Voter turnout has surged in New Jersey during the first few days of the early in-person voting period in this year’s closely watched gubernatorial election — and the early tallies likely show an advantage for Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill over her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli.
More than 160,000 voters went to the polls on the first two days of early in-person voting Saturday and Sunday, according to the state’s Division of Elections. In the 2021 gubernatorial election, the first where the state held early in-person voting, the total for the entire nine-day early-voting period was about 207,000.
Registered Democrats are outpacing registered Republicans by about 5,000 votes in early in-person votes so far, according to election division data.
Democrats have also experienced an uptick in mail-in ballots compared to 2021. Registered Democrats have now returned 200,000 more mail-in ballots than registered Republicans. Sherrill's campaign said on Tuesday that the Democratic mail-in ballot advantage at this stage in 2021 was lower, at 167,000.
“Mikie heads into the final stretch of this race as the clear front-runner, and she’s ready to bring this home,” Sherrill campaign manager Alex Ball said in a statement to Gothamist.
The race between Sherrill and Ciattarelli has been closely observed as a national bellwether before next year’s congressional elections. Most polls show Sherrill in the lead, but only by a few points against Ciattarelli, who came within about 3 points of spoiling Gov. Phil Murphy’s re-election run in 2021.
Early-voting tallies could shift as Election Day on Nov. 4 draws closer. Republicans outpaced Democrats on Election Day in 2021, but only by 1,700 votes, said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. He said if Sherrill’s 200,000-plus vote advantage holds, Ciattarelli would need an unprecedented Election Day turnout to overcome her lead.
“It’s a tall order to think that you can erase [200,000] banked votes of the advantage that one party has over the other,” Rasmussen said.
Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said early in-person voting at the county level is largely following the pattern of the 2024 presidential election in terms of ballots being cast. He said Ciattarelli so far has not seen the increase he may need in coastal counties where he’s expected to do well, like Monmouth and Ocean.
“It doesn't look like Ciattarelli is getting the surge that he needs in order to overtake the large Democratic advantage in vote by mail,” Cassino said.
Early-voting numbers only reflect voters’ party affiliation, not whom they’re voting for. But Rasmussen said the latest polls show both Ciattarelli and Sherrill have consolidated their own parties' voters behind their respective candidacies.
“There's nothing in the public polling that suggests that there is some big defection of Democrats [or] there's some big defection in Republicans. We don't see any evidence of that,” he said.
Ciattarelli’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the early in-person voting numbers.
ack Ciattarelli, prays with faith leaders while speaking to supporters at a restaurant in Paterson.
New Jersey’s Republican Party has raised concerns about the integrity of the election process in at least one county.
The state GOP committee last week sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking its civil rights division to monitor the processing of mail-in ballots by the Passaic County Board of Elections on Nov. 4. New Jersey GOP attorney Jason Sena wrote in the letter that the county has a “sordid history” of vote-by-mail “fraud,” and accused the state attorney general’s office of being “incapable of prosecuting these matters.”
Sena wrote that earlier this year the Passaic County Board of Elections declined to enact “basic transparency” measures proposed by Republicans, including allowing 24-hour surveillance cameras in the vote-counting room and logbooks noting everyone who accessed it.
The letter also cited two examples from 2014 and 2020 where county residents, including an elected official, were indicted over alleged voter fraud.
The Department of Justice announced this week it would send federal monitors to Passaic County on Election Day in response to Sena’s request. President Donald Trump flipped the county in 2024, winning it by 5,000 votes over then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump had lost the county to Joe Biden by 17,000 votes four years earlier.
Lower turnout contributed to Trump's victory last year in Passaic County, Cassino said. Only 195,000 votes were cast in the county in the 2024 presidential election, compared to 221,000 in 2021.
It’s unclear what exactly the federal observers will be doing on Nov. 4 in Passaic County, but Cassino said the possibility of federal agents’ presence in the heavily immigrant county could affect in-person voting.
”Even discussion of the federal government at the polling place might serve to depress turnout. And that does have Democrats a little worried,” he said.
