No two states voted more alike and closer to the national average in last year’s presidential election than the two states that have gubernatorial elections in this odd-numbered year, New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey voted 51.8% for Kamala Harris and 45.9% for Donald Trump. Virginia voted 51.8% for Harris and 46.1% for Trump. Aside from the seven target states and Democratic underperformance in New Hampshire and Minnesota, these were the two closest states in the country.
They have other similarities. Large percentages of their voters live in metropolitan areas centered on cities outside the state, such as New York City and Washington, D.C. Both of those metro areas have populations far above the national average in education credentials and income.
LIST: THE MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE AND SENATE WHO HAVE SAID THEY WON’T SEEK REELECTION
That has tilted them toward the Democratic Party in this era when upscale voters, in line with their liberal stands on cultural issues, trend that way. It’s a time when million-plus metro areas, evenly divided in the 1980s, have become heavily Democratic, while the half of Americans living outside those big metro areas have, often despite historical Democratic allegiances, been delivering increasing margins for Trump’s Republicans.
It comes as second nature to political writers to seek omens in the results and trends of off-year elections. Virginia has provided plenty of grist for their mills, having elected governors of the party that lost the presidential election the year before in every contest starting in 11 of the last 12 contests starting in 1977.
That would seem to give an advantage to Democrats in two states carried by Harris. It helps that Democrats have managed to nominate candidates with attractive biographies and reputations, despite their generally party-line voting records, as centrists. Both are women with national security experience who were first elected to the House of Representatives in the Democratic year of 2018.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) was a Navy helicopter pilot and later worked as a lawyer. After her military service, she went to graduate school, earning a law degree and an Arabic language certificate. She captured an exurban, traditionally Republican New Jersey district when the incumbent retired. She won her first primary easily and has won general elections with 53% to 59% of the vote.
Abigail Spanberger also won a graduate degree, taught at Northern Virginia’s Islamic Saudi Academy, and was an intelligence officer in the CIA for six years. She won her suburban House seat, stretching from Richmond to Fairfax County, against an incumbent Republican by 2 points, then won reelection by 3 and 5 points and stepped down, with the governor’s race in mind, in 2024.
Current RealClearPolitics polling averages have Sherrill ahead of 2021 nominee Jack Ciatarelli by a 48% to 44% margin and Spanberger leading Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by 50% to 44% — margins not that far from the virtually identical margins by which Harris carried both states.
Republicans hold out some hope in both races. Ciatarelli lost by only 51% to 48% against incumbent Democrat Philip Murphy in 2021, campaigning against the high taxes that have helped Republicans win four of eight New Jersey elections starting in 1993, despite the state’s Democratic lean in presidential politics. And Sherrill, Republicans say, is on the defensive for having been required not to appear at her graduation from the Naval Academy, apparently for not having reported another cadet’s violation of the honor code.
In Virginia, Spanberger was set back by the revelation on Oct. 3 that her running mate, Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones, in 2022, sent tweets expressing a desire to shoot the then-Republican House speaker and see his children murdered in their mother’s arms. Spanberger expressed abhorrence but refused to call on him to step aside and announced her early vote for him. October polling shows Jones trailing incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares by 47% to 43%.
Despite their identical responses in 2024, these two states have different traditions. In assessing the chances for an upset in either race, it may be useful to look at the different surges of migration, immigrant and internal, that have populated these two states over the years.
In New Jersey, one can find traces of Dutch settlers from Nieuw Amsterdam and Quakers in the Delaware River valley from colonial days. But the big surge of migration came from the descendants of the Ellis Island migration of 1892 to 1924, Italians, Jews, and Poles spilling over from the big cities across the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.
Their offspring responded favorably to the appeals of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as the anti-tax constituency was reduced by migrants to Florida. But inflation and illegal immigration in the Biden years have pushed them toward Trump, who raised Republicans’ presidential percentages from 41% in 2012 to 2020 to 46% in 2024.
That move was accentuated by Trumpward moves among Hispanics. The 1940 to 1965 northward migration of black people has ebbed in New Jersey, leaving only two municipalities (East Orange, Lawnside) with black majorities. In contrast, the post-1982 Hispanic migration has produced 29 municipalities with Hispanic majorities.
In those two-thirds or more Hispanic, Trump made major gains in 2024, reducing their average Democratic margins from 40% in 2020 to 12%. NBC analyst Steve Kornacki points out that if Ciatarelli in 2021 had won Trump 2024 percentages in majority non-white municipalities, he would have lost by only 0.3%.
Virginia is a different story. The demographic surge has been an influx of affluent, highly educated Americans plus relatively high-skill immigrants, with significant numbers of Asians and Hispanics, over the past 30 years. Northern Virginia’s share of the statewide vote has increased from 25% in 1980 to 36% in 2024.
In the three Trump elections, Northern Virginia has voted 60%, 65%, and 61% Democratic, putting a state safely in the Democratic column that, with just one exception, had voted comfortably Republican from 1952 to 2004. That’s notwithstanding Trump’s 50%, 50%, and 52% wins in the rest of Virginia, similar to his showings in next-door North Carolina.
In that setting, Spanberger’s cold-blooded refusal to renounce Jones and her stubborn refusal to oppose girls in boys sports look like efforts to avoid disenchanting Democratic voters in one of the strongest anti-Trump constituencies in America. Trends may be working for Trump’s party in New Jersey, but less so in Virginia.