This report is a second report in a series; the first report was published in 2023. For the data collection for the first report, CAWP partnered with the Center for Public Interest Polling to conduct a survey of all currently serving officeholders in New Jersey at the congressional, statewide elective executive, state legislative, county, and municipal levels to collect demographic data. Despite multiple attempts to contact elected officials and using various outreach techniques, the response rate was only 16.1%. As outlined in the previous report, three major challenges emerged in achieving this: the absence of mandatory participation by officeholders in completing demographic surveys, the limitation of surveys and the resulting reliance on proxy coding, and the unavailability of comprehensive contact lists for currently serving officeholders..Due to the low survey response rate, CAWP pursued a different strategy for this second round of data collection.
Having exhausted the use of survey outreach for the first report, we decided to bypass the survey process altogether for this round of data collection. Previous data collection efforts relied heavily on expert proxy coding – using public statements, direct contact, and other means – to determine gender codes at all levels of office and race/ethnicity codes at most levels. Since many officeholders from the previous report remain in office, this round included the existing data and employed expert proxy coding for gender for new officeholders of all levels, as well as race/ethnicity data for all levels except for municipal. Updates were made manually by comparing the previous list of officials to identify new officeholders and remove those no longer serving.
Additionally, to better understand the demographics of municipal officeholders in New Jersey, this dataset was supplemented with voter file data from the Catalist National Database. This data is the source for race/ethnicity findings for municipal officeholders. All other data in this report –including municipal gender – was provided by CAWP through prior survey responses and expert proxy coding, both past and current. Since the race/ethnicity data originates from the voter file, it is only reported in the aggregate form and is not available in our public database. Of the 3,459 municipal officeholders, the voter file was able to predict race/ethnicity for 80.5% of them.