New Jersey was won overwhelmingly by the Republican nominees, incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower of Pennsylvania and his running mate incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon of California.

Eisenhower and Nixon defeated the Democratic nominees, former Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and his running mate Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

[2] Eisenhower’s decisive 1956 landslide represented a dramatic swing in the state in his favor.

However, Eisenhower’s overwhelming personal popularity in the Northeast in 1956 led him to perform unusually strongly in New Jersey.

Even as Eisenhower won a slightly more convincing victory nationwide than he had in 1952, New Jersey swung much more than the nation, and its result in the 1956 election made the state more than 15% more Republican than the national average, making it the sixth most Republican state in the union.