Is New Jersey becoming a swing state?

When New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli went on Fox News in late October and predicted New Jersey could go for Trump, Democrats in the blue state laughed him off. Most were so sure their state was true blue, they were spending their time volunteering in Pennsylvania.

But on Wednesday, after the state delivered New Jersey’s 14 electoral votes to Kamala Harris, but just barely, it was the state’s Trump supporters who were having the laugh. And making more bold predictions.

“I think New Jersey will be a swing state in 2028,” Matthew Diullio-Jusino, a Trump supporter who attended multiple New Jersey events leading up to the election, said Wednesday. He blamed the state’s GOP leaders for not trying harder to win the state. “If they were supportive of President Trump we would have pushed him over the top. They just kind of wrote it off.”

The margin for Harris in New Jersey stood at 4.1% on Wednesday, the smallest since 1992, when the state began its nine-election streak of Electoral College blue by voting for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush by a margin of 2.37%. Biden carried the state by 16 points in 2020.

Andy Kim, the popular Democratic congressman who was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, outperformed Harris by about 4.5 points.

But Kim was in some sense an outlier: His campaign took on the state’s entrenched Democratic Party leadership, and he will take the seat formerly held by Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator who was convicted of bribery and corruption charges.

Democrats were soul-searching and pointing fingers. Former State Sen. Loretta Weinberg pointedly suggested on X that her fellow N.J. Democrats “should spend a little less time writing postcards to Georgia and a little more time finding out what our own residents are thinking.”

Gov. Phil Murphy called the presidential results “sobering, including in New Jersey.”

“How could it not be?” he told reporters at a press conference in Newark. “We’ve been trying to war game this and do a post mortem, and we still don’t have all the answers.”

He said his administration would work with Trump as it did during Murphy’s first three years. But he also vowed to fight any actions the Trump administration might take against people in New Jersey, such as mass deportations, or changing the state’s reproductive health or gun laws.

“We’re willing to try anything ... ,” Murphy said. “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground we will seize that as much as anybody.”

In retrospect, he said his own close reelection in 2021, where he won by just 3.3 percentage points over Ciattarelli, was “a canary in the coal mine.”

“I do not think we’re a swing state,” he told reporters at a press conference in Newark. “But I tell you the mistake you can make right now is to put your feet up and pretend this is an aberration.”

With about 94% of New Jersey’s vote counted, Harris had 2.09 million votes, compared to Trump’s 1.89 million. In 2020, Biden ended up with 2.6 million New Jersey votes, to Trump’s 1.88 million.

Murphy said his team was trying to determine whether the issue for Democrats was a matter of substance or message. He said Harris was hamstrung by voters “not knowing her as well, short runway,” and “kitchen table issues like immigration, crime and safety.”

“Regardless of the facts, the other guys played those cards very effectively,” he said. And he said he believed racism and sexism played a role in Harris’ loss.

“My gut told me it did play some role,” he said, “which sucks.”

Michael Donohue, chairman of the Cape May County GOP, said for a state like New Jersey, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly a million voters, to come so close to going for Trump showed that his coalition was broadening.

“I think New Jersey is reflective of what happened across the country,” Donohue said. “For Trump to do that well in New Jersey, he had to draw a broad coalition of voters: young people, Democrats, Republicans, independents, Hispanics. You can’t do that without getting outside of just your base.”

Johnny Exadaktilos, a pub owner in Atlantic City and Republican who has actively opposed Democrats there, said he thought voters in New Jersey were still reeling from COVID restrictions imposed by the Murphy administration that hurt people economically. “A lot of the COVID regulations were beyond overkill,” he said. “It exposed how special interests tried sabotaging the country. Lives were ruined.”

South Jersey counties that went for Biden in 2020 that flipped to Trump this time included Gloucester, Cumberland and Atlantic. Monmouth County went for Trump by 3 points in 2020 and by 12 points in 2024. Cape May County continued its red tradition with a 20-point Trump win.

The shocker was in North Jersey: Passaic County, which went for Biden by 16 points in 2020, went for Trump by 3 points. Democrats fell short in the contested 7th District in North Jersey, where Tom Kean Jr. held off Democrat Sue Altman. Still, nine of New Jersey’s 11 congressional districts are represented by Democrats, and Democrats control both state houses.

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, said Passaic County’s South Paterson is home to one of the country’s largest Muslim American populations, which may have played a role similar to Dearborn, Mich., in siphoning away votes from Harris. It also has a large Latino population, about 40%.

He said Democrats have now had two closer-than-expected elections: in 2021, when Murphy just narrowly beat Ciattarelli, and Tuesday’s election. With the governor’s race looming in 2025, he said Democrats should be doing some soul-searching.

“If you’re a Democrat, you don’t want to be flying blind now having been hit twice,” he said. “The party is on auto-pilot.”

Republican State Sen. Vince Polistina from Atlantic County said the results showed that Trump has fundamentally changed the party, including in New Jersey. “It’s become a party of working-class and blue-collar people. As a Republican Party, I think we have to recognize he’s forever changed the party, and we have to embrace it.”

Diullio-Jusino, of Williamstown, whose father is Puerto Rican, said Democrats just assumed the support of Latinos, especially after the garbage joke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

“It looks like the Madison Square Garden joke didn’t move the needle,” he said. “I think Puerto Ricans are not soft, we’re strong people. We can take a joke. Part of making America great again is bringing comedy back. We’re tired of the tears. It’s family values, conservative family values.”

But while the Democrats were soul-searching, it was the Republicans who had clarity after Tuesday, like the voters in Pennsville, a small and sleepy town along the Delaware River, in Salem County, where political signs for the local sheriff’s race far outnumbered national politics.

Upon exiting the Pennsville Fire & Rescue Station, most said one word when asked what candidate brought them to the polls. Then they continued on to their cars.

“Trump.”

Only a few cared to elaborate.

“I guess I gotta say ‘why’ but isn’t it obvious.? I don’t like the direction this country is going in,” said Tom Blemings, who voted with his wife, Lori.

Staff writer Jason Nark contributed to this article.