Steve Kornacki’s cities and counties to track on election night – NBC Los Angeles

The Donald Trump era has changed American politics for a decade. On Tuesday night, two contentious races for governor will define what the next steps for Republicans and Democrats might look like — not only who will lead Virginia and New Jersey for four years, but how the two parties are appealing to different types of voters and building coalitions for future elections.

Republicans have gained ground in those two blue-leaning states since Trump’s heavy losses there in 2020. Tuesday’s elections will show just how durable those advances were, hinging in part on the progress the Republican Party under Trump made with groups that once voted more strongly against the GOP. That especially includes Latino voters, who banked heavily toward Trump in 2024.

But Democrats have spent the last year focused on how to reverse those trends, nominating candidates without baggage from the party’s 2024 election loss. And, of course, Trump is now in the White House, which led to voter backlash against him as the incumbent during his first term.

The two states saw similar results in the last presidential election, but the races have gone differently this year. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger enters Election Day with a clear polling lead over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. And in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill holds a smaller advantage in most surveys over Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

Here are the places and the trends to watch when the votes get tallied Tuesday night.

New Jersey

Back in 2020, Joe Biden trounced Trump by 17 points in New Jersey. But Republicans have been seeing steady gains since then.

In 2021, Ciattarelli came within just three points of unseating Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. And last year, Trump lost by less than 6 points, the second-largest improvement he posted anywhere in the country. Both results were better performances — in all of the state’s 21 counties — than Trump in 2020.

Crucially, the areas where Trump and Ciattarelli made their biggest strides don’t necessarily overlap. They each tapped into different voters in different places. Ciattarelli made some of his biggest gains in suburban areas with above-average median incomes and higher concentrations of college degrees. Meanwhile, Trump’s largest improvements largely came in areas with heavier Hispanic populations.

Republican Jack Ciatterelli made his final case to voters as he positioned himself as the one who will drive down costs for New Jersey families. But Democrat Mikie Sherrill said it’s not possible to talk affordability in the state without also touching on what is happening in the White House. NBC New York’s Adam Harding reports.

Where Ciattarelli outperformed Trump

Somerset County is an affluent and historically Republican county filled with New York City bedroom communities. But like many suburban areas around the country, its population has diversified — from 75% white at the turn of the century to barely 50% in the most recent census — and its highly educated voters have reacted with hostility to the Trump-led GOP. George W. Bush carried Somerset in 2004, but Democrats have won it in every presidential election since, with Biden’s 21-point romp in 2020 as their high water mark.

In 2021, Ciattarelli came within four points of Murphy — a 17-point improvement over that Trump 2020 performance. Trump didn’t give back all of those gains in 2024, but he did lose significant ground from Ciattarelli’s showing, finishing 14 points behind Kamala Harris. (It helped that Ciattarelli once represented parts of Somerset in the state Legislature.)

A key question is whether Ciattarelli can at least replicate that 2021 showing. Four years ago, he benefited from the fact that Biden was in the White House. Many anti-Trump voters were willing to put aside their concerns with the national Republican Party. It turned out they had concerns with the Democrats who were running New Jersey, too, and deemed Ciattarelli an acceptable alternative. But with Trump back in power, will it be different?

Within Somerset, Bernards Township (population 27,000) is a great example of these dynamics. It has a median household income that’s nearly twice the statewide average. Two-thirds of its population is white, and more than two-thirds of its white adult population have college degrees, far above the statewide level. As recently as 2012, it was still voting Republican at the presidential level, but Trump’s emergence changed that. He lost it by 14 points in 2020 and only improved a smidge in 2024, when Harris bested him by 11.

Ciattarelli, on the other hand, won it by 5. Bernards Township is chock full of exactly the kind of voter Ciattarelli needs to hang on to: the avowedly anti-Trump, affluent suburbanite.

Where Trump outperformed Ciattarelli

Passaic County in North Jersey includes the state’s third-largest city, Paterson, along with a number of densely populated middle-class suburbs and a stretch of rural land and wilderness. It is racially and ethnically diverse: a population that’s about 40% Hispanic and white, just under 10% Black and Asian, andnotable Orthodox and Arab American pockets. Bill Clinton broke a string of Republican successes in Passaic when he carried it in his 1996 re-election bid and his party then posted double-digit wins until last year, when Trump flipped it.

While Ciattarelli also made sizable strides in 2021, he didn’t make the kinds of inroads Trump did in the county’s largest and least white municipalities: Paterson and Passaic city.

In Paterson, which is two-thirds Hispanic and less than 10% white, Ciattarelli lost by 71 points in his 2021 campaign, around what the typical margin of defeat for a Republican in the city had long been. But Trump finished only 28 points behind Harris last year. He did this by demonstrating significant new appeal in heavily Hispanic areas and by posting improvements in heavily Arab American South Paterson, where voters seemed to cast protest votes either for Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

With 70,000 residents, Passaic city is about half the size of Paterson, but it’s also overwhelmingly (75%) Hispanic. In 2024, Trump carried the city by 6 points after Ciattarelli lost it by 40 in 2021.

This was a trend seen across the state. Trump’s biggest gains from 2020 — and his biggest overperformances relative to Ciattarelli — tended to come from areas with sizable Hispanic populations. Ciattarelli’s inability to make even remotely similar inroads four years ago casts doubt on whether he can add these voters to his coalition this year.

Certainly, his campaign hopes that Trump will serve as a gateway to the broader Republican Party for them. But it also appears that many were first-time voters or voters who don’t normally participate in non-presidential elections. If Ciattarelli can fold in some of these new Trump voters, he’ll be taking a major step toward victory.

Short of winning over new votes in Paterson and Passaic city, Ciattarelli will have to hope that turnout is low. This was the case in 2021, when turnout plummeted in many heavily Democratic urban areas around the state. Take Paterson, where turnout in 2021 was just 35% of the level it had been in the 2020 presidential race — compared to the statewide average of 57%.

Reasserting their dominance in cities like Paterson while also beefing up turnout is a major priority for Sherrill this year.

Virginia

In 2024, Trump lost Virginia by just under 6 points, an improvement from his 10-point defeat in four years earlier. In a way, the result amounted to a tale of two different elections in the same state.

In the Washington, D.C., suburbs and exurbs of Northern Virginia, Trump made big strides, particularly in areas with significant Hispanic and Asian American populations. Had these gains extended across the state, he might have actually put Virginia in play, but outside of northern Virginia his progress was spotty at best, and he even backtracked in some areas.

The counties and cities that comprise Northern Virginia account for about one-third of all votes statewide. The growing and diversifying populations here are the primary source of Virginia’s evolution into a blue state — but those same places also drove Trump’s Northern Virginia improvement in 2024.

Building on 2021 gains

In reducing his deficit, Trump locked in many — but not all — of the gains that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin made in these same places in his victorious 2021 gubernatorial campaign. For example, in sprawling Loudoun County, which accounts for 5% of all votes cast statewide, Youngkin lost by 11 points in 2021, and Trump lost by 16 points last year. Both represent big jumps from Trump’s 25-point loss in 2020.

Trump did this in part by building support with Latino voters, as he did nationally. Case in point: Sterling has the highest concentration of Latino residents (50%) of any census-designated place in Loudoun County. Trump lost Sterling by 19 points to Harris after getting crushed by 44 against Biden in 2020.

Notably, this is one place where Trump outperformed Youngkin, who lost it by 24 in his own campaign. For Earle-Sears, building on this momentum is essential.

GOP improvements in Loudoun are also rooted in local politics, especially contentious disputes over education standards and school policies over the last half-decade. In particular, gains by both Youngkin and Trump with Asian American voters seem tied to these battles.

Earle-Sears is seeking to capitalize the same way. This makes majority-Asian Loudoun Valley Estates worth watching closely. A development community of about 10,000, its median income and college attainment rate are both far above the state average. In 2020, Loudoun Valley Estates sided with Biden by 43 points. Youngkin cut that to a 28-point Democratic margin a year later, and Trump brought it down five points further last year.

It will be a solid barometer of whether Earle-Sears has tapped into the same currents that boosted Youngkin and Trump in Loudoun and across northern Virginia.

There are similar dynamics in suburban Prince William County, another population juggernaut that accounts for 5% of all votes statewide. With a white population of around 40%, Prince William is more diverse and slightly more Democratic than Loudoun. Trump lost by 27 points there in 2020, a margin that both he and Youngkin reduced by about 10 points in 2021 and 2024.

Then there’s the geographically compact city of Manassas Park, which has just over 16,000 residents, almost half of whom are Hispanic — the highest concentration of any county or independent city in Virginia. Trump cut his deficit there from 33 points in 2020 to 20 points last year.

Where to watch beyond Northern Virginia

Moving away from Northern Virginia, two major population centers stand out for their willingness to embrace Youngkin — and their refusal to do the same for Trump last year.

One is Chesterfield County, which takes in the suburbs to the south of Richmond. With 365,000 residents, it’s the fourth-largest county in the state, and the biggest outside of Northern Virginia.

These were staunchly Republican suburbs from the end of World War II on, but a gradual shift away from the GOP exploded with the emergence of Trump. In 2016, he carried Chesterfield by 2 points, the worst showing for a Republican since Thomas Dewey in 1948. By 2020, it had flipped completely and Trump lost it by 7 points. And last year, it was the rare county in America that actually got bluer, with Harris pushing the margin to 9 points.

Chesterfield is racially diverse and has one of the largest Black populations in the state. Notably, though, a precinct-level analysis finds that Trump actually improved his performance in predominantly Black parts of the county; it was in largely white and high-educated precincts that he continued to lose ground:

A major reason why Youngkin is governor today is that he managed to roll back these Trump-era Democratic inroads, beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 5 points in Chesterfield. His campaign kept Trump at arm’s length and was no doubt helped by the fact that Trump was a former president in 2021, with the White House then occupied instead by an unpopular Democrat in Biden.

Now, with polls indicating there’s been no growth in Trump’s popularity over the last year, it figures to be tougher for Earle-Sears to connect with these voters. Democrats are banking on a backlash against Trump, and Chesterfield looms as a test of whether they are right to.

The biggest bellwether in the state may be the independent city of Virginia Beach, which has about 460,000 residents. For years, a large Navy presence helped make Virginia Beach one of the most Republican-friendly big cities in the country, but as it has continued to grow and diversify, it has tipped into the Democratic column.

In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson to carry Virginia Beach, taking it by 5 points. Flipping it back was a priority for Republicans as they sought to make Virginia a battleground state last year, but Harris managed to hang on to it by 3 points.

The story was different in the last governor’s race, though, with Youngkin winning Virginia Beach by 8 points. As with Chesterfield, the question is whether Trump’s return to the White House will make it all but impossible for the GOP to replicate that 2021 roadmap this year.