Is New Jersey the next swing state?

The 2024 election was a solid enough victory for Donald Trump, but hardly a “red wave.” Except in a few states like New Jersey. There, the polling average had Kamala Harris up by 15 points but she only won the state by 6. Looking to past elections wouldn’t have helped predict the relatively close outcome either: Trump improved on his 2020 margin by 10 points. If every state had shifted that much, Trump would have won Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire in addition to the more traditional swing states last November, while Virginia would have been within the recount margin. In fact, New Jersey saw the second-largest swing toward Republicans in the country, behind only neighboring New York.

Now, does that single result make New Jersey a swing state? Let’s not get carried away: it was still only the 11th-most competitive state in 2024. That’s a long way off from quintessential swing states like its other1 neighbor, Pennsylvania, which voted only 0.2 points to the right of the national popular vote in 2024. And sometimes, surprising shifts in the presidential margin prove to be one-off flukes. For example, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008, moving the state from R+21 to D+1. But how did Indiana vote by 2024? Basically back to where it started at R+19.

So as much as we keep warning you not to read too much into Tuesday’s results, this is probably the race with the biggest long-term consequences for the electoral map.

The two paths toward a redder New Jersey

New Jersey’s rightward swing in 2024 followed a familiar pattern: Trump picked up support among nonwhite residents and maintained his strong edge among voters without college degrees. Those trends helped him flip five of New Jersey’s 21 counties. And every NJ county shifted at least somewhat toward Trump between 2020 and 2024.

Trump’s gains were particularly dramatic in the New York City exurbs, especially in areas with large Hispanic populations. Passaic County — which is 43 percent Hispanic and has a lower proportion of college-educated residents than the statewide average — moved from D +17 in 2020 to R +3 in 2024. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won that county was 1992.