This past weekend, on January 26th, Anthony Colandro, New Jersey Second Amendment activist, NRA Board Member, and host of the Gun For Hire Radio show shared that Early Vote Action will be making regular appearances at Gun For Hire range in Woodland Park. EVA’s entrance into the fray of New Jersey politics is a potentially significant development. Against the backdrop of the seismic shift in the political landscape in the state, gun owners can seize on the momentum to both change election outcomes and drag the current minority state GOP closer to their cause.
The 2024 presidential election shattered some very long-held myths about New Jersey politics. The Democratic grip on the Garden State has lasted so long that it would be hard to blame the strategists and operatives in the Republican and Conservative camps for just rolling over and accepting these myths as fact. The question in 2025 is will the GOP in New Jersey learn from its prior mistakes?
Having met with many candidates for legislative seats up and down the state, the almost universal sentiment is that the GOP in New Jersey is simply content to be a minority party. The Blue Wall that tracks the NJ Transit commuter corridor, a diagonal blue stripe running from eastern Bergen County continuing southwest all the way to the Princeton area is impenetrable. That corridor represents the densest concentration of voters in the state (New Jersey being essentially a bedroom community for New York City).
The NJ Blue Wall comprises a dense mix of middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-class suburbs and major urban centers like Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson. According to the myth, the suburbs are full of moderate to liberal-leaning, white-collar professionals, while New Jersey cities are dense working-class areas with diverse minority populations. Again, according to the myth, those groups are off-limits to the GOP.
The long-ago era of Christine Todd Whitman and Chris Christie would lead one to believe that for Republicans to win a state election, the battleground would have to be Bergen County. The Blue Wall divides Bergen County with the western and northern parts of the county home to some of the wealthiest communities in the state and a history of voting for moderate Republicans primarily focused, at least in rhetoric, on keeping taxes low. Bergen County is the largest in the state by population (approximately 1 million residents). New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District, including the northern and western parts of Bergen County, had been a red district for almost a century before 2016 when Josh Gottheimer flipped that district blue and has managed to hold it for the last nine years.
The loss of that territory in 2016 likely created a fear in the State GOP that the Trump era of Republican politics had driven away the moderates who just wanted lower taxes. This dynamic has kept the GOP disloyal to more conservative aspects of national politics, importantly on issues relating to gun control and the right to keep and bear arms. That has left gun owners in the state on an island.
But then Trump completely re-wrote the rules, on some level not even of his own hand. A crop of conservative, Trump-loyal candidates and grassroots activists took to the streets in 2024 and in a very organic way, with very limited resources and no substantial support from the State GOP or the County Committees, led the charge in the heart of the Blue Wall. No example is as significant as Billy Prempeh’s run in NJ Congressional District 9 which centers around Paterson and captures portions of southern Passaic, Bergen, and Hudson Counties. While Prempeh walked away with a loss, one of the deepest blue parts of the state swung from nearly 30 points to less than 5 points. And Trump did even better.
In fact, Trump outperformed almost every down-ballot Republican in every district.
Looking ahead to 2025, it is worth examining how Trump performed in some of these Blue Wall Legislative Districts. In Legislative District 35, which centers around Paterson, in the last state election in 2023 Republicans lost by nearly 38 percentage points. In 2024, Trump lost that district by a mere 12 points… a 25-point swing! In Legislative District 36, in the 2023 state elections, Democrats carried the district by over 23 points. In 2024, Trump WON that district by 2 points. In years past, these districts were deemed so non-competitive that Democratic candidates would frequently run unopposed.
This is why it matters. In state and mid-term elections, voter participation rates fall precipitously. In the 2023 cycle, in LD35, Republicans lost by 38 points, but the margin was just over 6,000 votes. Comparing the 2023 state elections to the 2024 presidential election cycle, 24,000 fewer Republicans voted in LD35, four times the margin of victory in 2023. In LD36, 30,000 fewer Republicans voted. If the voters that showed up in 2024 voted in the 2023 state elections, LD35 and LD36 would be deep red districts, and in 2021, Jack Ciattarelli would have been governor, on just the swing of those two districts alone. LD35 and LD36 make up a significant portion of Congressional District 9 where Prempeh ran a strong, principled, conservative campaign and was unafraid to support gun rights, obtain A ratings from the NRA and GOA, and embrace the support of gun owners, not treating 2A issues like a political third rail.
Chart Sources:
New Jersey Town-by-Town Election Results
35th Legislative District Election Results – 2023
36th Legislative District Election Results – 2023
What does this mean? Politics is not about appealing to some hypothetical middle-ground, moderate, independent voter. Politics today in New Jersey and around the country is about turning out more of the base. And in those two deep blue districts, there are more Republican voters on the sidelines than all the people who voted for both parties, in total, in the state elections!
Enter Scott Presler who has announced that he is committing to work in New Jersey for the entirety of 2025. Presler, in many ways, is emblematic of the ascendency of the new generation of grassroots conservative activists. He was instrumental in delivering the Keystone State for Donald Trump, one of the tensest battlegrounds in the 2024 election.
Pressler’s organization, Early Vote Action, employs a simple strategy. Through a pure grassroots campaign, EVA volunteers contact unaffiliated voters, encourage them to register as Republicans, and then encourage those Republican voters to vote early, through either vote-by-mail or in-person early voting. The app that EVA volunteers use is a simple tool that virtually anyone can use. Phone banking or door knocking for actual campaigns and candidates can be more difficult because volunteers need much more training on the messaging and the issues to be effective. But EVA volunteers have an easy-to-deliver message, and can simply work in their neighborhoods. Download the app, pull up a list of voters to contact in the neighborhood, and then either make phone calls, send postcards, or door knock.
Gun owners are not just a voter bloc at this point. New Jersey Democrats have led an absolute assault on gun rights, in particular under Gov. Phil Murphy. In the wake of major Supreme Court victories, giving hope for 2A supporters in the Garden State, the level of grassroots activism has exponentially increased. Partnering with EVA is an obvious way that the grassroots energy can be channeled.
Gun owners can volunteer right now and go down their list of neighbors and friends in their circles, and encourage the people they know to register to vote, register as Republicans, and vote early. Gun owners have the numbers and as a motivated, organized special interest group, gun owners and Second Amendment supporters have the numerical representation to change outcomes in elections.
In exchange, the GOP in New Jersey will have to first realize the myths about politics here are a simple illusion, that the conservative base even in the bluest districts is large enough to swing elections and the only way to win elections is to emphatically appeal to that base of voters, embrace conservative values, which includes being unafraid to publicly and vigorously support and defend the right to keep and bear arms for the people State of New Jersey.
