NJ Dems beat GOP early votes in a positive sign for Mikie Sherrill

Democratic voters in New Jersey are superior to Republicans Their peers in early voting turnout – which is It bodes well for gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mickey Sherrill With just over a week until Election Day.

Of the nearly 635,000 mail-in and in-person early voting ballots in New Jersey, 57% were registered Democrats, 26% were Republicans, and 17% had another party affiliation. According to the latest collected data Written by Michael Prosser, Director of Data Science at DecisionDeskHQ.

That’s a better forecast than Republican Jack Ciattarelli had at the end of early voting in 2021, when 58% of mail-in ballots and in-person early votes were Democratic, 22% Republican, and 20% had another affiliation.

But the GOP still has a roughly 202,000-vote primary vote gap with Democrats, and initial in-person voting trends are only worsening the Republican margin.

“We are starting to see a narrowing of viable paths for Republicans,” Micah Rasmussen, director of the Ribovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, told The Washington Post, warning that “we have a lot of votes left.”

Some Republicans take solace in the fact that, too often, their voters are wary of voting in person. But Chiattarelli’s campaign pushed his voters to cast their ballots early.

Rasmussen also explained that Democrats outperformed Republicans on Election Day by about 140,000 in 2024 and 16,000 in 2022, while Republicans outperformed Democrats by about 1,700 votes in 2021.

“In any of these three historical examples, you can see how (the current early voting gap) would be a difficult task compared to our experience in those last three elections,” Rasmussen added.

Moreover, the Democrats’ lead in in-person voting, which began Saturday, 68,665 to 63,178, and is still growing, is also a bigger advantage than Democrats had at this point in 2024.

“Another strong in-person voting day for Democrats, as they improve their margin and raw turnout,” Prosser noted Monday. “Republicans find themselves about 5 points behind where they were on this day in 2024, about 10 points behind where they want to be.”

However, Democrats’ biggest advantage is voting by mail, where they outperform Republicans by about 296,339 to 100,251, according to the Prosser data set.

However, while the early data is a positive sign for Sherrill, it leaves a lot of unknowns. Not all registered Democrats will vote for Democrats, and vice versa for Republicans.

“I would caution observers not to make too many assumptions when they see the ballots for Democrats or Republicans because there will be more Democratic crossover votes for Ciattarelli than Republican crossover votes for Sherrill,” a source close to Ciattarelli’s campaign warned to the newspaper.

They pointed to the endorsement Ciattarelli received from North Jersey Democrats as evidence that the Republican nominee would enjoy major support.

Ciattarelli lost by about 3 percentage points in his 2021 gubernatorial bid, significantly exceeding expectations at the time. RealClearPolitics Aggregate has underestimated its estimate by about 5 percentage points at the time.

Since then, New Jersey Republicans have been doing just that Receive more registered voters Of the Democrats, who still have an advantage of 860,000 voters.

The source stressed that the dynamics of the 2025 race are likely to be radically different from 2021 and 2024, predicting that Chiattarelli will enjoy significant support on Election Day.

“It’s hard to compare some of the returns to 2021, because in 2021, a lot of early voting was relatively new. Remember, a lot of this was post-Covid,” the source added. In 2024, of course, there is interest at the presidential level.”

“Traditionally, gubernatorial elections do not reach the level of presidential turnout.”

Sherrill currently has a 3.8 percentage point lead over Ciattarelli in the latest Total RCP.

“I don’t want to say he (Chiattarelli) is out of it. I don’t think so at all,” Rasmussen confirmed. “I think he’s very much in the game…but he’s going to have to do exceptionally well on Election Day.”