After now President-elect Donald Trump clinched the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency Tuesday night, political analysts quickly pointed out where Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign fell short. NJ Spotlight News interviewed Ashley Koning of the Eagleton Poll and political analyst Micah Rasmussen to get their impressions both nationally and for New Jersey.
National exit polls and returns revealed Harris under-performed with three key Democratic voting blocs: Black men who’ve been loyal voters for the party; Hispanic and Latino voters who broke for Trump this year; and younger voters. And all of those patterns were evident in New Jersey as well, where Trump made historic gains in counties that haven’t shifted this drastically in decades.
“It looks like two counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020 have flipped to Trump in 2024, Somerset County and Morris County,” said Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Somerset is a little bit more of a surprise.
“Maybe the biggest surprise is Passaic County flipping,” he said. “It was Passaic County becoming Republican and going for Trump as well. It’s just really a wild situation that you’re talking about in a blue state like New Jersey, these three counties behaving very atypically based on past election results.”
Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, added: “This is something we’ve seen in other blue states like California and New York. Where we see in these, kind of comfortable blue states, Republicans have been more galvanized and have been coming out and voting more and registering more within these typically blue areas.
“It leaves a question for the Republican Party in New Jersey, which has kind of had this ‘will it or won’t it’ attitude when it comes to Trump, sometimes embracing him, sometimes not,” she said. “It really brings into question kind of which path of politics New Jersey Republicanism will take for the 2025 GOP gubernatorial [election], given that the kind of Republicanism we typically see in the state is more moderate. So will the candidates embrace Trump?”
