ELIZABETH, New Jersey — When Donald Trump won the presidency last November, he did so with unprecedented levels of new support from Latino voters across the country. In big cities, towns, and suburbs around the country, these voters — both new, previously disengaged voters and former Democrats disillusioned with the status quo — flocked to Trump and Republican candidates. The result: about an 11-point improvement from Trump’s 2020 performance, which itself was already a major achievement compared to 2016.
It was a great realignment that many Republicans had been predicting, and it had finally arrived. But whether it would last was an open question. A more popular Trump could either wield new Latino support for his economic, border, immigration, and social proposals to secure an enduring multiracial, working-class coalition for future Republicans. Or he could squander it all away by going to the extreme.
Republicans were optimistic. Trump had managed to tap into dissatisfaction not just with the economy, but with Democratic ideology, and transform it into sustained Republican support.
“A populist shift in the form of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was enough to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party, they aren’t going back,” warned the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini as recently as May.
But by the summer, it was clear the second scenario was happening. Tariffs, DOGE instability, lingering economic malaise, and new immigration enforcement in big cities had collapsed Trump’s approval ratings; his polling numbers among Latino and Hispanic Americans had fallen off a cliff — plunging 20 points by one count.
“Trump betrayed us,” one former Democratic Latino voter told me in May. “People voted for one thing: the economy. A good economy. And these tariffs are hiking everything up.”
The answer to the question of whether Latino voters have soured on Trump is, pretty clearly, yes. But that just raises a new one: Has their increasing displeasure with Trump’s second term resulted in a new interest in the Democratic Party?
We’re now on the eve of the first real trial of this question: in just a few days, voters in New Jersey will decide on new leadership for their state. The Garden State is a test case: About 16 percent of the electorate is Latino; the Democratic state has been trending more Republican in the Trump era, nearly electing a GOP governor in 2021, and barely voting for Kamala Harris last year.
Contributing to that shift was the gradual swing of Black and Latino voters away from the Democratic Party. And as we’ve seen across the country since Trump’s first term, the more working-class and diverse a place is, the more likely it is to have shifted toward Trump.
Plenty of signs are suggesting that trend might reverse this year: Trump isn’t on the ballot, his party is overseeing a historically unpopular agenda that seems to be targeting and upsetting Latino and Hispanic Americans more than most voters, and his new converts aren’t necessarily thrilled to run back their Republican vote.
As we encountered earlier this year, my colleague Miles Bryan and I ran into plenty of Latino voters who fit this model in New Jersey this month: the kind who voted for a Republican for the first time ever last year, but don’t seem sold on casting another one this year.
“I’m not sure what to do right now. Both sides promise one thing, and then do another,” Aldo, a 71-year-old retired Hispanic man and former Democrat, told us recently. “The Democrats have been going too far left, too socialist-like…but Trump has ended up betraying us.”
What Trump-voting Latinos in New Jersey are feeling now: disillusionment or steady loyalty
It might be easy to dismiss the feelings of regret, betrayal, or disillusionment some Latino voters who sided with Trump last year might be feeling right now — particularly if you’re an engaged news consumer or a regular voter.
Didn’t Trump promise to carry out mass deportations and to institute tariffs? Didn’t he run a much more explicitly racist and offensive campaign last year, compared to the campaigns he had run before?
But posing those questions to these voters suggests that they miss the point. The Latino voters we spoke to across New Jersey either didn’t believe that Trump would follow through with his most extreme proposals, didn’t anticipate what his theoretical policies would actually look like in practice, or, more commonly, simply didn’t know what Trump was proposing to do.
Politics didn’t — and still doesn’t — define their identities or play a central role in their regular lives. But they told us they sided with Trump because they were frustrated with the status quo, upset with the high cost of goods, wary about increased immigration and crime, and disappointed with Democratic leadership during the Biden years.
“The first mistake Democrats made was to open the borders and lose control of who was coming into the country. If Biden hadn’t opened the borders, then we wouldn’t have to be dealing with ICE,” one infrequent voter named Leo, a 20-year resident of Elizabeth, a city neighboring Newark, and a retiree, told us. “And Democrats lost control of prices. Biden just let prices get out of control. And it’s the same now with Trump. He hasn’t done anything.”
These voters expected prices to go down and life to become more affordable. It hasn’t. They expected the border to be brought under control and immigration enforcement to target dangerous criminals, those who have committed violent crimes or are involved in drug trafficking. Instead, average families are being split up, and racial profiling seems to be on the rise. They hoped Trump would unite and revitalize the country after a feeling of stagnancy during the Biden years. Instead, some of his former supporters think he’s doing more to divide than before.
“I’m upset at what he’s doing to my community. As the president, he should be uniting the nation, not dividing it,” Aldo told us, while waiting for an order of fish tacos in Elizabeth. “When I looked at him last year, I saw strength, and I thought he could put us on the right track. … He had some good economic ideas; he offered to limit immigration. But then he started rolling out these deportations. When you’re deporting people, you’re dividing the community. … You’re deporting people I know.”
Those dynamics make their current views on politics, their state’s gubernatorial election, and Trump specifically a bit more complicated.
You could divide the Trump-voting Latinos we spoke to into two buckets.
The first includes people like Aldo and Leo — those who are disappointed with how he’s carrying out his job, and who took a chance on Trump or decided they were fed up with the status quo enough to break with Democrats.
Another of these voters, an Ecuadorian-American truck driver named Carlos, described his Trump vote last year as “the worst mistake” he’s made in his political life. He’s a regular voter — he’d voted for Democrats in the past and told us that he’s planning to return to the party in next week’s election.
“I didn’t expect all of this to happen,” Carlos told us. “We wanted a Trump government [to make] change. … That’s why I voted for him: because he said that he wanted to take away all the people, criminals, every person who came to this country and does bad things. I was angry at that: you have to get out. But he’s taking innocent people, breaking up families, leaving kids alone. That frustrates me.”
The second includes those Trump-voting Latinos who are still happy with him, but are primarily Trump supporters — not new Republican voters. They don’t blame him for the current economic malaise and are happy with his various immigration and crime policies.
These voters didn’t want to speak to us on the record, but they shared similar thoughts: They didn’t necessarily know there was a statewide election happening, they didn’t know who Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, was or whether they would vote at all, but they still stood by Trump.
The test Democrats — and Republicans — now face
There are always pitfalls to trying to use an off-cycle contest to try to tease out national trends — most voters aren’t necessarily paying attention, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, and the manpower being fielded to try to reach voters. But at least among Latino voters, there may be some confirmation of anecdotal and national tailwinds.
The survey data, at least, matches a lot of this anecdotal evidence. Nationally, Trump has seen a decline in his approval ratings and softening of support among even Hispanic Republicans. The most recent AP-NORC poll of Hispanics is illustrative of this: just 25 percent of Latino and Hispanic Americans view him favorably, down from 44 percent who viewed him favorably just before he took office — a nearly 20-point drop.
That includes Hispanic Republicans: right before the election, some 83 percent of Latino Republicans viewed Trump favorably; nearly a year later, that share has dropped to 66 percent. That same tracking poll found a double-digit drop in his approval ratings with these voters over the last six months — driven by dissatisfaction with the economy and immigration policy. For them, the prices of everyday goods and housing are the biggest stressors, above the average for white and Black adults polled.
While polling of New Jersey Latinos itself is sparse, the limited data suggests a familiar dynamic: wavering enthusiasm and support for the Democrat in the gubernatorial race, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, but also limited support for Ciattarelli, her opponent. About 53 percent of these voters said they’d back Sherrill, while 32 percent would back Ciattarelli, according to an October Fox News poll. For both candidates, those figures are on the lower end of what they might be hoping for — the conventional wisdom has long held that Democratic candidates tend to get around 60 percent of Latino support, while Trump has been able to routinely get closer to 40 percent of their support.
Ciattarelli has faced this problem before — in his near-victory in the 2021 race against the current governor, Phil Murphy, he performed most strongly in wealthier, suburban, college-educated, and white parts of the state; Trump, meanwhile, did better in working-class and diverse areas with more Latino voters. With that trend, it seems plausible that Ciattarelli would be facing a similar challenge with an unpopular Republican president in the White House.
But this also raises alarm signs for the Democratic side: Plenty of the Latino voters we talked to in the state did not seem particularly informed, excited, or supportive of the Democratic Party brand in general. Their dislike of Trump and distrust of Republicans did not mean they were finding new hope in Democrats — or even in Sherrill herself.
State Democrats who are supporting Sherrill acknowledge this struggle. And Sherrill herself acknowledged that she is trying to overcome this national issue within her state — in this case by focusing not so much on immigration, ICE raids, and threats to democracy, but specifically on affordability and prices.
“They’re still looking for someone who’s really going to address their core issues, and they’ve not found it in the Democratic Party and they’ve not found it in the Republican Party,” Sherrill told us at a Latinos con Mikie rally in Camden County, across the river from Philadelphia. “So what I’m saying is, ‘Look, I hear you. Here’s my record, here’s who I’ve always focused on, and how I’ve done it. And so this is my plan, and I think it’s going to really focus on those exact things you’re talking to me about.’”
This is the next challenge awaiting Democratic candidates and campaigns moving forward: to prove that there is a difference between the parties, between leaders from either side, and to regain the identity and association that Latino voters had, for some time, that the Democratic Party was the party that cared for and represented their interests. The latest Pew Research Center survey on views of the parties reveals that this remains a defining problem for the Democratic Party this year: Just 37 percent of Hispanic Americans say that the Democrats better represent their interests; about 20 percent say it’s the Republicans; and nearly 30 percent say neither party does.
Our conversations on the ground in New Jersey reveal a similar feeling among these Latino voters. “It’s hard to find the right candidate,” Aldo, the former Trump supporter we found in a Mexican restaurant, told us. “I’m not sure what to think anymore, or who to trust. Democrats say a lot. But then they do something else.”
And even a voter like Carlos, who feels burned by his vote for Trump and plans to return to the Democrats, told us he still wishes Democratic candidates made a better effort to reach him, to talk to him, and to motivate him. “I have to check the news to see who is better. [I feel] like I know nothing, and I don’t know exactly who is running for governor.”
So, just as Republicans face the challenge of Latino voters not being excited by candidates who aren’t Trump, Democrats face the challenge of Latino voters simply not caring or trusting Democrats anymore. This may end up being the defining realignment of the last decade: of weakening trust in Democrats, of feeling burned by candidates from both political parties, and of just wanting to tune out. Beyond other trends and tea leaves outsiders try to draw from what happens in New Jersey, this race and how these candidates are campaigning may end up showing whether this trend starts to change.