Kim Up Big in New Jersey Senate Race

Both Candidates Remain Relatively Unknown

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, October 30, 2024 – Representative Andy Kim has a substantial lead over his Republican opponent, Curtis Bashaw, in the race for the Senate seat formerly held by Bob Menendez. According to the latest results from the FDU Poll, Kim leads Bashaw by 18 points among likely voters in New Jersey, even as many voters say that they don’t know enough about the candidates to have an opinion.

“The Presidential election means that a lot of voters just have not been paying attention to this race,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson, and the Executive Director of the poll. “In the absence of reasons not to, people are just going to vote by party, and in New Jersey that’s good news for Democrats.”

Both candidates have solid support among their respective partisan and ideological bases. Kim holds the support of 96 percent of Democrats, 92 percent of liberals and 87 percent of progressives in the state. 87 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of conservatives say that they’ll vote for Bashaw in November. Despite some attempts to distance himself from the Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, Bashaw has the support of 87 percent of MAGA voters. Among self-described moderates, Kim leads by a wide margin, 69 to 26.

“Bashaw’s strategy was to try and make Kim look unacceptably liberal to New Jersey voters, and it just hasn’t happened,” said Cassino. “To win, Bashaw needs to get a lot of crossover votes from moderates and Democratic leaners, and we’re just not seeing it in the data.”

While Kim’s lead over Bashaw is substantial, it’s in line with how Democrats have done in previous US Senate races in the state. Generally, Democrats running for Senate in New Jersey have done better in Presidential election years, like this one, than in mid-term election years. In 2020, Senator Cory Booker won re-election by 16 points over Republican Rik Mehta. In 2012, another Presidential election year, Menendez won by 20 points, 59 percent to 39 over Republican Joe Kyrillos. In the last two off-year Senate elections, Democratic incumbents won by 11 points (2018, Menendez over Bob Hugin), and 14 points (2014, Booker over Jeff Bell).

“In a Presidential election year, you get a lot of voters who don’t bother to turn out for mid-term elections,” said Cassino. “If Biden were on the top of the ticket, it might not be as much of an advantage for Kim, but New Jersey Democrats seem much more enthusiastic about voting for Harris.”

A low-key campaign overshadowed by the Presidential election, and even a competitive House race in the Seventh Congressional District means that both candidates remain unknown by large numbers of voters. Kim is viewed favorably by 53 percent of voters, and unfavorably by just 16 percent. Thirty-one percent say that they don’t have any view of him, favorable or not. Similarly, Bashaw is viewed favorably by more voters (31 percent) than view him unfavorably (21 percent), but the biggest group, 41 percent, say that they don’t have an opinion of him either way.

“New Jersey is an expensive state to campaign in, and this Senate race just hasn’t been that visible,” said Cassino. “Voters are seeing more ads for House candidates on Long Island than they are about the Kim-Bashaw race, so it’s not surprising that they don’t know much about the candidates.”

Of the two candidates, Kim has more cross-party appeal, with 24 percent of Republicans saying that they have a favorable view of the Representative, while just 14 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of Bashaw. For both candidates, voters who don’t have an opinion of them form a substantial part of their support: 14 percent of Kim supporters say that they don’t know enough about him to offer a favorable or unfavorable view, as do 24 percent of Bashaw supporters.

Methodology

The survey was conducted between October 20 and October 27, 2024, using a voter list of adult New Jersey residents carried out by Braun Research of Princeton, New Jersey. Voter lists were obtained from Aristotle International of Washington, DC. Respondents were randomly chosen from the list, and contacted via either live caller telephone interviews, or text-to-web surveys sent to cellular phones, resulting in an overall sample of 806 registered voters in New Jersey. 221 of the surveys were carried out via live caller telephone interviews on landlines, 302 on live caller interviews to cell phones, and the remainder (286) were done on a web platform via weblinks sent via SMS to cell phones. Surveys were conducted only in English. Respondents were considered likely voters if they (a) were registered to vote in the state, and (b) said that they planned to vote in the Senate race.

The data were weighted to be representative of the population of New Jersey voters, according to data from Pew Research. The weights used, like all weights, balance the demographic characteristics of the sample to match known population parameters. The weighted results used here are balanced to match parameters for sex, age, education and race/ethnicity.

SPSSINC RAKE, an SPSS extension module that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using the GENLOG procedure, was used to produce final weights. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis helps to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The size of these weights is used to construct the measure of design effects, which indicate the extent to which the reported results are being driven by the weights applied to the data, rather than found in the data itself. Simply put, these design effects tell us how many additional respondents would have been needed to get the weighted number of respondents across weighted categories: larger design effects indicate greater levels of under-representation in the data. In this case, calculated design effects are approximately 1.3.

All surveys are subject to sampling error, which is the expected probable difference between interviewing everyone in a population versus a scientific sampling drawn from that population. Sampling error should be adjusted to recognize the effect of weighting the data to better match the population. In this poll, the simple sampling error for 806 registered New Jersey voters is +/-3.5 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-4.1 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported.

This error calculation does not take into account other sources of variation inherent in public opinion studies, such as non-response, question wording, differences in translated forms, or context effects. While such errors are known to exist, they are often unquantifiable within a particular survey, and all efforts, such as randomization and extensive pre-testing of items, have been used to minimize them.

The FDU Poll is a member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative and is devoted to ensuring that our results are presented in such a way that anyone can quickly and easily get all of the information that they may need to evaluate the validity of our surveys. We believe that transparency is the key to building trust in the work of high-quality public opinion research, and necessary to push our industry forward.

Weighted Telephone Sample Characteristics

806 Registered New Jersey Voters

Figures do not include individuals who declined to answer demographic items.

Man

49%                 N = 392

Woman

51%                 N = 410

Some Other Way

1%                  N = 5

18-30

17%                N = 135

31-44

25%                 N = 203

45-64

36%                 N = 289

65+

22%                 N = 180

White

69%                N = 557

Black

13%                N = 104

Hispanic/Latino/a

12%                N = 95

Asian

5%                  N = 36

Other/Multi-racial

1%                  N = 9

No college degree

61%                N = 495

College degree or more

39%                N = 324

Question Wording and Order

First off, we’d like to ask you a few questions about the upcoming Senate Election

P1. [Shuffle order of top candidates] In November’s New Jersey Senate election, do you intend to vote for Andy Kim, the Democrat, Curtis Bashaw, the Republican, for someone else, or do you not plan on voting?

1. Andy Kim, the Democrat
2. Curtis Bashaw, the Republican
3. Someone else
4. Not going to vote
5. [Vol] Don’t know/ Refused

And how do you feel about the candidates?

P2. Would you say that you have a favorable view of Andy Kim, an unfavorable view of him, or do you not know enough about him to say?

1. Favorable
2. Unfavorable
3. Don’t Know
4. [Vol] Refused

P3. Would you say that you have a favorable view of Curtis Bashaw, an unfavorable view of him, or do you not know enough about him to say?

1. Favorable
2. Unfavorable
3. Don’t Know
4. [Vol] Refused

Further Questions Held for Future Release

Release Tables