuable in the presidential race than those from reliably right- or left-leaning states.
New Jersey has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, when the country elected George H.W. Bush.
The state hasn’t backed a Republican for the U.S. Senate since 1972, and while Bashaw has sought to cast himself as a moderate Republican, he’s an underdog against Kim.
Of the 435 House seats up for election next week, just 68, or about 16%, are considered competitive, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Democrats hold 38 of those seats, Republicans 30.
The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, also a nonpartisan electoral research group, named just 60 competitive House races, 31 where Democrats hold the seat and 29 where Republicans are the incumbents, in its latest ratings.
Both Cook and the UVA group give Kean a slight edge, and a Monmouth University poll, conducted this month, placed Kean ahead with 46% to 44% for Altman. Though the margin of error in that poll — the degree to which it could be wrong — is 4.7%, meaning either candidate could be ahead.
Looking through a narrower lens, a few dozen House races are considered “toss-ups,” elections where either candidate has a chance to win.
“Control of the House is again up for grabs in this year’s elections. The fight will be fierce and expensive, but it will also take place on the narrowest of playing fields,” authors Michael Li and Gina Feliz at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent legal advocacy organization, wrote in an analysis published last week.
“In the campaign’s final stretch, only 27 of 435 districts — 12 held by Democrats and 15 held by Republicans — are considered toss-ups based on the most recent assessment of a district’s political makeup and candidate strengths and weaknesses by election analysts at Cook Political Report.”
The current makeup of the House is 220 Republicans to 212 Democrats, with three vacancies, including the seat of the late Rep. Bill Pascrell, and whichever party wins control in the next Congress will likely hold a similarly slim majority.
“Over the next week and a half, we will take nothing for granted,” Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Democrat from Washington state, said. “It’s going to come down to a wire finish.”
DelBene, asked last week why national Democratic groups had waited until the last month of the campaign to spend significantly on the race, said her organization is now engaged.
“We’ve been engaged with Sue early on,” DelBene, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a national group that raises money and works to elect Democrats to the House, said on a call Thursday with reporters.
“We’re up with a coordinated buy in the district right now,” DelBene said. “This is a seat where even the latest polling has it within the margin of error.”
The DCCC and the Altman campaign are spending money to run an ad critical of Kean for not holding town halls. Kean has said the public prefers to contact him for help.
A Democratic super PAC, a type of political group that can raise unlimited sums of money, is slated to spend $4 million to support Altman.
Asked by NJ Spotlight News what issues she thinks give Altman an edge in the district, DelBene touted Altman’s work fighting public corruption, “reproductive freedom” and her public appearances.
“Tom Kean Jr. is hiding from the press,” DelBene said. “Sue Altman is everywhere talking to folks,” she said. “That has been a very big difference.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Kean campaign have sought to label Altman as against police officers and in favor of weakening restrictions on drug use.
“She supported defunding the police,” Kean said in his opening statement of a debate between the two candidates. “She supported letting cop killers out of jail. She supported legalizing narcotics. Those are extreme positions — they’re out of step with the people in the 7th Congressional District.”
Other close races expected to tilt control of the House include several in the greater metropolitan regions of Los Angeles and New York City plus on Long Island, where three of four seats are competitive.
Many Americans live in House districts that are not competitive due to gerrymandering — a process by which politicians, often in state legislatures, draw and approve the electoral maps, often to their own political advantages.
“Since the late 1990s, even as presidential elections continued to be close, the number of congressional districts where district-level presidential results more or less matched close national results has fallen by more than half,” Li and Feliz of the Brennan Center said. “More than 80 percent of congressional districts are now decidedly red or blue.”
Most sitting House members win easily, the pair wrote. “In 2020, for example, Biden carried 167 congressional districts by 15 or more percentage points, and Donald Trump carried another 149 districts by the same margin. These districts together make up a whopping 73 percent of all current House seats.”
A state commission is responsible for drawing New Jersey’s electoral boundaries, and independent commissions often create political maps with tighter races.
Other states with competitive House races include Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan — all maps independent commissions drew.
Electoral maps are also playing big roles in two states of the Deep South. After the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, Louisiana was ordered to use maps with two majority-Black districts after the state was found to have illegally gerrymandered voters along racial lines. A similar case played out in Alabama, after federal judges last year ordered the state to implement a new map that includes a new majority-Black congressional district.
Democrats have few opportunities to flip Senate seats and hold a tenuous 51-49 majority in that chamber, but one of the sitting members who votes with Democrats, West Virginian Joe Manchin, a political Independent, is retiring, a move that all but guarantees his seat will go to a Republican in the deeply conservative state.
While Kim is likely to win in New Jersey and become the first Asian American senator from the East Coast, incumbent Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin and Montana are in tough campaigns.
In Texas and Florida, Republican senators are running for and will likely win reelection, denying Democrats chances to flip those seats.
In recent weeks, a Senate race in Nebraska, between an independent former union leader named Dan Osborn and two-term Republican Deb Fischer has emerged as a sleeper race that could have national implications.
For Osborn to win seems unlikely. Trump carried the state with about 58% of the vote in 2020 and the national Republican Party has begun flooding the state with campaign advertising money in recent weeks.
If Harris wins the presidency, her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, the current Minnesota governor, would be able to break tie votes in a deadlocked 50-50 Senate.
Unless one party sweeps to power in Washington, winning the White House and both houses of Congress, significant legislative or regulatory changes are unlikely.
This Congress, the 118th in national history, is on track to pass about 2% of legislation introduced, the lowest rate in decades.
