Ronald Reagan giving a speech at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey on September 1, 1980.
Reagan carried New Jersey with 51.97% of the vote to Carter's 38.56%, a margin of 13.42%.[2]
Anderson came in a strong but distant third, with 7.88% of the vote. Reagan won 18 of the state's 21 counties, with Carter only holding onto the 3 most heavily Democratic counties in New Jersey: Essex County, Hudson County, and Mercer County. New Jersey weighed in for this election as almost 4% more Republican than the national average.
New Jersey in this era was a swing state with a slight Republican tilt; four years earlier, in 1976, the state had narrowly backed Republican Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter by a 50–48 margin, as Carter won nationally over Ford by a similarly narrow 50–48 margin. However, in 1980, with Reagan winning convincingly at the national level, the state easily remained in the Republican column. Carter was also hurt in the state by the candidacy of John Anderson, who had been a liberal Republican Congressman and whose campaign appealed strongly to Northeastern liberals and moderates who viewed Reagan as being too extreme and too far to the right,[3] but who were dissatisfied with the status quo under the Carter Administration.[4] Carter bled a substantial amount of support among such liberals and moderates in New Jersey who would likely have leaned Democratic in 1980 but instead voted for Anderson as a protest vote,[5] pushing Carter below 40% and widening Reagan's margin over Carter.
Results
1980 United States presidential election in New Jersey
^Howison, Geoffrey D.; The 1980 Presidential Election: Ronald Reagan and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement (Critical Moments in American History), p. 108 ISBN1136174117
^McMahon, Kevin J.;Winning the White House, 2008, p. 85 ISBN0230100422
^Lipset, Seymour; Party Coalitions in the 1980s, p. 228 ISBN1412830494
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