Colleen O'Dea's VBM and Early Voting Interactive Map
By Colleen O’Dea
Democrats would seem to have amassed a large advantage as early voting starts across
New Jersey on Saturday, but the numbers may not portend the ultimate results once all votes are counted.
An analysis of mail-in ballots received by counties through Thursday shows that registered Democrats have submitted about 3 ½ times more ballots as registered Republicans, or 285,000 versus 82,000.
In the battleground 7th District, where a victory by either Rep. Tom Kean Jr. or Democrat Rebecca Bennett will help decide which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats have sent in about 16,000 more ballots than Republicans. That’s roughly the same size as the GOP registration advantage.
And Democrats have outvoted Republicans 2-to-1 in the 2nd District, where Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock is still considered a longshot to unseat Democrat-turned-Republican Jeff Van Drew, even as a pro-Democratic super PAC reportedly began spending $1.5 million against the incumbent.
While the Vote-by-mail numbers look good for Democrats, the VBM turnout of 435,000 represents only a small sample of the potential electorate – less than 7% of New Jersey’s 6.7 million total registrants. There’s also no way to know if people voted for the candidates representing their parties.
Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of the FDU Poll, said there’s just not enough information in the mail-in ballot totals to draw any solid conclusions.
“Every year, I’m telling people that once we have a solid baseline for how many votes have come in by a certain day, we’ll be able to evaluate whether a particular cycle is relatively good or bad.,” he said. “But they keep changing the game on us, so we just don’t have that baseline yet.”
Among the many unknowns: Are New Jersey Democrats not worried about the post office and are using drop boxes or are they more enthusiastic and got their votes in early? Or are these numbers actually an undercount because Democrats are going to disproportionately vote in person this cycle? Or are Republicans going to swamp early voting and erase those margins?
“Choose your own adventure, there’s no way of knowing,” Cassino added. “Of course, you’d rather have an advantage than not have one, but the size of that advantage matters.”
New Jersey Democrats traditionally have embraced mail-in balloting more than Republicans. By Election Day 2025, which was a state and gubernatorial year with no federal races on the ballot, registered Democrats had outvoted Republicans by about 3-to-1. Republicans have been more comfortable with in-person voting, although more Democrats cast ballots during last year’s early voting period than Republicans.
This year’s early machine voting begins Saturday, Oct. 24 and continues for nine days through Sunday, Nov. 1. At least three polling locations will be open in every county, with larger counties having as many as 10 polling sites, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily except Sunday, when polls close at 6 p.m. The N.J. Division of Elections has a map and list of all the early voting sites.
Early voting turnout trends may help give a better sense of whether the trends reported by national pundits will dictate the results in this year’s midterms. The latest poll from the William H. Hughes Center at Stockton University found that fewer than a third of New Jersey voters approve of President Trump’s performance and more than half said the economy has worsened over the last year. Numerous polls show Democrats leading or at least competitive in dozens of congressional races across the country, including in some traditional Republican strongholds.
The only independent poll in New Jersey’s 7th District, by StimSight Research for InsiderNJ, gave Bennett a five-point lead over Kean in mid-September. Two national GOP independent spending groups pulled money out of the race, essentially ceding it to Bennett, so they could spend more to shore up Republican incumbents elsewhere in the nation, though the Bennett campaign said pro-Kean organizations still had more broadcast advertising reserved than Democrats had booked to boost Bennett.
Cassino said the early voting counts may help clarify whether Democrats can expect a New Jersey blue wave similar to 2018, when the balance of power in the state’s House delegation shifted from 7-5 for the Democrats to 11-1 for the Democrats.
“While we don’t have strong evidence in the early vote numbers of the huge Democratic wave that we’re finding in the polls, there still isn’t any counter-evidence,” Cassino said. “People can say that they don’t trust the polls, that actual votes will be closer, and that’s fine, but at a certain point, you should start to see signs in the actual numbers that Democrats aren’t turning out, or that Republican turnout is high, and there just hasn’t been any data, here or elsewhere, that point against a wave election
“I’d want to look at the first few days of early voting, at least – but the fact that there isn’t any evidence to point to the wave not happening is meaningful,” he added. “If there’s not going to be a wave, there should be signs that the Democratic advantage has been overstated, and those signs just aren’t there.”
Cassino sees Kean losing to Bennett and called the race in the 2nd District a potential bellwether.
“In a big midterm wave, Van Drew is likely to hold on. If he loses, we’re past waves and into tsunami territory, where safe Republican seats are wiped out, and a bunch of Democrats win mostly by accident,” Cassino said. Then he quoted a famous line by Bill Murray’s character from the movie Ghostbusters, “End of the world, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”
