Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) won re-election this year to a second term, and he’ll be back in Washington next year to continue representing the residents of New Jersey’s 8th congressional district. But he – like many of his fellow representatives from majority-Hispanic districts – has witnessed a sea change in how his constituents are approaching national politics.
In 2020, Donald Trump lost Menendez’s 8th district by 45 percentage points, 72% to 27%; this year, according to one estimate, he lost it by just 24 points, 61% to 37%. Menendez’s margin was slashed, too, from 50 points in his first race in 2022 to just 25 points this year. Hispanic voters, both in the 8th district and across New Jersey, are suddenly looking more like a swing demographic rather than a backbone of the New Jersey Democratic coalition.
Menendez, who is only the third Latino to ever represent New Jersey in Congress (and who will soon be joined by the state’s first Latina congresswoman, neighboring Rep.-elect Nellie Pou), said that many voters in his district have felt the crunch of inflation and global instability in recent years – and Trump provided an outlet for their frustrations.
“This was a ‘feel’ election. How do people feel when they go in to vote?” Menendez said. “It’s been a challenging couple of years for people. You start with the first Trump presidency, and then at the end of it you have Covid, then you have this really tight election between Biden and Trump, then you have January 6, then you have the invasion of Ukraine, then you have the reversal of Roe. You have all of these challenges that keep stacking up, and while all of our macroeconomics are relatively solid compared to a lot of our peers, at the micro level in people’s daily lives, they still feel the challenge of affordability.”
Menendez argued that Trump has also successfully driven a wedge between Democrats and Hispanic voters over the issue of immigration. Trump’s campaign, he said, convinced many in the Hispanic community that Democrats are fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants instead of for the economic concerns of legal immigrants and their families.
“Trump said, ‘I’m talking to you, and Democrats are talking to them,’” Menendez said. “That was never our focus – I sit on [the Homeland Security Committee], we talk about the border a lot, we talk about our immigration patterns. But we were never able to get that message out there, because we were constantly responding to these divisions that Trump and the Republican Party were creating.”
Even with this year’s massive swings towards the GOP, Menendez’s own seat likely remains safe for Democrats; Republicans still have a long way to go before they can seriously think about competing in a district based in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Newark. But the stakes are higher elsewhere, particularly in Pou’s 9th district, which Trump shockingly carried 49% to 48%.
In order to claw some of those margins back, Menendez said, Democrats need to make sure that their messaging of economic opportunity and kitchen-table issues is breaking through. Democrats already have the better pitch to voters, he argued; they just need to get voters to listen to it instead of to the noise coming from the Republican side of the aisle.
“We need to say, ‘You know why they’re talking about that? Because they’re trying to distract you from their lack of policies that are actually going to improve your life,’” he said. “When they’re doing all this, and there’s all this noise, we need to address the noise, but then pivot back to what we want to do to create real, meaningful change in people’s lives.”