New Jersey Democratic voters are outpacing their Republican peers in early voting turnout — which is boding well for gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mikie Sherrill with just over a week out from Election Day.
Of the roughly 635,000 mail-in ballots and in-person early votes in New Jersey, 57% were registered Democrats, 26% were Republicans, and 17% had another party affiliation, according to the latest data compiled by Michael Pruser, DecisionDeskHQ’s director of Data Science.
That’s a better outlook 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 Democrats, 22% Republicans, and 20% had another affiliation.
But the GOP still has a roughly 202,000 raw vote gap with Democrats, and initial in-person voting trends are only worsening Republicans’ margin.
“We’re starting to see a narrowing of the viable paths available to Republicans,” Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for NJ Politics at Rider University, told The Post, caveating that “we have a lot of voting left.”
Some Republicans have taken solace in the fact that, oftentimes, their voters are skittish with in-person voting. But Ciattarelli’s campaign has pushed his voters to cast their ballots early.
Rasmussen also explained that Democrats outvoted Republicans on Election Day by about 140,000 in 2024 and 16,000 in 2022, while Republicans outvoted Dems by some 1,700 in 2021.
“In any of those three historical examples,” Rasmussen added, “you can see how that [existing early vote gap] would be a tall order as compared with our experience with those past three elections.”
Moreover, Democrats’ edge with in-person voting, which began on Saturday, 68,665 to 63,178, and has been growing, is also a larger 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 edge,” Pruser noted on Monday. “Republicans find themselves about 5 points behind where they were on this day in 2024, which is about 10 points behind where they want to be.”
Democrats’ biggest advantage, however, is with mail-in voting, where they are outperforming Republicans by about 296,339 to 100,251, per Pruser’s data set.
Still, while the early data is a positive sign for Sherrill, it leaves a lot of unknowns. Not all registered Dems will vote Democratic, and vice versa with Republicans.
“I would caution observers to not make too many assumptions when they’re seeing Democrat or Republican ballots because there are going to be more Democratic crossover votes for Ciattarelli than there will be Republican crossover votes for Sherrill,” a source close to the Ciattarelli campaign cautioned The Post.
They pointed to endorsements Ciattarelli received from North Jersey Democrats as evidence that the GOP hopeful will enjoy key crossover support.
Ciattarelli lost by about 3 percentage points in his 2021 gubernatorial bid, massively overperforming expectations at the time. The RealClearPolitics aggregate underestimated him by about 5 percentage points at the time.
Since then, New Jersey Republicans have netted more registered voters than Democrats, who still have a 860,000 voter advantage.
The source underscored that the dynamics of the 2025 race will likely be fundamentally different than 2021 and 2024, predicting that Ciattarelli could enjoy a significant boost on Election Day.
“It’s difficult to compare some of the returns to 2021, because in 2021, a lot of the early voting was relatively new. Remember, a lot of this was post-COVID,” the source added. “And in 2024, of course, there’s presidential-level turnouts.”
“Traditionally, a gubernatorial election doesn’t reach presidential-level turnout.”
Sherrill currently has a 3.8 percentage point lead over Ciattarelli in the latest RCP aggregate.
“I don’t want to say that he’s [Ciattarelli is] out of it. I don’t think that at all,” Rasmussen stressed. “I think he’s very much in the game … but he has to do exceptionally well on Election Day.”
