Turnout for the 2023 election in NJ was small. Voting by mail helped Democrats

Voter turnout for last month’s election that decided control of the New Jersey Legislature met the expectations of experts who predicted that small numbers of Garden State voters would take to the polls.

About 1,759,000 of the state’s 6,494,988 registered voters casted ballots.

Though all 120 seats in the state Legislature were on the ballot, traditionally years without a federal or gubernatorial race see less people heading to New Jersey's polls.

Voting by mail creeps toward 'dominance'

That trend continued in 2023, according to Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the executive director of the FDU Poll.

“Turnout was pretty much exactly where we thought it would be, in the upper 20s, just about where it was in 2015, the last time we had an election like this one,” Cassino said. “That’s lower than races with bigger offices on the table - like the governor’s race in 2021 or the presidential race - but given that the trend before 2016 had been toward lower turnout numbers, it’s pretty good.”

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Most notable, Cassino said, is the “creeping dominance of vote by mail.”

More than 438,000 people submitted their ballots, either through the postal service or via dropbox before Election Day.

That amounts to more than a third of all votes cast. Cassino said the number of voters casting ballots early ticks up each year.

There is a lag in Republican strongholds but not by as much as some might expect. In the traditionally red Ocean County, there was 24% vote-by-mail, while more predominantly blue counties like Bergen and Essex saw vote-by-mail turnout of 20% and 25%, respectively.

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What did Democrats say?

LeRoy Jones, the state’s Democratic Party chairman, also called the turnout a “condition of the election cycle” because there were no statewide races on the ballot.

He said that he expects a much larger turnout in 2024, for both the primary and general election because of the presidential and senate races.

Jones said that the Democrats are trying to reach out to less consistent voters because while there were “pockets around the state that were battleground where turnout spiked a bit but overall statewide turnout should be a little better.”

The Democratic plan has also included having the “Get out the Vote” efforts started earlier, he said, because it used to be a week before the election but now starts the moment a vote-by-mail ballot hits the mailbox.

The New Jersey Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.

Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ election 2023: Voter turnout small, mail helps Democrats