After President-elect Donald Trump delivered surprising gains for the GOP in New Jersey and Virginia last week, Republicans are claiming both states as new battleground territories.
Trump swept all seven swing states to win the Electoral College and the popular vote during the 2024 presidential election. However, it wasn’t just the battlegrounds he dominated. Trump also shifted New Jersey and Virginia to the right. While a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won either state in decades, Trump realigned the political map to build what he described as “the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition” that came within single digits of flipping both states red.
“They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history. They’ve never seen it–young and old men and women, rural and urban,” Trump reflected in a victory speech as the election results came trickling in. “They came from all quarters, union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American. We had everybody. And it was beautiful.”
However, as the Republican Party eyes gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia next year, does it have a real chance of sustaining Trump’s gains? Here’s what political strategists have to say about whether the states are truly new battlegrounds or if what the president-elect hailed as a “historic realignment” is simply a Trump anomaly.
Delivering on promises
The longevity of the Trump coalition depends on whether the GOP follows through on pledges they made to voters during the election cycle, said Carol Swain, a former political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University.
Trump’s campaign promises to bring back a flourishing economy and target illegal immigration resonated with more than 75 million voters who handed him a victory on Election Day, including many in traditionally Democratic strongholds. Swain suggested that a failure from the GOP to carry out the “unprecedented and powerful mandate” would be “greatly harmful for the Republican Party of the future.”
While she called the election results “a defining moment in history,” Swain warned that the realignment would only last “if Republicans don’t blow it.” She pointed to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) recent move to call for an early leadership vote as a warning sign that Trump’s “mandate” is being undermined.
Top Trump allies, including Republican media host Tucker Carlson, slammed the Senate chief, who announced earlier this year plans to step down from his position.
“Hours after Donald Trump wins the most conclusive mandate in 40 years, Mitch McConnell engineers a coup against his agenda by calling early leadership elections in the senate,” said Carlson in an X post. “Two of the three candidates hate Trump and what he ran on.”
What the hell is going on in the US Senate? Hours after Donald Trump wins the most conclusive mandate in 40 years, Mitch McConnell engineers a coup against his agenda by calling early leadership elections in the senate. Two of the three candidates hate Trump and what he ran on.…
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 9, 2024
If Republican leadership doesn’t work together to fix the problems voters elected them to do, then the coalition Trump built could turn away from the GOP, Swain said.
“They’re being trusted with leadership, but they don’t actually do anything with that trust. Then that’s a problem,” she said.
Alternatively, the GOP could build on the staggering gains Trump made during the 2024 election and “be in power for decades,” Swain said, but only “if they follow through and they bring about real change in the direction of the country.”
Aaron Van Allen, a government professor at Liberty University, echoed the theme that Trump’s movement could cement New Jersey and Virginia into battleground territories if Republicans enact his agenda.
“Let’s say that immigration gets under control–that the border is, in fact, secured. … Let’s say that prices begin to fall on things like gasoline or with groceries,” Van Allen told the Washington Examiner. “If all of that seemingly goes well for Republicans, I certainly could see the Commonwealth of Virginia being in play.”
Republican strategist Chris Russell, who holds strong ties to New Jersey, also noted that if Trump followed through with pledges to keep his campaign promise to lift the SALT cap, which would be “an instant tax cut for a lot of people in New Jersey,” the GOP could continue to see gains in the state.
“To the extent that the Republicans in the House and the Senate and the Trump administration govern and govern effectively and successfully, that’s only going to help us,” he said.
Comprehensive gains equal lasting coalition
Increases in support for Trump across racial and gender lines were so marked that they shouldn’t be discounted as “temporary” or anomalous shifts, multiple political experts told the Washinton Examiner.
Hispanic support for the president-elect grew by a staggering 14 percentage points from 2020, according to Edison Research exit polls. Black support for Trump has expanded by 5 points since 2020, per CNN exit polls. Among voters under age 30, support for Vice President Kamala Harris has declined by 20 points since 2020, according to an Associated Press/Fox survey. Harris also saw a 5-point decline in support from female voters from President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, according to CNN exit polls.
“This is something that is here to stay,” Van Allen said, commenting on Trump’s performance in New Jersey and Virginia. “And the reason being is because of not just the shifts that you saw that happened demographically, but the sheer volume and the augmentation as well of those shifts that occurred.”
Those shifts were on full display in Virginia, where Trump expanded support by more than 3 percentage points overall since 2020, and in New Jersey, where support for Harris dropped by roughly 11 points.
Trump made significant gains in suburban areas across Northern Virginia, including in Stafford and Fairfax counties. His margins were perhaps the most significant in Loudoun County. Harris carried the Democratic stronghold by 17 points, down from Biden’s 25-point win in 2020. Yet while the president-elect also made gains in solid blue suburbs outside of Richmond, including in Charles City, he also picked up support in rural areas in the southwest region of the state, such as Dickenson, Russell, Buchanan, and Wythe counties.
Meanwhile, Trump’s showing in New Jersey was the best performance for a Republican presidential candidate in over three decades.
Flipping multiple counties red, Trump made staggering gains in Passaic County. The longtime Democratic stronghold is part of the New York metropolitan area, containing suburbs that Harris underperformed in, similar to her lackluster showing in many Virginia suburbs. The inroads Trump made nationally among minorities were showcased in Passaic, which includes Paterson City, where 63% of residents are Hispanic and 24% are black.
The realignment is not “a temporary fad or a fashion,” Van Allen said, noting increases in support for the president-elect, particularly in suburban and Latino communities.
Trump also outperformed his 2020 showing by a large margin in Hudson County, another urban New Jersey area. Meanwhile, he picked up steam in rural areas across the Garden State, including in Warren County.
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Russell pointed to the GOP’s gains in the Garden State’s 2021 gubernatorial election to argue that Trump’s performance is just another indicator that a “trend” to the right is happening. Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) was reelected by barely 3 percentage points two years ago after coming to power in 2017 by a resounding 14-point margin of victory.
“The two biggest elections in New Jersey in the last four years have been very close. I think that’s not a one-off,” Russell said. “New Jersey is on its way to being a swing state, and hopefully, with next year’s [gubernatorial] results, and then 2026, we can continue to make that a reality. And then by 2028, you know, we’re talking about New Jersey at the same breath as Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania.”