What New Jersey Could Reveal About the Rightward Shift of Hispanic Voters

Moments after Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, bounded down the steps of his campaign bus on the first day of early voting, he began to rattle off statistics about the size and strength of the state’s Latino population.

“We have more than two million people that are of Hispanic descent and more than 500,000 that are Puerto Rican,” Mr. Ciattarelli said, flanked by the Republican governor of Puerto Rico who had flown in to campaign with him. “And we’re so very happy that they called New Jersey home.”

Latino voters are not only a critical swing bloc in this year’s New Jersey governor’s race but also an important test nationally of just how enduring the gains that President Trump made last year in the Hispanic community will prove.

Mr. Trump lost New Jersey by less than six percentage points in 2024, a surprisingly close result that came largely because of his remarkable strength in the state’s most diverse areas. Every single one of New Jersey’s 29 townships with a majority Hispanic population swung in Mr. Trump’s direction between 2020 and 2024 — by an average of 25 percentage points.

Now the question looming over 2025 is whether the historic movement to the right among Hispanics was evidence of a durable political and racial realignment or a passing phenomenon specific to Mr. Trump — and whether any other Republican besides Mr. Trump can lure Latino voters into the Republican fold.

“New Jersey ends up being the first meaningful temperature check since the last election,” said Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who specializes in studying Latino voting patterns and lives in New Jersey.

Mr. Odio said the answer would be especially significant because Latino voters will hold significant sway in determining control of the House of Representatives in 2026. His firm’s data shows the Hispanic share of the population in the 40 most competitive House seats is 18 percent — compared with 13 percent nationwide. And 12 of the most competitive seats have at least a 20 percent Latino population, though the figure would shift somewhat if California voters approve remapping the state.

In New Jersey, the fact that both Mr. Ciattarelli and Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, have invested significantly in outreach to Latino voters has only heightened the significance of the outcome.

Ms. Sherrill and her super PAC allies have spent roughly $4 million on Spanish-language advertising and campaigned aggressively in Hispanic communities. Mr. Ciattarelli participated in a recent Spanish-language town hall sponsored by Univision and was recently endorsed by a coalition of more than 100 Latino pastors and ministers. He has made it a mission to march in practically every Hispanic cultural parade in the state.

One of Mr. Ciattarelli’s challenges will be trying to match Mr. Trump’s 2024 gains in diverse corners of the state without ceding his own past relative strength in 2021 in whiter and more educated towns.

The density of Latino voters in some New Jersey municipalities makes it a uniquely appealing place for political strategists to measure movement in the community. For instance, Union City, just across the Hudson River from New York, is more than 80 percent Hispanic; the township swung 27 percentage points toward the Republican Party in the last presidential election.

“The results will be considered a bellwether,” said Katharine Pichardo, the president of Latino Victory Fund, which seeks to elect Latino Democrats. “What Democrats hope to see is significant erosion of the gains that Trump was able to make with Latinos last year.”

Still, Republicans are bullish that Mr. Ciattarelli can hold onto Mr. Trump’s gains.

“The Latinos are the second wave, like the Irish and Italians who came over in the 1930s: blue-collar American working people to make a better life for themselves,” said Peter Murphy, who owns an Irish bar and is the chairman of the Passaic County Republican Party, which flipped for Mr. Trump in 2024. “Now the Irish and the Italians are a major backbone of the Republican Party. I believe the Latinos now are the backbone of the Republican Party also.”

Passaic County, which is New Jersey’s most Hispanic, is one of more than 1,400 counties nationwide that trended toward the Republican Party not just in 2024 but in three consecutive elections since 2016. Last year, Mr. Trump carried the congressional district that Representative Nellie Pou, a Democrat, won, making her one of 13 House Democrats to survive in a Trump-won district and a potential Republican target next year.

Mr. Trump improved Republican performance not just in Latino areas but also in heavily Black and Asian areas. Across all of the state’s majority-nonwhite townships, Mr. Trump cut his margin of defeat to 27 points from 43 points in 2020, amounting to a 16-point rightward shift.

In other words, Democrats were still winning those areas but by far less.

Still, there are already some signs of softening support for Mr. Trump among Hispanic voters. An October Associated Press-NORC poll showed that the share of Hispanic adults who have a favorable view of Mr. Trump has dropped since he took office in January.

“His gains are not permanent,” Patricia Campos-Medina, a leading Latino activist in the state and the vice chair of the Sherrill campaign. “Can we fix the backsliding of the last 10 years, just in these six months in these three months of spending? I do not think so. But we’re going to move back the needle toward a better outcome for Democrats with Latino voters.”

For now, Ms. Sherrill, who holds a narrow lead in the polls, currently has an edge of 30 points among nonwhite voters, according to polling from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

One of the central questions for strategists of both parties is what issues would drive any potential drift back toward the Democratic Party.

Hispanic Americans consistently show among the highest levels of economic stress. In the same A.P. survey, 65 percent of Hispanic adults said the cost of groceries was a strain, compared with 54 percent of U.S. adults overall.

Ms. Campos-Medina said Mr. Trump’s failure to address the cost of living had made him vulnerable — more so than his administration’s attention-grabbing immigration enforcement.

“They are not concerned on immigration raids,” she said of Hispanic voters. “They care about it because they see them. But that’s not what drives them to the polls. What drives them to the polls is: Do I have affordable housing? Do my schools — are they teaching my kids what they need to learn? Do I have access to health care? Where am I going to get my new job?”

In 2021, Mr. Ciattarelli had held Mr. Trump at arm’s length — and outperformed him among whiter and wealthier areas that have trended more Democratic in recent years.

This year, Mr. Ciattarelli has secured the president’s endorsement and avoided virtually any criticism, giving the president an ‘A’ grade when asked, adding that the president “has been right about everything that he’s doing.”

Turnout is another X-factor.

Turnout typically drops off substantially in the governor’s race compared with the presidential election the year before, and the drop-off is often steepest in diverse urban areas.

That is one reason the 2021 governor’s race was so much closer than the 2020 presidential election. Even as Mr. Murphy won majority-Hispanic communities by 48 points, a similar margin to that of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in New Jersey in 2020, those areas saw much bigger drops in turnout than the rest of the state.

In other words, Ms. Sherrill doesn’t just want to win a greater share of Hispanic voters but also to coax the community to the polls in greater numbers.

In Union City, Mr. Trump in 2024 won more than four times as many votes as Mr. Ciattarelli did in 2021, even as former Vice President Kamala Harris had won virtually the same number of votes as Mr. Murphy did in 2021.

“This is going to give us a great indicator of how 2026 can go,” said Laura Matos, a Democratic strategist working with a pro-Sherrill super PAC and a Democratic National Committee member in New Jersey, “It will be a road map of the work we need to continue to do.”