Colleen O'Dea: Diving Deeper into 2026 Election Turnout Compared to 2018
BY COLLEEN O'DEA
Fewer than half of all registered New Jersey voters cast ballots in this year’s midterms, despite the blue wave saw Democrats flip two U.S. House seats.
The roughly 45-47% turnout was most likely due to Republicans’ sitting out this election.
The best comparison from recent years to this year’s election in New Jersey is 2018, which were also a President Trump midterm. That year, Democrats ousted three Republicans, turning the state’s House delegation a bluer 11-1. That balance again will becomes 11-1 in January following the results of last week’s election. But in 2018, 55% of registrants voters. While county officials are still tallying some mail-in and provisional ballots, total turnout – at 44.8% as of midday Nov. 11 -- is not likely to rise much higher than 47%.
“Turnout in this cycle was definitely lower than in 2018, and even seems to have been a shade lower than we saw in the governor’s race last year,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and director of the FDU Poll. “That difference is entirely due to lower turnout among registered Republicans.”
Indeed, 51% of registered voters cast ballots in last year’s gubernatorial race, the highest percentage turnout for a New Jersey governor’s race this century and the largest number voting in a non-presidential election – 3.37 million. So far, county officials have counted 2.99 million votes but that number is unlikely to exceed last year’s total. It may not reach the 3.25 million who voted in the 2018 midterms.
Enthusiasm was high this year in at least parts of the state. In Central Jersey’s 7th District, where Democrat Rebecca Bennett crushed incumbent Republican Tom Kean Jr. by more than 16 points, the total votes counted so far exceeds the 2018 and 2022 midterms. But that wasn’t the case everywhere. No Republican appeared on the ballot to challenge Democratic Rep. Rob Menendez in the 8th District based in Hudson County, although three independent candidates won a combined 11% of the vote.
And there was no real statewide race to turn out voters everywhere. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker easily won a third full six-year term, besting Republican Justin Murphy by more than 27 points.
In 2018, then-incumbent Democrat Bob Menendez, fresh off a mistrial in his first corruption trial, faced wealthy Republican Bob Hugin, who spent $35 million of his own money on the race. While Menendez wound up winning by double digits, the candidates and outside groups spent more than $50 million. While Booker, who is mulling another presidential run in 2028, had a $36 million warchest, Murphy raised and spent less than $100,000 through mid-October.
“There was a real Senate race in 2018,” said Democratic strategist Dan Bryan, a consultant for the Bennett campaign this year. “That of course is going to drive turnout.”
Without a marquee race atop the ballot and with many Trump voters experiencing buyers remorse, there was not much to draw them out to vote, even on a sunny, temperate November Tuesday.
“You saw a whole lot of Republicans who, after voting for Trump and his allies, throwing up their hands and saying, ‘We’re done,’” Bryan said.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said Booker got about 120,000 more votes than Menendez, while Murphy got 330,000 fewer votes than Hugin.
“So it was the tale of two turnouts -- a blue wave and a red undertow,” he said. “Essentially, the Republican voters who did not show up were replaced with Democratic voters who did.”
Cassino said he was surprised that more Republicans didn’t turn out in force in the state’s two battlegrounds.
“What really struck me about that was the degree to which it didn’t seem to matter how competitive the local House race was,” he said. “I would have expected higher turnout among Republicans in the 7th and the 2nd, but it just didn’t happen.”
It was the lack of Republican turnout on Election Day that doomed Democrat-turned-Republican Jeff Van Drew’s reelection bid in South Jersey, although that was a much closer race than the 7th, with Democrat Zack Mullock winning by less than three points.
An analysis of turnout and voting trends found that a smaller percentage of people voted in every county this year than in either 2025 or 2018. So far, turnout has ranged from a low of 35% in Hudson County to 58% in Hunterdon County.
That higher turnout in Hunterdon did not help Kean, as it had boosted Republicans in the past. Bennett beat Kean by about eight points in Hunterdon, where the GOP has a double-digit registration advantage. In fact, Hunterdon is the only County in the state in which a Democrat running for federal office – Bennett – received more votes than the number of registered Democrats in the county. As of midday Nov. 11, Bennett had received 33,552 votes in Hunterdon, which has 32,472 registered Democrats.
Statewide, votes for Booker and the Democratic congressional candidates equaled about 71% of the total number of registered Democrats in the state. For Republican candidates, that percentage was 61%.
Overall, Democrats for federal office received some two percent more votes this year so far than in the 2018 midterms. Most of the party’s largest vote gains occurred in counties that make up the 7th District, with double-digits increases in Warren (28%), Hunterdon (25%), Somerset (16%) and Sussex (13%) counties. While losing all races in Ocean, Democrats also performed significantly better in Ocean County, +15 points compared with 2018.
On the other hand, Republican federal candidates received almost 20% fewer votes this year than in 2018 and got fewer votes in every county except Gloucester, where the increase was about 1% this year.
“President Trump asked people to vote like he was on the ballot, and, for the most part, they did,” Cassino said. “Democrats crawled over broken glass to cast a vote against him, and many Republicans, who have turned lukewarm on him, decided to stay home.”
