Assessing the new electoral landscape after a surprising surge in Trump support.
Photo: Shutterstock/Chip Somodevilla
By Jeff Pillets, New Jersey Monthly, January 17, 2025
It was anything but a typical Wednesday morning for Ed Durr as he hit the road to deliver furniture and mattresses. It was a MAGA day, the greatest of them all, and Durr was beaming into a video camera mounted on his dashboard.
He sang out at something like full volume to an audience of Facebook followers.
“Gooooooooooood morning America!…Congratulations to President Trump on an outstanding victory, proving once again: You can’t bankrupt him. You can’t imprison him. You can’t assassinate him. You can’t defeat him.”
Durr, a commercial truck driver from Gloucester County, made national headlines in 2021 when he won election to the state senate by upsetting incumbent Stephen Sweeney, one of New Jersey’s most powerful Democrats.
Even though he was defeated in his bid for reelection two years later, Durr is now running for governor, one of a handful of Republicans buoyed by Trump’s surprising strength in a deep-blue state that hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.
For many Republicans like Durr, Trump’s victory is confirmation that New Jersey is turning red, and doing it quickly. Even though Kamala Harris won the state by 6 percentage points, Trump’s performance jumped dramatically compared to 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden here by 16 points.
Five New Jersey counties that voted for Biden in 2020 flipped to Trump, including traditional Democratic strongholds such as Passaic County. Even counties Harris carried saw droves of voters switching to Trump: Essex, Bergen, Hudson and Middlesex counties all saw double-digit swings to Republican.
Perhaps the scariest trend for Democrats: Huge swaths of New Jersey’s 2 million-strong Latino community voted for Trump, even as he campaigned on the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and their American-born children.
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