What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Given how close the governor’s race in New Jersey is, we’ve calculated how the candidates are doing relative to 2020 presidential benchmarks. Murphy now leads by about 0.3 percentage points, which isn’t much, but you’d still probably rather be Murphy than Ciattarelli at this point. That’s because a couple of Democratic-leaning counties — Essex (Newark) and Mercer (Trenton) — still likely have a fair number of votes left to report, which should be good news for Murphy. Still, our benchmark analysis suggests Murphy is way outperforming what he needs from Hudson County, the second-bluest county in the state, after Essex. Murphy has a margin akin to Biden’s in 2020 there, even though he’s running behind Biden pretty much everywhere else. That raises questions about whether some of the remaining vote in Hudson might actually be friendlier to Ciattarelli than you’d expect in such a major Democratic-leaning county. But with a lack of clarity on what of the remaining vote is still left to count — many Democratic-leaning mail-in and early votes but also some Republican-leaning Election Day ballots, too — we can’t know with certainty how things will shift from here.