After the 2024 elections, Republicans were excited about the possibilities that New Jersey’s congressional map presented to them. The map had been drawn by Democrats to elect a mostly Democratic congressional delegation, but thanks to Donald Trump’s enormous gains across the state, their coalition was looking shakier than ever.
After this year’s gubernatorial election, Republicans’ optimism will be hard to sustain. Mikie Sherrill, en route to a double-digit blowout against Jack Ciattarelli, won ten of the state’s 12 congressional districts, and did better in every single district than both Kamala Harris in 2024 and Phil Murphy in 2021.
State-level elections aren’t always perfect indicators of how federal elections will go, and a lot could happen between now and November 2026. But if even some of what transpired this year repeats itself, congressional Democrats are likely feeling fairly good about their prospects in New Jersey.
“It’s a very, very different electorate than what we were looking at just a year ago,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “I think there’s a lot of reasons to think that 2025 was a precursor of 2026. And if it is, I think that Republicans need to hunker down and secure all the patio furniture.”
The swing seats
The two seats, naturally, whose gubernatorial results will draw the most interest are the two that were already gearing up for competitive 2026 races: the wealthy, suburban 7th district and the plurality-Hispanic Paterson-based 9th district.
In Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield)’s 7th district, Sherrill pulled off a two-point, 50.7% to 48.7% win. That’s a bit better than Kamala Harris did in 2024 (when Donald Trump carried the district), slightly worse than Joe Biden did in 2020 – and far, far better than Phil Murphy did in 2021, when he lost the district by more than 12 points.
Republicans will point to the district’s tight result, even amid a statewide landslide for Sherrill, as evidence that Kean is still in good shape heading into next year. The nine Democrats who are running to unseat Kean will undoubtedly still be in for a challenging race ahead in a district that gave Jack Ciattarelli nearly half of the vote.
But in a district that’s typically more conservative in state-level races than in federal ones, Sherrill’s win is an auspicious sign. The well-off suburbs of New Jersey have never warmed to Donald Trump, but many of them were still willing to support more moderate-leaning state Republicans like Ciattarelli; this year, much of that residual support evaporated.
“The fact that Sherrill won it bodes well for Democrats next year. It was a seat where there has historically been a decent amount of Republican strength,” said Matt Klein of the Cook Political Report, which moved the district from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” last week. “It’s not an easy flip, but at this point, it’s hard to say that Republicans are still favored to hold it.”
As for Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon)’s 9th district, the news is much more unambiguously bad for Republicans. The district shockingly voted for Trump last year thanks to Democrats’ collapse among Hispanic (and Arab American, and Jewish, and middle-class) voters, but it snapped back in a huge way this year, voting for Sherrill 59.4% to 39.9%. That’s a better result than even Biden got in 2020.
Even before November 4, some Republicans questioned whether the perfect storm of factors that led to Trump’s victory in 2024 could be repeated in a midterm election, when voters are likely to be more sour on the incumbent party. Republicans have also had some recruitment issues in the district; the two GOP candidates running, 2024 nominee Billy Prempeh and Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino, have struggled to attract much money or attention to the race.
But Sherrill’s massive victory, a return to the district’s historical Democratic roots, will make it even harder for Republicans to argue that the district is at the top of the target list next year.
“It just seems like this is probably not the right cycle to put a seat like this in play,” Klein said. “In a presidential year, when turnout dynamics are maybe more similar to what they were like in 2024, it’s not out of the question. But as for 2026, it seems like a pretty tall task.”
The wider field
Sherrill’s strong performance also extended to every other Democratic-controlled district in New Jersey; Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch)’s 6th district, Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran)’s 3rd district, and Sherrill’s own 11th district, all of which were at least somewhat close in last year’s presidential race and the 2021 gubernatorial race, went to Sherrill by double digits. (She won Pallone’s district by 22 points, the most dominant Democratic performance in years.)
The biggest improvement of all, though, came in Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City)’s majority-Hispanic 8th district, which swung a whopping 27 points towards Democrats when compared with Harris’s abysmal 2024 performance. Sherrill’s 51-point win nearly matched Hillary Clinton’s 54-point victory in 2016, back before the modern rightward swing among Hispanic voters had begun.
The one Democratic-held district where things look a little shakier is Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly)’s 5th district, where many of the Bergen County voters who shifted to Trump in 2024 stayed with Ciattarelli this year. Sherrill won the seat by a little over six percentage points, 53% to 46.6%, making it the second-closest district in the state after the 7th.
Long-term, that’s an ominous sign for Democrats that Bergen County may no longer be a reliable Democratic bastion. But Gottheimer is an unusually strong incumbent, and there’s little sign that Republicans will be able to make a serious play for the district in the near future.
As for Republican-held districts, Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester)’s 4th district remains as safely Republican as it ever was, voting for Ciattarelli by 29 points. Sherrill did better than both Harris and Murphy in much of the district, but the Orthodox Jewish hub of Lakewood voted so overwhelmingly in favor of Ciattarelli the topline number barely shifted.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s 2nd district, though, isn’t quite as secure. Sherrill made broad improvements across the board in South Jersey, and only lost the 2nd district by seven points, 53.3% to 46.0%; that’s not enough to immediately put the district on the competitive playing field, but with four Democrats vying to unseat Van Drew next year, there’s at least a small window of opportunity for them.
“It’s the sort of seat I could see coming in play in a huge wave year, at the very end of the cycle, if there’s a sleeper Democratic candidate who’s raising a ton of money and has built a good ground operation,” Klein said. “But Van Drew is a known commodity down there. He’s a pretty well-respected guy.”
The map, four years on
When the Democratic team on the Congressional Redistricting Commission drew what became the state’s current congressional map in 2021, they were doing so in something of a state of panic. Murphy had just nearly lost the governor’s office, and Democrats wanted to protect as many of their ten congressional incumbents as they could; they ultimately landed on a map that made nine Murphy-won districts that they believed could withstand a GOP wave, plus one highly competitive seat in the 7th district.
The map basically did its job in 2022, dooming Rep. Tom Malinowski to lose against Kean but otherwise keeping Democrats well out of the danger zone. It wobbled a bit in 2024, when Trump surged in the 5th and 9th districts, but still re-elected every Democratic incumbent and kept the party’s disproportionate 9-3 majority intact.
But it wasn’t until this year that Democrats got to see how their map would do in the event of a statewide Democratic wave. The answer: pretty well, though they’ll have to wait until 2026 to see just how well it will work in practice. Democrats are feeling positive about the prospect of unseating Kean, while Republicans can’t look at the 2025 results and be optimistic about flipping any districts.
“Democrats should clearly be pleased with their work,” Rasmussen said. “They should be pleased with Justice Wallace saying it’s their turn.”
As other states around the country have geared up to gerrymander their congressional maps in one direction or the other, New Jersey has steered well clear of those discussions. Part of that is because it would be an enormous logistical headache to nullify the work of the redistricting commission – and a new map wouldn’t be able to come into effect before the 2026 elections anyways – but part of that is also because Democrats aren’t that dissatisfied with the map they’ve already got.
“Could they make it safer? Sure,” Klein said. “There are ways that they could carve up this map to make it safer. But they’re not ways that are going to be palatable to a lot of the incumbents in the delegation or community groups throughout the state.”
