While New Jersey has been considered a Democratic-leaning, or blue, state for the past decade, it is really a crazy quilt of red and blue with a only a handful of towns that swing from party to party
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TRENTON — Over the next year, candidates and their armies of campaign workers will sift through mountains of data analyzing how people are likely to vote in New Jersey.
Afterward, they’ll take the old information, mix it with the new, and try to come up with some whys.
From Walpack to Tavistock, Ridgefield to East Orange, the one fact they will stumble on is this: While New Jersey has been considered a Democratic-leaning, or blue, state for the past decade, it is really a crazy quilt of red and blue with a only a handful of towns that swing from party to party.
Each of New Jersey’s 566 cities and towns is known for having its own identity, and as voters bone up for legislative elections Tuesday and presidential and U.S. Senate contests next year, the differences will be on display.
An analysis by The Star-Ledger of voter registration and past election data found the towns where Democrats dominate the most, and where Republican rule is the strongest:
• East Orange in Essex County, one of the state’s most densely populated areas, has the distinction of being the most Democratic city in New Jersey, with only 1.09 percent of voters registered Republicans.
• Saddle River, a wealthy Bergen County enclave whose mayor is the state GOP party chairman, has the smallest percentage of registered Democrats, 12 percent, among towns with more than 1,000 people.
• Residents in the Ocean County town of Lakehurst have taken advantage of the fact that New Jersey voters do not have to identify with any party; of its registered voters, 60 percent are neither Democratic nor Republican.
Nestled at the most southern tip of Bergen County, Ridgefield looks like many other New Jersey towns.
Anthony Pope, 98, a Brooklyn native, moved to town — which he says was considered "the country" when he got there in 1958 — to work at a coffee-roasting plant in Palisades Park.
"This is the closest I’m ever going to get to heaven," Pope said.
Like much of New Jersey, Ridgefield is bisected by the New Jersey Turnpike. And it shares another similarity: Voter registration mirrors the rest of the state — 20 percent Republican, 33 percent Democrat and 47 percent unaffiliated.
Today’s technology allows campaigns to focus on such swing towns — where voters alternate between parties from election to election — and ignore the more politically established areas.
For that reason, campaigning has become more focused and more partisan, said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University.
"The elected official who represents that area doesn’t need to be concerned about appealing to a moderate election constituency because there are so few of the Ridgefields in the state of New Jersey," she said. "We really are a red-and-blue state."
Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who worked for Chris Christie in his successful 2009 gubernatorial campaign, said when election results start coming in, a trained eye can often determine the outcome by looking at a few towns or precincts.
On the night Christie defeated his Democratic opponent, Gov. Jon Corzine, DuHaime said it was clear they had won once they saw Republicans had taken historically Democratic towns such as Woodbridge, South Amboy, Sayreville and Red Bank.
"That really indicated a lot of good things, that was going to be reflected statewide," DuHaime said.
On the whole, municipalities don’t fare very well in picking winners. The Star-Ledger review found fewer than 10 percent of them had gone with the victor in all of the last six statewide elections. Of the 43 that did, Lake Como in Monmouth County has been the most accurate, coming within a few tenths of a percentage point of the state each time.
Some counties are consistently partisan, and they, too, are largely unsuccessful in picking winners. No towns in Ocean or Sussex counties, both historically Republican, have chosen the successful statewide candidate in the all of the last six elections.
New Jersey’s red-and-blue strongholds can be jarring for some.
Twelve years after moving to Walpack, a tiny town along the Delaware River in Sussex County, Janina Wycalek got a surprise when she showed up to vote in a primary and told the poll worker she was a Democrat.
"That means there are two of them now," Wycalek recalls the worker saying.
After a decade in which the population has dwindled to 16 people, Wycalek is the only Democrat. (Tavistock in Camden County — population five — has none.) "I kind of like being the only Democrat," Wycalek said. "The only thing is I feel bad for the party because we don’t have a chance."
Republicans in East Orange face their own difficulties, and walking into a polling place there — home of the Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheila Oliver — can elicit odd looks. Only 123 people there who are registered Republican voted in a general or primary election last year.
Still, Mary Perrella, 83, a lifelong Republican and East Orange resident, said she never thought about switching parties.
"Sometimes when I got to vote I can see they’re looking under their eyes at me," Perrella said.