I’m told the town is very liberal today.
Well I would describe the town as always having been liberal, meaning “classic” liberal. It was always (in my experience, growing up in the 60’s) a bedroom community of NYC and was populated by and large by college-educated folk who were professionals, in general. So you would expect the kind of liberal influence that urbanism tends to have on people.
NJ certainly had grittier, more heavy industrial areas, located more midstate. Jersey City, Elizabeth, Harrison, Bayonne. It didn’t have steel mills (those were in Pittsburgh) nor a huge auto industry as did the midwest but there was and is a huge chemical and drug industry...all the big drug cos were established and located there, Merck, Pfizer, Becton Dickenson, (then) Schering-Plough, Lilly, Roche, Squibb, Bayer, Bristol...as these were largely begun by immigrants from Europe and this was cheap land, near NY and NYC which had plenty of manufacturing early in the 20th century. The coal companies in PA which fed the steel companies in PA also furnished chemical feedstocks for the chem companies, DuPont (more Delaware) Mallinckrodt. And a number of perfume companies also located there. Lots of that came from the processing of coal tar which was the frontier of chemistry in the 20’s and into WW2.