New Jersey Politics and Government: The Suburbs Come of Age

Chapter 4. Contemporary Political Patterns.

50 Chapter 4 Contemporary Political Patterns I have eaten everything from sauerbraten to pirogies to tacos, because New Jersey has only about ten fewer ethnic groups than the U.N. has countries. —Former Governor Tom Kean Most of New Jersey’s successful politicians were long described as raging moderates. The reform-minded “amateur democrats” who blossomed in California, Illinois, and New York in the 1950s had no counterpart in New Jersey.1 Its Democrats were never prominent in the ascendant Roosevelt “liberal” wing of their party when “liberal” had a principally economic definition. Their longtime boss, Frank Hague, was hostile to the labor unions that were a major force among Democratic liberals . Although there were dueling Republican organizations in the north (representing the moderates) and the south (representing the conservatives), the GOP’s victorious candidates, such as governors from Walter Edge early in the twentieth century to Christine Whitman at its close, were centrists. By the 1960s New Jersey was poised for transformation.The old-style party machines had remained in place because there was no way for the new independent-leaning suburban majority to communicate, or for politicians to reach them. They read local newspapers or the Philadelphia and New York press, and they listened to out-of-state radio and television stations. With the reapportionment decisions described in chapter 3, the United States and New Jersey supreme courts dealt a blow to the political structure based on county parties.That external event allowed a new system to emerge. But the traditional underpinnings did not entirely disappear, and demographic and geographic vestiges remain.This chapter describes their effect on New Jersey elections. Contemporary Political Patterns 51 Demography To understand the state’s politics, one first needs to understand its demography. Ethnicity, religion, population change, and the structure of the economy all contribute. Ethnic and Religious Patterns New Jersey has always been a multicultural state. Early Dutch, British, and German settlers were joined in the mid-1800s by the Irish and shortly thereafter by Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and European Jews. The Jewish population of slightly over 5 percent is proportionally second only to New York. Catholics, who number about two-fifths of residents, are also the second highest such population share in the nation. African Americans, who constituted 5 percent of New Jersey’s residents in 1940, now make up 14.6 percent of the population—fifteenth largest in the fifty states. Hispanics have surpassed African Americans, at nearly 18 percent, which ranks New Jersey seventh in the nation. People of Asian ancestry follow at close to 9 percent, a figure that almost doubled between 2000 and 2010 and is now the third highest in the United States, while non-Hispanic whites, numbering about 5.2 million, fell from 66 percent of the population to 59 percent.The decline was even greater among whites under eighteen,who by 2010 made up about 52 percent of children. New Jersey is on track to become a “majority-minority” state. Since 1990, residents speaking a language other than English at home have increased from 1.4 million to 2.3 million, or 28 percent of the state’s population.The foreign-born rose from 1.47 million in 2000 to 1.76 million in 2010; a “best guess” estimate is that about 6 percent of New Jerseyans are undocumented aliens, placing the state fifth nationally.2 Since the native-born declined during this decade, the population would have fallen without these newcomers. Overall population growth between 2000 and 2010 was 4.5 percent, less than half the national average, and left New Jersey “riding in the caboose of the national demographic train.”3 Like earlier immigrants, many of the newer ones have settled in cities, particularly the Newark and Jersey City metropolitan areas.Of late,however, they have been following the rest of the population to the suburbs. Both the Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon and Bergen-Passaic PMSAs (primary metropolitan statistical areas) are now home to more of the foreign-born than is the Jersey City PMSA, and together they far exceed the numbers in the Newark PMSA. 5 2 N e w J e r s e y P o l i t i c s a n d G ov e r n m e n t African Americans and Hispanics, the largest minority groups, are concentrated in Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cumberland, Essex, Mercer, and Union counties.All have...