2030 United States Senate election in New Jersey (Blackford)

The **2030 United States Senate election in New Jersey** was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2030, to elect a United States senator from New Jersey. Republican incumbent Jeff Van Drew was first elected with 49.9% of the vote in 2024, and ran for re-election to a second term. He was defeated in a landslide by Democratic nominee and former U.S. representative Andy Kim, who had previously unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2024.

Van Drew had been elected to the Senate in 2024, overcoming New Jersey's strong Democratic lean to defeat three-term Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez, who had been embroiled in multiple corruption scandals and lacked support from his own party. Van Drew was the first Republican elected to the Senate from New Jersey since 1972, and had campaigned as a political moderate, abandoning his prior staunch support for former President Donald Trump and distancing himself from both Trump and Ron DeSantis, the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nominee. However, he would position himself on the GOP's right during his Senate tenure, sponsoring multiple pieces of anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and anti-LGBT pieces of legislation and positioning himself as a loyal ally of President DeSantis.

Van Drew's social conservatism and support for DeSantis alienated him from the New Jerseyite electorate, and his approval rating sunk below 35% by June of 2027. After the 2028 United States presidential election, Van Drew was implicated in a scandal in which he and several other Republican senators allegedly participated in a plot to use illicit strategies to overturn the election results in favor of DeSantis, who had lost re-election by a considerable margin, and he was faced with calls to resign by many prominent New Jersey public officials. With New Jersey's powerful Democratic lean, having given Democratic presidential nominee Jon Ossoff over 60% of the vote in 2028, as well as Van Drew's strong unpopularity and growing association with the far-right of the Republican Party, he was widely expected to lose re-election in 2030 by a considerable margin.

Van Drew won the Republican nomination unopposed, and was faced by Andy Kim, a former U.S. representative who had unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Democratic Party for the same seat six years prior, earning the support of the party but being defeated by incumbent Bob Menendez in an upset. Kim developed a strong lead in polling, and the race was widely characterized as a safe Democratic flip, with most pundits noting that Van Drew had virtually no chance of winning re-election given the state's partisan lean and his personal unpopularity. Composite opinion polling had Kim defeating Van Drew 63% to 33%, a 30 point margin, while Van Drew at no point during the race held a lead in polling.

The race was called by most pundits for Kim as soon as the polls closed, and Van Drew was ultimately defeated by Kim by a 20 point margin, a narrower margin than anticipated but still a landslide. Kim flipped 8 of the 14 counties that voted for Van Drew in 2024, and reduced his margins in every remaining county by over 10 points. Van Drew initially refused to concede defeat, making false claims of electoral fraud similar to those made by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, however would eventually concede the race in late December of 2030, leaving office the next month.