When New Jersey’s 9th congressional district in Paterson and its suburbs voted for Donald Trump last year, Democrats and Republicans alike wondered how durable the GOP’s new coalition would be. Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon)’s plurality-Hispanic district had long been a core part of the Democratic coalition; was its sharp shift to the right the first step of a long-lasting realignment, or was Trump an anomaly?
Based on last night’s gubernatorial results, the answer might be the latter.
Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, en route to a statewide rout against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, won the 9th district by an astonishing 18-point margin, 58.9% to 40.4%, though that could shift slightly as a few remaining votes are counted. That’s a nearly 20-point swing to the left compared to 2024 and basically matches Joe Biden’s 2020 results in the district, back when it was considered safely blue.
Drilling deeper into the results shows how widespread Sherrill’s gains were, especially among Hispanic voters. The city of Passaic went from Trump +7 to Sherrill +26; Clifton went from Trump +1 to Sherrill +22; Kearny went from Trump +2 to Sherrill +25; and Paterson, the district’s beating heart, went from Harris +28 all the way to Sherrill +71.
To be sure, many of those numbers would not have been seen as particularly impressive just a few years ago, when Democrats’ hold on New Jersey’s nonwhite and urban voters was sturdier. Sherrill’s win is more of a reversion to a favorable baseline than a sign of some grand new coalition.
But a reversion to the baseline may be all that Pou, a top GOP target in 2026, needs to secure a second term.
Pou was chosen for the 9th district seat in the summer of 2024, after Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) died and local party leaders needed to quickly find someone to take his seat; Democrats thought the seat was safely in their column, but got a rude awakening when Pou only beat Republican Billy Prempeh by five points. Republicans, eager to make any gains they can in the 2026 midterms, have spent the last year incessantly attacking Pou and strategizing on how to defeat her.
If Sherrill’s victory is anything close to an indication of where the 9th district electorate stands under the second Trump presidency, though, the GOP will have a very tough time beating Pou, the state’s first Latina congresswoman. Republicans were already having some issues with candidate recruitment in the district; Prempeh and Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino are both in the race, but neither has been able to attract a huge amount of money or attention to the district.
“Our district’s story last night showed that any path for victory in New Jersey is dependent on the support of Latino communities,” Pou campaign manager Morghan Cyr said of the 2025 results. “It’s why Congresswoman Pou beat the top of the ticket last year, why Mikie Sherrill won by a wide margin this year, and why Congresswoman Pou will win again in 2026 and deliver a House majority to Democrats in Washington that fights to make life more affordable for working families across North Jersey.”
Of course, there’s always the caveat that state-level elections aren’t always a good indicator of how voters will vote in federal elections. A voter who based their vote on key state issues like school funding formulas or affordable housing development won’t necessarily apply the same calculus, or come to the same conclusion, in a federal election next year fought along completely different battle lines.
Then again, this year’s race was defined by Donald Trump as much as it was by local issues like utility costs or property taxes, so many voters did have a nationalized mindset when they cast their ballots. And Sherrill’s win is still impressive even compared to the last gubernatorial election; Gov. Phil Murphy won the district by eight points in 2021.
Sherrill’s gains among minority voters weren’t just limited to the 9th district. Every single county swung towards Democrats between 2024 and 2025, but the single biggest swing came in heavily diverse Hudson County, which Sherrill won by 50 points a year after Harris won it by just 28 – perhaps a result of Sherrill’s affordability-focused campaign, perhaps a backlash to Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. The catastrophic losses Democrats experienced with Hispanic voters in 2024 mostly just vanished.
Elsewhere on the state’s congressional map, the other incumbent considered to be at serious risk of losing their seat next year is Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) in the 7th district, a well-off suburban district that narrowly voted for Trump.
Detailed results aren’t yet available in all of the district’s counties, so it’s still too early to say whether Sherrill won it, but it will certainly be close. The two counties entirely within the district, Hunterdon and Warren, shifted 1.3 and 2.8 points towards Sherrill compared to Harris ’24, which if replicated districtwide would be just enough for a win. (Again, results could still change slightly as straggling ballots are counted.)
That’s a foreboding result for Kean, especially since voters in the 7th district have historically voted more Republican in state-level races than in federal ones. In 2021, Ciattarelli carried the current version of the 7th district by more than 12 points over Murphy; a year later, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) lost re-election to Kean by less than three points.
Sherrill does not seem to have won Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s 2nd congressional district in South Jersey, which is viewed as a longshot Democratic target next year. It looks like she did, however, carry the 3rd district, the 5th district, the 6th district, and her own 11th district, all of which voted for Harris by single digits in 2024.
