OPINION
At 5:31 AM, just a few days after the election I got a text from Someone Important. Someone Important was criticizing me for not mentioning in a recent TV interview that Black voters were responsible for the unusual margins that favored Mikie Sherrill’s big win. I and my colleagues had, he said, “missed the roots of the landslide completely.”
Someone Important was right. I had not mentioned the importance of Black or Latino turnout in this election, though I had said in other interviews that Democrats cannot win statewide races without black and brown votes. White voters in New Jersey vote red. Exit polls bear this out.
New Jersey is one of the nation’s most diverse states. One in four New Jerseyans speaks a language other than English at home. But White voters would have delivered a victory to Jack Ciatterelli by 52 to 47 percent, just as they would have delivered New Jersey’s electoral votes to Donald Trump three times.
As in previous elections, it is New Jersey’s white voters who drive the Republican vote. White voters comprised 70% of the electorate in this election. In fact, just white voters 45 and older were the majority of the electorate (52%). In contrast, Black and Latino voters were underrepresented in this election, each comprising just 10 percent of the voters, far from the estimated 30 percent of eligible voters they actually comprise. Black voters went 94% for Sherrill. Hispanic voters broke two-to-one for the Democrat. All non-white voters together gave Sherrill a landslide of 77-22 percent. They made all the difference. What is different in this election is that white women voted for the Democrat by 54 to 46 percent, a departure from their Trumpian preferences in previous years.
Meanwhile, Republicans won voters who did not go to college (55-45%), demonstrating once again how far the Democratic Party has moved away from its populist roots. That is important because white voters with no college degree comprised 31% of the of this year’s electorate and gave a resounding 63-37 advantage to Jack, while white men with no college degree bested that by five percentage points (69%).
Some speculated that Sherrill would peel off women from the Republican Party. That was not the case: Male and female Republicans voted for the Republican nominee in equal percentages. More telling was moderation.
Moderates comprised one-third of the electorate and broke almost two-to-one for the Democrat. This was important because 41% of the electorate said they were voting for Sherrill in order to oppose Trump. Overall, 56% disapproved of Trump, the same percentage that voted for Sherrill but, worse, 48% said they “strongly disapproved” of Trump. The Republican campaign thought it would be able to overcome this resistance.
Instead, disapproval of the President only drove more voters to the polls. A majority of voters said the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement had “gone too far” and voted overwhelmingly for Sherrill. Moreover, three-quarters of the electorate said they had decided their vote even before the October torrent of advertisements. Voters’ favorable and unfavorable views of the candidates were informed by their views of the President and tightly tracked the final result: Mikie’s favorable was 56% and Jack’s was 45%.
My important early morning texter may have heard on the same TV show a Republican state senator saying that Sherrill’s margin of victory was due to “people reliant upon food stamps” who “never voted before.” There is no evidence for of that claim. Just 3% said they did not vote in last year’s presidential election. Some newly-registered voters came of age, others moved into the state.
Eleven percent said this was their first time voting for governor. But that is normal because New Jersey gubernatorial elections occur in off years when there is no election for president or the US Senate or the 435 members of the House of Representatives.
More interesting is that nearly everyone (94%) said that corruption is a problem in New Jersey, and yet corruption was not a central campaign issue. And these 94 percent voted the same way as the rest of the population (55-45). More alarming is that 93% of voters said they are “concerned about political violence in the United States.” In fact, 70 percent of voters said they were “very concerned.” Yet, those 70% were on both sides of the partisan, dividing in exact proportion to the result of the race (56-43).
The only thing missed by the non-partisan pollsters was the level of turnout. (For-profit and partisan pollsters are another thing.) Modelling turnout is always a matter of flying partially blind. Not everyone we interview follows through on their intentions. We model for that. But we model on recent elections. Previous elections saw robust Republican turnout and underwhelming Democratic turnout. In this election, Republican turnout was exceptionally robust, and we modeled for this: Ciatterelli won more votes this year than Democrat Gov. Murphy won four years ago. But Democratic turnout was enthusiastic, nearly at Presidential election levels. Overall, voter turnout was 14 percentage points higher than any of the three previous elections for governor.
So, yup. We missed that.
Peter J. Woolley is a professor of government at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the founder of the FDU Poll.
