Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, Matt Friedman, reporter for Politico New Jersey and author of the New Jersey Politico Playbook. That's the newsletter that they send every day. He wrote that piece that asked if New Jersey is a swing state now. Matt, welcome back to WNYC.

Matt Friedman: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: New Jersey listeners, is anyone listening who voted for Biden in 2020 but Trump this year, or Biden in 2020 but this year you stayed home? Tell us your story of why. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, and anything else you want to say or ask about the election results in the state and your hopes or fears for the state of the country going forward, or you be the pundit. Why did it turn out this way, at least in New Jersey? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Matt, Harris beat Trump according to the numbers I'm seeing by only five points in the state. Biden had beat him by 16. Is New Jersey a swing state now?

Matt Friedman: Well, it put up swing state numbers. That much we know. Whether this is a trend or not is still hard to suss out because it's not the first time in recent years that we've seen an especially close result in a statewide election in New Jersey, but it's also since then reverted to form and then come back to this. I think that a lot of ways we talk about New Jersey as a swing state, there's no doubt that Trump did amazingly well compared to any Republican in the last 30 years here, but also, Trump is kind of shown to be a singular figure in a lot of ways.

Will it be like this going forward? Honestly, I'm pretty skeptical that it's really a swing state. This was a year across the board, but I think it's interesting that every blue state virtually performed better for Trump than it did in 2020. The difference in New Jersey, though, is that it swung even harder for Trump than most blue states did. The one thing about elections is anyone who pretends to know what's going to happen has no idea what they're talking about.

Brian Lehrer: When Andy Kim was on just a minute ago, I don't know if you were listening, but he had an easier time of it than the candidate at the top of the ticket. He won by nine points over his Republican opponent, while Harris only won by five points. What do you make of the difference between the two elections?

Matt Friedman: Well, I think that Andy Kim is a pretty popular figure and a pretty uncontroversial figure as far as New Jersey goes. He actually had a lot of genuine enthusiasm behind him, both in the Democratic base and elsewhere. I think that also shows that Trump is kind of a singular figure here. Of course, his margin of victory was much closer than it typically is in a statewide race for Senate. New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican senator in 52 years.

This margin was even closer than Bob Menendez coming off his first corruption indictment in 2018 after a hung jury and still managing to win reelection by 10 or 11 points. It shows you there are coattails, but there definitely was some ticket-splitting going on there. Andy Kim is a new figure and he's come in and just-- This quiet seeming guy just came in and kind of wrecked shop in terms of the Democratic machine. A lot of people really like that. He's a pretty popular guy right now, which might be belied at first glance by the relatively narrow victory.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from someone who I think he told our screener voted for Biden in 2020, didn't vote for president this year. Gary in Little Ferry, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gary. Did I get that right?

Gary: Hello. Well, no, I didn't. I voted in Mitt Romney in '19 and '20.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sorry.

Gary: I'm a lifelong Republican, but Donald Trump disgusts me. I was involved in Republican politics. I was actually a committee man for Bergen County and I ran for City Council twice in Fort Lee, which is a very Democratic town. When I first moved to New Jersey in 1988, it was a swing state. I think the legislature was controlled by Republicans. You had Tom Kean and Whitman as governors. What happened was that the Republican Party moved so far to the right, they lost attraction.

I just think there's a lot of frustration. A lot of people believe government isn't doing anything for them, they just take their tax money. That's why Trump did very well. I think it was a protest vote. As far as Kim goes, he didn't have a strong opponent. His opponent seemed like a nice guy, but he was also gay. It might have hurt him a little bit. If there was a very strong opponent, he would have run a much-- it would have been a lot closer for him.

Brian Lehrer: Gary, do I understand correctly, though, that you didn't vote for president this year, given what you said about Trump? Why didn't you vote for Harris if you didn't?

Gary: Well, I think in New Jersey, she'd win by a landslide. If I was living in Pennsylvania, I would have voted. I would have held my nose and voted for Harris, but I figured in New Jersey, she would have won by at least double digits. I figured, why? I'm just so very angry at the Republican Party because they have no guts. This Trump is a bad man and he's going to cause a lot of trouble. He's going to go after people and try to arrest his political opponents just because they oppose him. That's not the United States of America.

Brian Lehrer: Gary, thank you for your call. Interesting sample of one there, Matt, but I wonder if there are other people who would not vote for Trump but didn't vote for Harris because they weren't maybe so enthusiastic about her and they didn't think she needed their vote in blue New Jersey?

Matt Friedman: That's quite possible because most of us-- There's lip service paid every four years by Republicans to flipping New Jersey. People [unintelligible 00:06:42] Trump saying, "Well, I think we can play in New Jersey this year," but he also said that in 2020 and he also said that in 2016. Forgive us if we just thought, "Okay, he's saying that again." I think the story though of this election really, there are some old-school Republicans like Gary who really detest Donald Trump and really do believe in the rule of law and hate what they saw during the transfer of power last time.

I think the story of this election is really-- first and foremost, in New Jersey, what we're seeing is the Hispanic vote, which granted is not a monolith, but in this case, it seems to have moved right across the board based on exit polling that's especially among Hispanic males. If you just look at the map and if you look at the towns where the shift in performance was most dramatic, it tended to be the towns with a high population of whether it's Cubans, whether it's Puerto Ricans, whether it's other groups of Hispanic Americans. You could see it in Hudson County, you could see it in Passaic County, they moved right.

I think you've also got some questions about other groups like Passaic County, which was probably the most dramatic flip, large Arab American Muslim population and also a small but significant number of Orthodox Jews who are very conservative. To me, it was a wild demographic shift election, and Democrats can't just count on Hispanic voters supporting them.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking of Passaic County, which Trump actually carried, right? That's different than in the past?

Matt Friedman: Yes, that is. Chris Christie almost carried it in 2009 and he did in 2013, but that was a landslide election where he carried almost every county pretty much. It's very unusual. Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: For those who don't know, the state's county Passaic includes Paterson. We have the mayor of Paterson standing by, who's going to join us in a minute, but we also have a caller from Paterson who may be representative of some of the trends we've been talking about. Charles in Paterson, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Charles: Well, you're welcome, Brian. Thank you for the opportunity. I don't know how representative I am, but I did flip for Trump. I have been truly suffering the past four years trying to make ends meet. I am not a single-issue voter, Sir. I consider everything. I consider the economy, the border, the individual rights, the way our military is being used. Overall, I have felt completely divorced from the Democratic Party.

The final straw, frankly, for me was the anointment of the vice president. I didn't vote for her in the primary. Why would I vote for her in the final election? She did not go through that process. I felt completely disenfranchised. That would be--

Brian Lehrer: You did vote, I understand, for Biden in 2020. What was your thinking then before you wound up in this place this year for all the reasons you just stated?

Charles: My thinking then was I was not represented by the Republican candidate. I was more represented by what I believed the Democratic Party stood for at that time.

Brian Lehrer: Charles, thank you very much. We don't have the mayor on the line quite yet. We're going to talk to Mayor Sayegh from Paterson in just a second. Any comment from you, Matt? My guest is Matt Friedman from Political New Jersey. Was Charles representative of something to your ear, changing from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024?

Matt Friedman: Well, I think it's important that he said he's not a single-issue voter. It's just human nature to find a simple explanation for why things change, and frankly, that just doesn't exist. I think what we saw, and I think I can go back to an earlier caller, maybe half an hour on your show, what we've seen here is obviously economic concerns. The pandemic really flipped the economy. Housing prices went through the roof. Biden really inherited a lot of that, and then you have the stimulus and the economy, which probably drove a lot of the inflation.

If you're to weigh one issue above others, it's all complicated. I think inflation is probably the one that did it here because especially in places like Hudson and Passaic County, you have a lot of working-class, especially if we're talking about Hispanic people, a lot of working-class people in a very expensive place to live. There's also, and they're seeing it, there's also a bedroom community of wealthier, whiter New York City workers who have a lot of money and are also driving up the prices in these areas. That can really read a lot of contrast there and that could shift some votes.

At the same time, with Democrats, they're telling you, "Well, the economy is good. Look at the numbers." Overall, they're not lying that GDP growth was strong, the job growth has been strong, but I think ultimately, what Trump offered was some scapegoats. You heard a caller, what I was referring back to half an hour ago, blame housing prices on undocumented immigrants.

Now, I do believe there's some upward pressure from influxes of people coming in. That's just economics. But the way our housing prices have shot up, the fact that in parts of North Jersey and in some of the more trained communities where commuters can make it into the city, when you have these absolutely astronomical housing prices, that's not from undocumented immigrants. There's upward pressure. When they go up, everyone suffers the upward pressure.

I think the immigration plays a small part, but it's certainly not all of it. If you heard that caller say it, it was like it was a simple explanation and that's the reason housing is so expensive. It's not. It's one small factor contributing to it.

Brian Lehrer: Certainly, JD Vance, I didn't hear Trump himself do it, maybe he did, but I certainly heard JD Vance out there saying the problem with housing prices was there were too many people coming into the country illegally and that was pushing up the price. They were pushing that as an explanation in the campaign for sure. Well, we do have the mayor of Paterson, André Sayegh, on the line for a couple of minutes to join this segment with Matt Friedman from Politico New Jersey. Mayor Sayegh, thanks for giving us a few minutes. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor André Sayegh: Hey, it's good to be back. I thought we'd be talking about the Mets winning the World Series.

Brian Lehrer: We could have hoped, or the Yankees at least, but what--

Mayor André Sayegh: No, no, we don't go there, Sir, please.

[laughter]

Mayor André Sayegh: The battle lines are drawn sort of like Democrats and Republicans. I guess that's a pivot point, right?

Brian Lehrer: You're a Democrat, right?

Mayor André Sayegh: Yes, I am, Sir.

Brian Lehrer: What happened in Passaic County and in Paterson?

Mayor André Sayegh: It's hard to explain. Was immigration the issue that resonated? Was it the economy that resonated? Or was it just a Trump brand name? Think about this. It's about marketing. This man's been known for four decades, so you either like him or you don't. It's like any product; Coca-Cola, McDonald's. That's Donald Trump for you. People know the name brand.

Brian Lehrer: There is a Palestinian community in Paterson. There's an Arab American community. You come from, I believe, Middle Eastern parents, Syrian and Lebanese family, if I'm not mistaken.

Mayor André Sayegh: Yes, correct.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you think that contributed? Did people stay home because of Gaza?

Mayor André Sayegh: Yes, I think people did stay home. Some people voted for Jill Stein, and believe it or not, some may have even voted for Donald Trump because it goes back to what I said about the brand name, somebody you know.

Brian Lehrer: How do you understand somebody with sympathy for the people of Gaza voting for Trump, given the free rein that he seems to indicate he would give and has given in the past to Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Mayor André Sayegh: Could it be voting with your wallet, or could it also be not wanting to vote for a woman? Those are things that I'm still trying to parse out because I don't necessarily think there's one single issue that drove people to vote for him in Passaic County and other parts of the state.

Brian Lehrer: It's a very Latino-

Mayor André Sayegh: It is.

Brian Lehrer: -County. What are the basic demographics of your city, Paterson? Do you know them?

Mayor André Sayegh: We have about 65% Latino, predominantly Dominican. Yes. We have the highest Latino population in the state. We have a vast number of residents who are either Dominican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican. We have almost everything here as far as Latin America is concerned.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think you had that gender divide in the Latino community there that got so widely reported in the national media? Trump won Latino men by 10 points. He lost Latino women by about 24 points. Do you think you had that in Paterson?

Mayor André Sayegh: A couple things. One, my director of constituent services on Election Day told me, and he's Colombian, he says, "He's going to lose a lot of Latinos." I said, "Wait a minute, what do you mean by that?" He said, "Well, there's many conservative Latinos and some of the issues that are being espoused by the Democratic Party don't necessarily resonate with them. What does strike a chord would be let's address inflation, let's improve our economy, let's generate more jobs." Quite frankly, a lot of these Latinos are Catholic and there's some conservatism in the churches. That probably motivated them.

Brian Lehrer: And notions of masculinity, perhaps with that gender divide?

Mayor André Sayegh: Yes, yes, yes. I would also say, and Brian, I'll give you an example, at the end of the night, I was getting some tallies. I went to my old District, Ward 6 District 7, and I'm saying to myself, "Wow, this is going to be a triumph for Kamala. She's going to trounce him here." She lost that district, and that's a Latino district.

Brian Lehrer: For all the reasons you've been articulating, I guess?

Mayor André Sayegh: Correct.

Brian Lehrer: Matt Friedman from Politico, do you want to ask Mayor Sayegh anything before I let him go?

Matt Friedman: Mayor, did you see this coming at all or was this a total [unintelligible 00:17:40]?

Mayor André Sayegh: No, I did not. I did not. I was just telling somebody I'm old enough to remember 1994, and I don't think we saw that Contract with America GOP tsunami coming either.

Brian Lehrer: Right. That came in the middle of the Clinton administration and this came now. What's the response? Last question, Mayor Sayegh. What's the response from you as a Democratic mayor of your city that voted the way it did or from other Democrats in the state if you want to project onto them to be more in touch with the voters than what you've been describing?

Mayor André Sayegh: Yes, for sure. Senator Bernie Sanders came out and talked about the working class, and they feel abandoned. Well, I think if anything, we have to double down and make sure that they don't feel that way, and we need to empower them.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think then, since you mentioned Senator Sanders, that Vice President Harris would have done better to run on more of the progressive economic platforms that she embraced in 2019 or even that President Biden embraced that he couldn't get through Congress, Medicare for All, to cite Bernie Sanders, but also Biden had universal pre-K, Biden had more elder care, Biden had paid family leave. He couldn't get these things through Congress. He was going to propose national rent control just before he dropped out of the race.

Kamala Harris didn't really embrace any of those things that I just mentioned as big national programs when she was running. She seemed to more tack toward the center. A, is that your impression? B, do you think she would have done better by being a little more Bernie-ish?

Mayor André Sayegh: I can recall that James Carville, I believe, advised then Bill Clinton to focus on the economy. In fact, they said it was the economy stupid because that would essentially resonate with a lot of people. I feel like if they were hyper-focused on that, then we might have some better results.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor André Sayegh of Paterson, thank you for calling in and giving us a few minutes today.

Mayor André Sayegh: Thank you, Brian. Hopefully, next time we talk, the Mets will have won the World Series.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Hopefully, we'll talk before next October.

Mayor André Sayegh: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Lori in Morristown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lori.

Lori: Hi, Brian. Just to echo what your guest said before, when Trump had come in, he inherited this great economy from Obama that was still on an upswing, and that crested. He did his tax cuts, he put in his tariffs, then COVID hit, and so we were on a wicked downswing when Biden took over. I'm in Morris County. I think a lot of people who don't understand really how economics works, they think, "Oh, well, Bidenomics caused the inflation." They don't realize that inflation would have happened no matter who was in office because of the situation in the world.

I think if maybe Biden had done more in terms of rescinding the tax, the tariffs that Trump put in place or we had had a quicker economic recovery, he was managing a recovery, not a normal economy, and that affected him. I think it affected her. She didn't differentiate herself from his policies. Bottom line, I think it's a lack of education that people blamed him. There was media rhetoric around it too. People blamed Biden for the state of their family economics.

Brian Lehrer: Lori, I hear you.

Lori: There's really not much you could do.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Lori: Just like your caller who said that the housing prices were going up from immigrants, the immigrants aren't coming over with hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy up housing. It's large corporations cornering the market.

Brian Lehrer: Lori, thank you very much. One more for Matt Friedman from Politico. I think John in Monmouth County is going to reference the question in your article, Matt, as to whether New Jersey is a swing state now. John, you're on WNYC. Do I see you were a poll worker on Tuesday?

John: I was not a poll worker on Tuesday, but I am a poll worker. I have done that before.

Brian Lehrer: Okay.

John: To answer your original question and with respect to your guest, because I think he's a great journalist, I don't think New Jersey is a swing state. I think there is a cult of personality with Trump. When you think of voters, you think of four and four voters. They go out every year and they vote four out of the last four years. I think a lot of people have voted for Donald Trump. They just come out in presidential years. I think with our governor's race in '25 and the midterms in '22, we're going to see it swing back.

I don't want to deny that this happened because it happened. I think maybe the numbers would show that other people like Barack Obama, there's a bit of a cult of personality. Yes, a bunch of people voted for Obama and then didn't go and vote for the next couple of years. Maybe the numbers showed that--

Brian Lehrer: What we saw that we laid out at the beginning of the segment is that basically, the same number of people voted for Trump in New Jersey this year as in 2020, but there were 500,000 fewer votes for Harris than there were for Biden in 2020. What does that tell you, John, as an observer of the scene?

John: Well, I think you guys discussed and that you hit on some of that, focusing on Passaic County, [unintelligible 00:23:34] Hispanic, and we know how that went nationwide, the Arab American population that you mentioned. I think not as many people were as motivated by Harris. They just had questions about Harris that really weren't answered, so they just didn't go and vote.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you for your call. We appreciate it. Matt, before you go, we played a clip earlier with Senator-elect Kim of Governor Murphy after the election saying, "If there's any attack on the Garden State or any of its communities from Washington, I will fight back with every fiber of my being," but as Politico has reported, he also went out of his way in his news conference to say nice things about President-elect Trump. Here's 20 seconds of Governor Murphy recalling the height of the pandemic.

Governor Murphy: In June of 2020 by example, I sat across the table from President Trump in Bedminster and urged him to authorize the Portal North Bridge Project, one of the most critical infrastructure initiatives in the nation. The President heard my argument and greenlit the project literally that night, and that project is well underway.

Brian Lehrer: Using that clip as a starting point, Matt, what's this line that the Governor seems to be walking or that he would have to walk to try to get things either given to or not taken away from New Jerseyans?

Matt Friedman: This isn't new, really. If there's one thing we can say about Trump-- Well, there's many things we could say about Trump with certainty because we all know him pretty well now, but he sure likes it when people say nice things about him, and that goes a long way. If you're the governor of a blue state, well, if you say some nice things about him and that can help billions of federal funds come your way, it just makes sense to do it. There's not much downside.

You saw Murphy do it during the pandemic a few years after he came into office, promising to Trump-proof New Jersey and saying he wanted to make it the California of the East. You even saw, after the assassination attempt, Murphy went and visited Trump in Bedminster. It just makes sense. If you're going to responsibly govern a state, you're not going to want to sacrifice federal funds based on your dislike for someone and their potential when you know that they could engage in petty revenge.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think is most in play for New Jersey in the new Trump administration, especially if he has both Houses of Congress? Can you name one or two things you'll have your eye on from the start?

Matt Friedman: Well, certainly the state and local tax deduction that Trump limited to $10,000 he promised on the campaign trail, as he was promising a lot. This guy promised a lot on the campaign trail without any idea how to pay for it, but he promised to repeal it. I'd like to see if that's actually going to happen. That's something that's huge in the suburban communities that really used to be Republican and are now Democratic.

There's probably about 400,000 undocumented immigrants in New Jersey. What happens to them? We've had a reaction in the state to close down private prisons where they were held. Is that going to come back? What's the mass deportation going to look like here? In terms of New Jersey getting its share of how do we navigate this blue state in a Republican administration that's proven in the past to be vengeful about things, how do you walk that line?

Also, electorally, I am inclined to agree mostly with John, the last caller. We have to ask the questions when these results come in like this. Like I said before, I think Trump is a singular figure. Republicans haven't found anyone who can replicate this yet. We have some signs in New Jersey that Republicans can come close here but also, it reverted in 2022 and 2023, really reverted back to its blue state behavior. We got to keep an eye on it, but we can't draw a lesson yet.

Brian Lehrer: Matt Friedman, reporter for Politico New Jersey and author of their New Jersey Politico Playbook newsletter, thank you very much for coming on with us. We always appreciate it.

Matt Friedman: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.