In less than a month, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill will take office as New Jersey’s 57th governor, having defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a victory more dominant than almost anyone believed possible.
After Gov. Phil Murphy’s close call in 2021 and Donald Trump’s unexpectedly strong showing in 2024, Democrats were nervous – and Republicans were giddy – that long-blue New Jersey might be on its way to becoming a swing state. That may well be true in the long term, but at least this year, Sherrill snapped it right back to how it used to vote, winning by 14.4 percentage points.
Sherrill managed that in part by replicating the best parts of the otherwise lackluster Democratic coalitions from 2021 and 2024. She matched Murphy’s 2021 strong results in the state’s heavily diverse cities, which had swung dramatically towards Trump in 2024, while mostly retaining the gains Harris and Joe Biden made in more suburban and wealthier areas. And she did it with an enormously large electorate: more than 3.3 million voters cast ballots, 600,000 more than did so in 2021.
To close out 2025, here are a series of maps that show the breadth and depth of the 2025 blue wave, including how different parts of the state voted compared to past years, what turnout looked like, and whether your town flipped from one party to the other.
For detailed maps of the 2025 results by gubernatorial and legislative district, click here.
For town-by-town data on the 2025 gubernatorial election (and other past statewide elections), click here. And for town-by-town data on this year’s Assembly elections, click here.
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2021 vs. 2025
The Democratic result in 2021 was rather famously bad: Phil Murphy cratered almost everywhere compared to prior years, losing ground in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike.
It makes sense, then, that Sherrill’s much healthier victory – she won by 11 points more than Murphy – would involve regaining ground almost everywhere. An unpopular Joe Biden was a boondoggle for Murphy, dragging him down across the state; a similarly unpopular Donald Trump proved to be a similarly damaging albatross for Ciattarelli.
Sherrill’s biggest gains compared to Murphy generally came in South Jersey, where she flipped back a number of counties that Murphy had lost in 2021, and in the outer suburbs of North Jersey. Westville, in Gloucester County, shifted 32 points towards Sherrill; Bound Brook, in Somerset County, shifted 28 points.
The few areas where Sherrill couldn’t match Murphy’s 2021 performance, meanwhile, are generally home to either large Hispanic or Jewish populations (or, in a handful of cases, both). By far the most extreme example of that was Lakewood, where local the Orthodox leadership’s switch from Murphy to Ciattarelli shifted the town a whopping 58 points rightwards, but it also showed up to lesser extents in towns like Passaic, Millburn, and North Bergen.
2024 vs. 2025
Comparing the 2025 election to last year’s presidential election, meanwhile, yields a more varied result. Kamala Harris’s performance in some parts of the state was historically bad, but it was perfectly alright in others, and Sherrill tended to do best (relatively speaking) where Harris did worst.
Nowhere was that more true than in North Jersey’s urban core, especially in majority-Hispanic cities where Harris absolutely cratered. The city of Paterson, for instance, swung 34 points to towards Trump between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections – and then swung 43 points back towards Sherrill this year. West New York shifted 44 points, Perth Amboy shifted 47 points, and the biggest of all was Brian Stack’s fiefdom of Union City, which shifted 52 points leftwards from 2024 to 2025.
Outside of urban areas, Sherrill gains were more muted, and in a handful of areas she actually lost some ground. The wealthiest regions of the state – northern Bergen County, the train station towns in Union and Somerset Counties, parts of the Shore in Monmouth County – shifted a bit towards Ciattarelli, one of the only bright spots for him anywhere.
It’s not a perfect correlation, but the map comparing 2024 and 2025 has a fair number of similarities with the map comparing 2020 to 2024, just in reverse. Sherrill’s victory broke new electoral ground in a few parts of the state, but in most areas, she simply reversed recent losses and returned the Democratic coalition to what it once was; despite one being a state-level election and the other being a federal one, Sherrill’s coalition has more in common with Biden’s than anyone else’s.
Vote density
As is typical on New Jersey election maps, it can be difficult to tell just from a standard geographic map how dominant Sherrill’s victory was, since the state’s reddest areas take up quite a bit of space but don’t actually cast very many votes.
A map that depicts vote margins, then, is a good corrective. It suddenly becomes clear just how important the state’s Turnpike corridor is; from Paterson down to Camden, there are hundreds of dense towns that collectively cast millions of votes, and a hefty majority of those votes went to Sherrill.
Naturally, the two biggest vote producers for Sherrill were the state’s two largest cities, Newark and Jersey City, which together netted her more than 80,000 votes over Ciattarelli. Another 12 big cities and suburbs netted her at least 10,000 votes each: Paterson, East Orange, Montclair, Somerset County’s Franklin Township, Cherry Hill, West Orange, Union City, Trenton, Union County’s Union Township, Edison, Maplewood, and Irvington.
Ciattarelli, meanwhile, had one big vote producer: Lakewood, where near-unanimous support from the Orthodox Jewish community netted him 32,903 votes, close to as many as Sherrill got out of far larger Newark. But nowhere else in the state could come close to matching Lakewood, and many of Ciattarelli’s strongest towns in the far south and northwest cast only a few hundred votes each.
All in all, Ciattarelli netted 150,744 votes from the seven counties he carried; Sherrill came close to matching that total in Essex County alone.
Turnout
In addition to getting strong vote margins almost everywhere in the state, Sherrill and Democrats were also able to partially address a problem that has long plagued them in off-year elections: low urban turnout.
Compared to the 2021 election, voters in New Jersey’s diverse, deep-blue cities came out at astonishingly high rates: while the state overall hit 128% of its 2021 turnout, Jersey City was at 144%, Paterson at 152%, Elizabeth at 161%, and Newark, the state’s ultimate Democratic bastion, at 150%. Sherrill did around one percentage point worse in Newark, margin-wise, than Murphy in 2021 – but because of the massively increased turnout, she netted more than 10,000 more votes out of it.
(The biggest turnout boost of all, though, came in the state’s reddest town: Lakewood, where fully twice as many people voted in 2025 as in 2021, gifting Ciattarelli a huge number of new votes.)
That’s not to say that urban turnout matched suburban turnout – it would be a truly remarkable day in New Jersey politics if that were to happen – but rather that it came closer to parity than usual. For example, while deep-blue Camden and its somewhat-less-blue suburban neighbor of Cherry Hill have similar populations, Cherry Hill cast around three times as many votes as Camden this year – but that’s still better than 2021, when it cast around four times as many votes.
Flipped towns
One almost unbelievable statistic: 93 towns – one-sixth of all towns in the state – voted for Jack Ciattarelli in 2021 and Mikie Sherrill in 2025.
Those towns had all sorts of different demographics and were spread all across the state; all but two counties have at least one Ciattarelli-Sherrill town, and the only two that don’t, Mercer and Hudson, didn’t have any towns Ciattarelli won in 2021 in the first place. Some of the Ciattarelli-Sherrill towns are perennially competitive; others, like Keyport, Manville, and North Arlington, are flips that few would have seen coming.
One lonely town, meanwhile, was a Murphy 2021-Ciattarelli 2025 town: Woodcliff Lake in northern Bergen County, where Sherrill did unexpectedly poorly compared to the rest of the state.
57 towns voted for Trump in 2024 and Sherrill in 2025, a more eclectic mix that includes many of the Ciattarelli-Sherrill towns as well as some largely Hispanic towns like Kearny, Fairview, and Clifton that Trump “shouldn’t” have been winning in the first place. Eight towns went for Harris in 2024 and Ciattarelli in 2025, all of them in wealthier suburban or Shore communities.
Ciattarelli 2021 -> Sherrill 2025 (93 towns): Aberdeen, Berkeley Heights, Berlin Borough, Bernards, Bernardsville, Boonton Town, Bridgewater, Califon, Carneys Point, Chatham Township, Chesterfield, Cinnaminson, Clinton Town, Delaware, Denville, East Rutherford, Eatontown, Egg Harbor City, Egg Harbor Township, Elmwood Park, Fair Haven, Florence, Galloway, Garwood, Green Brook, Hainesport, Hamilton (Atlantic), Hasbrouck Heights, Hawthorne, High Bridge, Highlands, Hillsborough, Hillsdale, Interlaken, Jamesburg, Keyport, Lake Como, Little Falls, Mansfield (Burlington), Manville, Matawan, Medford, Medford Lakes, Mendham Township, Middlesex, Milford, Millstone (Somerset), Milltown, Millville, Mine Hill, Monroe (Gloucester), Mount Ephraim, Mount Olive, National Park, Neptune City, Newton, North Arlington, Norwood, Nutley, Ocean (Monmouth), Pemberton Borough, Pemberton Township, Phillipsburg, Pitman, Ramsey, Raritan Borough, Riverside, Rochelle Park, Rockaway Borough, Rockaway Township, Sayreville, Somers Point, South Amboy, South Hackensack, South Plainfield, South River, South Toms River, Tinton Falls, Ventnor City, Vineland, Waldwick, Watchung, West Deptford, Westville, Wharton, Winfield, Woodbine, Woodbury Heights, Woodland Park, Wood-Ridge, Woodstown, Woolwich, Wrightstown
Murphy 2021 -> Ciattarelli 2025 (1 town): Woodcliff Lake
Trump 2024 -> Sherrill 2025 (57 towns): Aberdeen, Berlin Borough, Clifton, Denville, East Rutherford, Eatontown, Egg Harbor Township, Elmwood Park, Fairview, Galloway, Garfield, Hasbrouck Heights, Hawthorne, Highlands, Jamesburg, Kearny, Keyport, Little Falls, Little Ferry, Lodi, Mansfield (Burlington), Manville, Matawan, Middlesex, Milford, Milltown, Millville, Mine Hill, Monroe (Gloucester), Moonachie, Mount Olive, National Park, Newton, North Arlington, Nutley, Ocean (Monmouth), Passaic, Phillipsburg, Ramsey, Raritan Borough, Ridgefield, Rochelle Park, Rockaway Borough, Rockaway Township, Sayreville, Somers Point, South Amboy, South Hackensack, South River, South Toms River, Ventnor City, Waldwick, Westville, Winfield, Woodland Park, Wood-Ridge, Wrightstown
Harris 2024 -> Ciattarelli 2025 (8 towns): Allendale, Barnegat Light, Ho-Ho-Kus, Little Silver, Mendham Borough, Peapack & Gladstone, Shrewsbury Borough, Woodcliff Lake
