Republican challengers in New Jersey still face uphill congressional campaigns

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The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, sparked reactions across party and ideological lines.

“I said that day Trump was courageous,” said Cenk Uygur, a host of the progressive politics show The Young Turks. “I loved when the crowd chanted ‘USA, USA’ because the president had just been saved … that was a great moment.”

Republicans unified behind Trump following the incident, which happened the weekend before the GOP National Convention in Milwaukee.

Experts caution that it’s too soon to determine the overall impact on November’s election. But whatever the impact, it will likely not be felt in New Jersey’s congressional races, according to political watchers in the Garden State.

“It’s going to take a lot more than the events of the past week to change the fundamental facts on the ground,” said Dr. Ben Dworkin, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University.

In New Jersey, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by almost 930,000, as of the beginning of July. Most incumbents, even Republicans, are safer because of redrawn maps that took effect during the 2022 congressional midterm elections.

“Even if the Republican Party is riding high this week, first of all, we’re not sure what it’ll be like at the end of October and beginning of November,” Dworkin added. “Second of all, these are still going to be very difficult districts with very talented and strongly entrenched Democratic incumbents.”

The race voters are likely to experience some effect could be the 7th Congressional District, according to Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. That district pits Republican incumbent Tom Kean Jr. against Democratic challenger Sue Altman.

“The reason for that is because Sue Altman is counting on a toxic Donald Trump to tie Tom Kean to, as every other opponent has tried to do … And so far, it hasn’t worked,” he said. “If all of a sudden Donald Trump is less toxic, then it undermines the sense that this district is one of the top prospects for Democrats in the entire country.”

Despite this, Rasmussen still says “a tidal wave” favoring Trump would be needed for down-ballot candidates to be successful. But he expects no tidal wave on the horizon, due to the political division of the country.

“It’s hard to see a tidal wave when you’ve got rock bed Democrats who will never consider [Trump,] and rock-bed Republicans who will never consider Biden,” he said. “They’re virtually immovable.”

Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, says most voters are entrenched in their opinions and beliefs. He said the public is polarized to the point that an assassination attempt, let alone a convention, probably won’t “move the needle that much” because “there’s very little room for the needle to move to begin with.”

“Polling can only do so much, we might see a trend where things move in a couple of points in one direction or the other,” Murray said. “Unless we see that consistently, and over time, we’re really not sure what’s going on, because that could just simply be the margin of error that we’re measuring.”