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    • How Democrats Failed to Generate 2024 Numbers
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    How Democrats Failed to Generate 2024 Numbers

    Umito Posted on

    4 minutes of reading

    Following Tuesday election results, Democrats across the state and country are trying to understand what went wrong and what can be learned when it comes to voter outreach in the upcoming election.

    While New Jersey retained its blue state status thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’ victory, the race was the closest in more than three decades and President Donald Trump managed to win in areas considered by many to be safely blue, including Passaic County.

    Harris won the Garden State with 2,100,255 votes, or 51.6 percent of the vote, to Trump’s 1,894,266 votes, or 46.5 percent of the vote.

    Gov. Phil Murphy said during a news conference Wednesday that in hindsight, his 2021 re-election effort — which he managed to win by a margin of just 84,286 votes compared to 303,527 votes in 2017 — would have could have been the proverbial “canary in the coal”. mine.”

    But it’s not enough to blame messages or voters attracted to Trump’s xenophobic and bigoted comments, according to the governor.

    “Saying it’s just a messaging issue, let’s all get off the hook, we’re doing everything right and we just can’t talk about what we’re doing. It’s too naive,” Murphy said. “It is too early to analyze this. Have we been emphasizing the wrong things? We haven’t communicated that, have we? Was there racism or sexism involved? I think it will be a combination of all of these.

    How are the numbers broken down in New Jersey?

    According to the Associated Press, among voters who went for Harris, 17% were between 18 and 29, 26% were between 30 and 44, 31% were between 45 and 64 and 27% were 65 or older. Meanwhile, for Trump, 15% were 18-29, 23% were 30-44, 34% were 45-64, and 28 were 65 and older.

    Trump’s voters were also overwhelmingly white, with 84% of his support coming from white voters, 3% from black, 8% from Latino and 4% identifying as another race.

    Harris saw 66% of her support from white voters, 17% from black voters, 11% from Latinos and 6% from another race. Benjamin Dworkin, founding director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship at Rowan University, said it’s too early to say why so many voters connected with Trump this time around.

    “The analysis has not been done yet,” he said. “Meanwhile, party leaders, pundits and other opinion makers will pontificate about what they think. These ideas could all contain some truth, even if they contradict each other.

    Dworkin also emphasized that it’s never “one thing” that causes a given candidate to lose an election and that “it’s almost always a combination of things that determines an outcome.”

    He said parties can always do more and the next step for Democrats would be to “talk with the voters they lost and have real conversations about why they voted the way they did done” because “no one will overcome a challenge without first understanding the source of the problem.

    Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of the FDU Poll, said what has been overlooked in this election is the negative perception of the economy.

    “New Jersey is becoming more like the rest of the country because the rest of the country is now facing the same issues that New Jersey has been facing, which is affordability, especially in housing,” he said . “When people feel that their lives are becoming unaffordable, they vote for the party that is not in power. The fact that the other side doesn’t have good solutions is basically irrelevant.”

    Charlie Stile: How is Trump’s earthquake shaking New Jersey Democrats ahead of 2025 gubernatorial race?

    Low Democratic turnout in New Jersey

    Another problem in this week’s election was low Democratic turnout – which was also the case in New Jersey. Cassino said low turnout is nothing new in the Garden State.

    He noted that there has long been a problem of low turnout in central urban areas of the state and that the oft-discussed county Democratic machines should be “really effective in getting large numbers of voters to the polls, and in some areas they do that I haven’t done in the last few cycles.

    He went on to say, “Democrats must listen to these voters and actually invest in breaking away from the voting mechanism that has been taken for granted for the past decade. »

    Dworkin said New Jersey might be on the verge of being considered a swing state, but the overall analysis of why the margins were so narrower for Democrats, especially in heavily Hispanic communities, doesn’t work. is not thorough enough and will take some time to review.

    He did offer hope to Democrats, however, because as things stand, there is still a significant voter registration advantage.

    “There are reasons why all of these people registered as Democrats and, if the first Trump presidency is any indicator, those reasons will not be forgotten in a second Trump presidency,” Dworkin said.

    Cassino doesn’t see New Jersey moving toward swing state status, but it is “definitely a more polarized state than it was in the past.”

    As for what comes next in New Jersey, Dworkin said Trump’s approval rating will be a factor because, with the exception of Murphy’s re-election three years ago, the state has always voted for a governor representing the party that did not win the White House the previous year. dating back several decades.

    “Republican George HW Bush won in 1988, and Democrat Jim Florio in 1989. Four years later, Democrat Bill Clinton won in 1992 and Republican Christine Todd Whitman won in 1993,” he said. “Many Democrats envision a very hospitable political environment in 2025 as Trump returns to the White House, meaning New Jersey may well prove to be anything but a battleground state. »

    Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. E-mail: [email protected]

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