Overall, the
Northeast was Roosevelt's weakest region in 1932, with all 6 of Hoover's state victories coming from this region amid a nationwide Democratic landslide. However, the overwhelming urban vote in FDR's favor in 1932 helped to narrowly tip New Jersey into the Democratic column, even as much of the state's geographic area remained Republican. A similar pattern was seen in neighboring
New York State, which FDR won comfortably despite winning only ten of the state's 62 counties, the overwhelming majority of his victory margin there being provided by landslide wins in the five boroughs of massively populated New York City. Like most Northeastern states, New Jersey in the early decades of the 20th century had been a reliably Republican state; the state had not given a majority of the vote to a Democratic presidential candidate since
1892. (In
1912,
Woodrow Wilson, then the sitting
Governor of New Jersey, won the state's electoral votes, but with a plurality of only 41 percent in a 3-way race against a split Republican field, with former Republican President
Theodore Roosevelt running as a
third party candidate against incumbent Republican President
William Howard Taft. Wilson lost the state to the GOP by a decisive 12-point margin in a head-to-head match-up in
1916.) The state's strong Republican lean was still evident in FDR's 1932 election campaign: although he narrowly won the state with a 49.5-47.6 plurality over Herbert Hoover, in the midst of his nationwide landslide, that still made the state almost 16 points more Republican than the nation. By
1936, with the emergence of the
New Deal Coalition,
FDR would make dramatic gains for the Democratic Party in New Jersey that would endure and transform it into a closely divided
swing state with only a slight Republican lean, a pattern that would endure for much of the 20th century until New Jersey ultimately became a solidly Democratic state in the 1990s. ==See also==