Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 performance in New Jersey was abysmal across the board, turning in the closest Democratic win since 1992 in a state that was previously thought to be deep-blue. Harris cratered with New Jerseyans of all demographics and geographies, from South Jersey to North and from rural towns to big cities.
But there’s one community in particular that seems to have swung further to the right than just about any other: Hispanic voters, who still supported Harris overall but who may no longer be the reliable backbone of the Democratic coalition that they once were.
Up and down the state, Hispanic voters, seemingly rattled by inflation and disappointed in the Biden administration, flocked in droves to former President Donald Trump, flipping some towns and counties and making others uncomfortably close for Democrats. That movement came in spite of the fact that Trump ran heavily on a message of curtailing immigration, and despite the racist, anti-Latino jokes made by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally a week before the election.
“Kitchen-table issues and inflation mattered to everybody,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “It mattered to Latino voters more than what was said at Madison Square Garden; it mattered more than whatever other cultural issue you want to rattle off. Those were not the issues that drove decision-making.”
Laura Matos, a Democratic strategist and the chair of Latina Civic PAC, a group dedicated to electing Latinas to office in New Jersey, concurred.
“The Latino community cares about the same thing the Black community cares about, cares about the same thing the white community cares about: their money,” Matos said. “Being able to work at a job where they make enough money to be comfortable, and they can spend time with their family and do things they enjoy.”
Taking a closer look at election results from New Jersey’s 22 majority-Hispanic cities and towns (as of the 2020 Census) reveals just how far towards Republicans Latino voters swung.
In 2020, Joe Biden won those 22 towns by a collective margin of 47 percentage points, 73% to 26%. In 2024, Harris won those same towns by just 22 points, 60% to 38% – a 25-point-swing to the right, far higher than New Jersey’s overall eleven-point rightward swing. (This isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the Hispanic vote – not every voter in the 22 towns is Hispanic, and not every Hispanic voter lives in a heavily Hispanic town – but it’s a decent approximation of larger trends.)
In a few big cities, the trend towards Republicans was even more pronounced. Harris’s margin in Elizabeth was 13 percentage points, down from 41 points in 2020; seven points in North Bergen, down from 34 in 2020; and 11 points in Perth Amboy, down from 44 in 2020. Two majority-Hispanic towns, Passaic and Fairview, voted for Trump after supporting Democrats for decades.
Biden’s 2020 performance among Hispanic voters was already seen as relatively weak, so Harris’s totals are even more dismal compared to prior years. Paterson, for example, supported Hillary Clinton 90% to 9% in 2016; Harris won it just 63% to 33% on Tuesday. (A few votes have yet to be counted, so these totals could shift slightly before the election is certified.)
The underperformance among Hispanic voters was enough to flip Passaic County – long a Democratic stronghold – to Trump, and it likely helped Republicans flip Atlantic and Cumberland Counties as well.
A Hispanic swing against Democrats was not a phenomenon unique to New Jersey; it also happened, to varying degrees, in essentially every other state in the country. But it stung especially deep for New Jersey Democrats, who view Latino voters as a core part of their liberal governing coalition.
Hudson County GOP Chairman Jose Arango, whose plurality-Hispanic county swung 18 points towards Republicans overall, said that the results were Democrats’ own fault for shifting too far to the left on issues like immigration, housing, and identity politics.
“[Latino voters] see how the progressive movement inside the Democratic Party was leaving them out to focus on all kinds of things that didn’t have anything to do with everyday life,” he said. “The Democrats have gone so much to the left that they don’t have anything in common with the Latino community.”
Matos said that while Democrats may have wanted their more pro-immigrant message to break through among Latino voters, many of those voters don’t view the struggles of recent immigrants – especially undocumented ones – as connected to their own concerns.
“If you’re talking to the Latino community about immigration, the Latino community that is potentially going to vote for you doesn’t necessarily automatically identify themselves with, and understand the plight of, people who are crossing the border,” she said. “They don’t see themselves in those people just because they’re brown… And I think the Republican Party has done a good job of going out and developing relationships on the ground in communities and turning it around.”
The biggest question for Republicans now is whether they can hold onto their gains from this year and build on them in future election cycles, particularly 2025, when the governor’s office and all 80 State Assembly seats are up for election.
“The conversation in the Democratic Party, if they keep talking the way they’re talking, I think anybody running as a Republican has an excellent shot to win the state,” Arango said. “If you can do [so well] with a person that is so controversial and so problematic like Donald Trump, I’m pretty sure you can do better with a person that has a better message.”
But Democrats might see some reason for optimism in downballot races that were on the ballot this year. While many Democratic congressional candidates also got disappointing results from heavily Hispanic towns, they weren’t quite as apocalyptic as they were in the presidential race.
The same majority-Hispanic towns that went for Harris by 22 points voted for their local Democratic House candidates by a collective 30 points. State Sen. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) put up double-digit overperformances relative to Harris in towns like Paterson, Dover, and Perth Amboy; Pou and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) were also able to keep the two Trump-voting majority-Hispanic towns, Passaic and Fairview, in their column. And Democrats won county-level races in Passaic County, too, despite headwinds at the top of the ticket.
Some voters may have split their ticket for Trump and Democratic downballot candidates; others seem to have simply voted for Trump at the top of the ticket and then skipped the rest of the election, like in the city of Passaic, where Pou got 101 votes more than Harris but Republican Billy Prempeh got 1,965 votes fewer than Trump. Either way, those may be voters that Democrats can sway back to their side in 2025 and beyond.
But Matos and Rasmussen both cautioned that Hispanic voters “coming home” to the Democratic Party isn’t a guarantee, and that Democrats will have to put in the work in the coming years to make it happen.
“You have to educate people. You have to take credit for the good things that you’ve done,” Matos said. “I hope all [2025 gubernatorial candidates] had early meetings the morning after Election Day with their teams and are sitting up straight and paying attention. You need to make the case for why people should cast their vote for you because of what you’re going to do for them, and the best way to show that is by telling them and reminding them of what you already have done.”
“This is not an easy process for them,” Rasmussen said. “It’s not something where you wave your magic wand and suddenly the answer appears. If you just change how you communicate, you put out a different ad – that’s not going to do it. What’s going to do it is, can they show that they can be responsive to the concerns of Latinos?”