NEWARK, NJ — Republican gubernatorial hopeful Jack Ciattarelli appears to be facing a steep climb heading into Election Day, with nearly 300,000 more Democrats casting ballots than GOPers in early voting.
The data does not indicate who among the state’s total 1.3 million early voters backed in Ciattarelli’s tight race against Democratic Rep. Mike Sherrill, 53. But it signals that Dem turnout is high and that the 63-year-old Republican candidate will likely need a considerable surge Tuesday to win.
“Early turnout is high enough to think about the election in more or less halves — pre-Election Day and Election Day,” wrote Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for NJ Politics at Rider University in Lawrence, on X.
“In the first half, 300,000 more Democrats than Republicans will have voted. Can Republicans do the same on their half?”
Overall, 50.6% of the state’s 1,334,572 early voters were registered Democrats, compared to 28.9% Republicans and 20.5% with another party affiliation, according to data from VoteHub.
For context, the early votes in New Jersey were about 51% of the total vote in the 2021 gubernatorial race, when 2,614,886 voters came out.
Typically, Republicans are thought to underperform Democrats with early voting, but Ciattarelli’s team has been pushing their backers to turn out early.
In fact, his campaign bus is emblazoned with the words, “Vote Early In-Person Oct. 25 – Nov. 2.”
The recent numbers appear to be only a little more bleak than they were in the 2021 election cycle, when Ciattarelli ran against Gov. Phil Murphy.
At the time, registered Democrats outperformed registered Republicans by roughly 277,000 in early in-person votes and mail-in ballots, according to data from Michael Pruser, the director of Data Science at DecisionDeskHQ.
That cycle saw Ciattarelli dramatically outperform the polls Election Day and come close to 3 percentage points of the then-incumbent Democrat Murphy.
But this time around, New Jersey Republicans also have significantly more registered voters than they did in 2021. In August 2021, New Jersey Democrats had 1.1 million more registered voters than Republicans, but now that’s been whittled down to a difference of about 853,000, according to the latest data.
Still, in-person early voting in New Jersey wrapped up Sunday, and the data indicate that the Dems are enjoying a slightly larger raw gap than they did four years ago.
With respect to mail-in ballots, Democrats accounted for 61.9% of the ballots returned, compared to 20.8% Republican and 17.4% other, according to VoteHub.
Four years ago, Democrats were up 62.7% to the Republicans’ 19%.
Ciattarelli is also facing warning signs at the county level.
In Monmouth County, for example, where Ciattarelli spent significant time during the election homestretch, Democrats have a more than 800 early-vote lead over Republicans.
Last year, during the higher turnout presidential cycle, Republicans had a roughly 8,400 edge on the Monday before Election Day, according to VoteHub data.
During the 2025 gubernatorial race, Ciattarelli had been largely an underdog.
But he gained ground on her in the polls in recent months.
Democrats then dispatched their heavy-hitters, such as former President Barack Obama, to help boost Sherrill before the election.
She touts a 3.3 percentage point advantage over him in the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.
