In a town where Republicans usually measure victory by how large the margin is, not whether they win, the results of a special election in Oakland on Tuesday could portend big trouble for down-ballot GOP candidates in the November midterm election.
Oakland Councilman Kevin Slasinski plummeted from 50% in November to 29% just four months later after a court-ordered do-over of an election that ended in a tie resulted in his landslide ouster. His opponent, independent Matthew Dumpert, unseated him by 1,155 votes.
Donald Trump won Oakland by 11 points in 2024, but last year, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli won by less than half that, 4.7 points. In that 2025 election, another Republican incumbent, John McCann, a two-time congressional candidate, lost re-election to his borough council seat by 77 votes.
Democratic State Chairman LeRoy Jones, Jr. said this week’s do-over election “should serve as a stark reminder that the Republican Party is losing more and more ground in New Jersey.”
“While one election is certainly not enough to show a pattern, what is clear is that voters throughout the country are tired of Donald Trump’s disastrous economic plan, which has yielded only more economic instability and higher prices,” Jones stated. “Voters are tired of watching Donald Trump trample the Constitution with the help of the Republican Party.”
Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said the Oakland results show “a continuing deterioration of Republicans’ position since their high-water mark of Trump’s last time on the ballot.”
“To borrow from the Simpsons, he is both the cause of and solution to all of their problems,” said Rasmussen.
After Trump came within six points of carrying New Jersey two years ago, making considerable inroads among Hispanic voters and winning 61 municipalities that Joe Biden had carried in 2020, they suddenly became energized about their chances to make gains there the following year.
But the landscape shifted quickly during the first year of Trump’s second term, and by October, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll showed his favorables in New Jersey were upside down at 40%-53%. Despite predictions of a Republican year, Democrat Mikie Sherrill was elected governor by 14 points and a margin of almost 479,000 votes; Democrats ousted five incumbent Republicans in the State Assembly.
“They’ve gone from the catbird seat to a level playing field to the crapper in just a year and a half, and it’s moving away from them,” Rasmussen said. “We always need to remember that in New Jersey, when you’ve seen one election, you’ve seen one election, when you put this next to the surge in enthusiasm of Democratic voters that we’re seeing in NJ-11 and elsewhere, the combination appears to be deadly.”
Rasmussen said the fall election could present some unanticipated opportunities for Democrats at the local level.
“The signal to Democratic candidates everywhere could not be any clearer: 2026 may be the best year to run in a generation,” he said.
Do-over elections are not always harbingers of future contests.
After the 2021 general election for a seat on the Maywood Borough Council ended in a tie, a February 2022 repeat contest was won by Republican Danyell Cicarelli by about 6 points. That fall, in Biden’s mid-term election, Democrats won two council seats by over 300 votes, about 8 points. Still, Maywood, which gave Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) 61% of the vote in 2020, gave Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) 55% in 2022 after redistricting moved it to the 9th district.
There are asterisks associated with the recent Maywood election: the Republican incumbent was defeated by an independent, not a Democrat; Dumpert had the backing of local Democrats and a faction of the Republicans who had mounted aggressive primary challenges in 2022 and 2024.
Republican-turned-Democrat Linda Schwager served as mayor of Oakland for 12 years before narrowly losing in 2023. The borough backed Republican Curtis Bashaw for the U.S. Senate in 2024 by 10 points, and Republican Billy Prempeh won Oakland in his race for Congress against Democrat Nellie Pou in New Jersey’s 9th district by 14 points.
State Sen. Holly Schepisi, a Republican who represents Oakland, disagreed that the special election was a signal of what’s to come in the fall.
“Oakland is an outlier,” Schepisi said. “I don’t think it’s indicative of anything else.”
