DELAWARE
As President Biden spends his remaining months in office on Rehoboth Beach, this November, residents of Delaware will no longer be voting for one of their own. Will Kamala Harris be able to match the impressive results Joe Biden put up four years ago in the First State? We find it unlikely that the vice president will outdo the extraordinary 58.7% of the vote that Mr. Biden garnered in 2020. Delaware voters just won’t be as eager to turn out for Harris as they would have for President Biden, who has served the residents of his state for over 50 years. This isn’t to say that Harris won’t finish above Trump by double-digit points (she will).
Delaware, a former slave state, has a sizeable Black population, the 8th highest by percent in the nation at 22.5% of its population. Will Harris be able to tap into this pool of voters more effectively than her predecessor? Prior to dropping out, Biden was projected to win the lowest percentage of Black voters for a Democratic candidate in over 60 years, spelling disaster for his reelection chances. While Joe’s ouster and replacement with Kamala Harris, who would be the first Black woman to hold the presidency, will likely bolster the party’s support with Black Americans, it’s unlikely that Harris will even reach Biden’s performance with these voters in 2020; nevertheless, Harris certainly has room for growth with Black voters before Election Day, and her outperformance in a state like Delaware would be reflective of this.
Taking these factors into account, we believe that Harris’ results in Delaware will be in line with Hillary’s 53.4% of the vote to Trump’s 41.9% back in 2016.
MARYLAND
Maryland is the third bluest state in the nation, beaten only slightly for that second spot by Massachusetts (but still a ways behind Vermont). A Republican Presidential candidate has only won Maryland thrice since 1960, in the landslide elections of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, in 1972, 1984, and 1988, respectively. In 2020, Joe Biden absolutely dominated in the state, receiving more than double Donald Trump’s votes; Biden finished with 65.4% of the vote to Trump’s 32.2%. This was a significantly stronger performance than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton only received 60.3%.
Surely a state as solid blue as Maryland wouldn’t have an extremely popular Republican in office, but it did; from 2015 through 2023, Republican Larry Hogan served as governor. At the same time Democrats were having their best elections in the history of the state, Hogan was becoming one of the most popular governors in the country. In the last year of his term, he had an approval rating of 70%. And since leaving office, Hogan has turned his eyes towards Maryland’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Incumbent Democrat Senator Ben Cardin is retiring after three terms, leaving his seat up for grabs.
This November, while Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are engaged in a tight race for the presidency, Hogan and his Democrat opponent Angela Alsobrooks are duking it out for this seat. And although Alsobrooks holds a 5-point lead over Hogan in recent polling, you can’t count the former Governor out just yet. Many Marylanders voting for Kamala Harris will split their ballot and vote for Hogan, but it remains to be seen just how many actually will.
However, it doesn’t remain to be seen whether Kamala Harris will have a major victory in Maryland this fall, she will. Yet, it’s not all good news for Harris; in the state’s 2022 House elections, Democrats received 64.71% of the total vote, slightly lower than two years prior, and also a point under Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. This Democrat stagnation in the midterms mixed with a popular Republican down ballot is likely to help Trump make modest gains in the state. Therefore, we predict that Kamala Harris will win Maryland by a slightly smaller margin than Biden did four years ago. And while Trump may do slightly better, Harris will still dominate in this mid-Atlantic state.
NEW YORK
Please excuse the length of this article because we’ve finally gotten to our home state: The Empire State. We certainly have many opinions about New York and its politics, but we will try to keep it as brief and as unbiased as possible. New York, the home of West Point, Niagara Falls, and The Big Apple. Yes, the politics of New York state are obviously dominated by New York City. NYC is by far and away the largest city in the United States, with over 8.2 million residents (LA is second with 3.8 million). If you add Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties (which have 1.4 and 1.53 million people, respectively), and NYC’s neighbors to the north of Rockland and Westchester counties (339,000 and 990,000 people, respectively), the population of downstate New York balloons to a staggering 12.5 million people.
With the entire population of New York coming in at 19.68 million people, the downstaters certainly have a majority of the voting power. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden easily won the state, receiving 60.9% of the vote to Donald Trump’s 37.7%. Breaking down the results by counties, Biden won an eyepopping 86.8%, 83.5%, 77%, and 72.2% of the vote, in New York (Manhattan), Bronx, Kings (Brooklyn), and Queens counties, respectively. Lucky for the King of New York, Donald Trump, to save some of his pride, he did win Richmond County (Staten Island) by 15 points and squeaked through in Suffolk County, Long Island, winning by 232 votes (out of 762,274 total votes cast).
In upstate New York, Trump performed solidly, except in the counties of Erie (Buffalo), Monroe (Rochester), Onondaga (Syracuse), and Albany. An interesting development in the state of New York since 2020 was the resignation of three-term Governor Andrew Cuomo for sexual misconduct, placing Democrat Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul in charge. After serving out the rest of Cuomo’s term, Hochul faced an extremely tough challenger, Republican Lee Zeldin. A congressman from New York’s first congressional district (the eastern two-thirds of Suffolk County, Long Island), Zeldin performed stronger in New York’s Gubernatorial Election than any Republican since 2002. Despite not winning the race, he received 46.8% of the vote to Hochul’s 53.2%; for comparison, in 2018 Cuomo won 59.6% of the vote.
This strong performance by Zeldin helped Republican House candidates flip three New York House seats in the midterms (one-third of all seats flipped by the GOP that entire election cycle) and signaled that the Republican party is alive and well in The Empire State. Therefore, we predict that Donald Trump will perform significantly better in New York this November. If the former president can even come close to the Republicans’ 2022 midterm performance, where they won 43.9% of all House votes in the state, then The Donald will have a massive improvement from his 2020 performance.
NEW JERSEY
New Jersey is an often-overlooked state. As a suburb of two iconic American cities: New York and Philadelphia, it is the only state in the nation to have every one of its counties deemed urban by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yes, New Jersey crams a whopping 9.3 million people into 8,722 square miles, making it the 9th largest state by population, but also the 4th smallest by area. This gives the Garden State the title of the most densely populated state in the nation.
The tightly packed residents of this state generally lean to the left; in 2020, 57.3% of Jerseyites voted for Democrat Joe Biden, while only 41.4% voted for the Republican Donald Trump (a 16-point margin). This performance by Trump was the best of any Republican Presidential candidate since John McCain in 2008, who received an almost identical 41.6% of the vote. To find the last time a Republican was even competitive in New Jersey, you have to go back another four years to 2004, where George Bush lost to John Kerry by just 6.7 points.
Today, however, the state remains relatively blue, but probably less so than you think. In the past decade, Republican House candidates have performed surprisingly well in such a Democrat-leaning state as New Jersey. In the 2014 House elections, Republicans received 48.17% of the vote and won 6 out of 12 of the state’s seats (this was a year after 60% of residents voted to reelect Republican Governor Chris Christie). And although the GOP’s support crumbled in 2018, when they won just 38.7% of the vote and lost four of their House seats, they bounced back in 2020 and 2022, winning 41.58% and 44.46% of the vote, respectively.
Despite several polls conducted in late June and early July showing Trump either leading or narrowly trailing Biden in New Jersey, the current President’s replacement, Kamala Harris, is certainly not at risk of losing the state. And even though Trump isn’t competitive in the Garden State, that doesn’t mean that Democrats have won over any of its voters in the last four years (they haven’t). You can expect many suburban voters dissatisfied with the Biden Administration’s performance on issues like immigration and the economy to turn their eyes towards Trump.
For this reason, we predict that although Kamala Harris will win New Jersey this November, it will be by a sizably smaller margin than what Joe Biden won by in 2020.
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