New Jersey

An unaffiliated voter who takes a party ballot in the June primary becomes enrolled in that party. Between June 2 and August 1 the unaffiliated column fell 16,360 while Democratic rose 25,869 and Republican rose 8,617 — a net party gain of 34,486 against total growth of only 18,071. Party enrollment is therefore a function of when you look, and the movement is predictable from the calendar rather than from anything about the voter. A pipeline that caches affiliation, or compares a pre-primary snapshot to a post-primary one, reports a partisan swing that is an artifact of the ballot a voter chose.

564 municipalities tile the entire state with no unincorporated territory, so the county administers no ground of its own and there is no residual space between municipalities. Pipelines built on the national default — municipalities as islands inside county-administered space — have the containment backwards, and address resolution that falls back to a county when no municipality matches will never fire correctly. This is the shape the corpus measured every other state against, and New England eventually took it further by deleting the county tier entirely.

The register carries Conservative, Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform and Socialist as separate columns alongside the two major parties and unaffiliated — 73,949 registrations, 1.10% of the state. None is pooled into an other bucket. A schema with two parties and an other loses the distinction between seven organisations that the state maintains deliberately, and the smallest, Reform at 1,336, would round to zero in any percentage-based model while still being a real set of named people.

New Jersey has one municipal tier with five statutory forms — borough, township, city, town, village — and calls all 564 of them municipalities. The Census sorts them into 323 municipal and 241 township, which are two of its own classification buckets rather than two tiers of New Jersey government. Reading the Census split as a hierarchy invents a township layer beneath the municipal one, which is exactly what Michigan has and New Jersey does not.

Governor, lieutenant governor and the entire legislature are elected in odd-numbered years, so New Jersey's marquee state elections never coincide with the federal calendar. A cycle model keyed to even years finds no state offices here, and a turnout expectation carried from a presidential year into a gubernatorial one is wrong by a wide margin in a state where the two never share a ballot.

Each of the 40 legislative districts elects one senator and two assembly members on the same lines, so a single district geography carries three seats of two different chambers with different term lengths. A district-to-seat relation modelled one-to-one is wrong for all 40, and joining assembly results to senate results on district alone silently merges contests that are not the same race.

The Division of Elections publishes the monthly register by county, by congressional district and by legislative district — three geographies, none of them the 564 municipalities that are the state's defining tier. So the unit that makes New Jersey structurally distinctive is the one unit the registration file does not use, and any municipal figure has to be assembled from county clerk sources rather than read from the state.

New Jersey administers 21 counties, the 2024 gazetteer lists 21 county-equivalents, and the Census counts 21 county governments. Three-way agreement with no consolidated city-county and no abolition. Unlike Connecticut and Rhode Island, which have zero county governments, New Jersey's 21 are real and sit above a blanket municipal layer — so a fully-municipal state is not automatically a countyless one, and the two properties have to be recorded separately.