Hundreds of worshipers, most of them Latino or Black, filed into a large evangelical church on Sunday in Jersey City, N.J., as the room pulsed with the sound of a 10-person band.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor, was hard to miss as he sat patiently in the front row, dressed in red, waiting for more than an hour for his chance to deliver a five-minute speech, deep in the Democratic territory of Hudson County.
Twenty miles away, the Democratic candidate, Representative Mikie Sherrill, was campaigning in Paterson, one of New Jersey’s most ethnically and racially diverse cities and where she returned yet again on Tuesday, trying out her message in two languages at once.
“Yo quiero — to make your electricity prices lower — como se dice?” Ms. Sherrill said.
The overlapping appearances in places long dominated by Democrats captured the central role that Black and Latino voters are playing in the closing stretch of the 2025 race.
A year after Mr. Trump made inroads in diverse and densely populated areas of New Jersey — including flipping Passaic County, home to Paterson — the path to the governor’s office runs through turf Democrats can no longer take for granted and Republicans now see as fertile ground.
Mr. Ciattarelli, running his third race for governor, has been stumping aggressively in churches, at cultural parades and at chambers of commerce events run by prominent Black and Latino leaders.
“Every time I turned around, Jack was there — at Black events,” said Marjorie Perry, who grew up in Newark and owns a construction company. A lifelong Democrat who now identifies as an independent, she joked that “they were going to take away my Black card” after she endorsed Mr. Ciattarelli.
“A Newark girl voting for a Republican?” she said with a laugh.
Hector Lora, the mayor of Passaic who is supporting Ms. Sherrill, also tipped his hat to Mr. Ciattarelli for his frequent visits to his city of 70,000, where nearly half of the residents were born outside the United States.
“He is everywhere,” Mr. Lora said. “He has spoken to Latino pastors, he’s going to the barbershops. If you welcome him to speak, he will show up.”
Mr. Ciattarelli is aiming to repeat the remarkable gains that Mr. Trump made in Passaic. In his first presidential run in 2016, Mr. Trump lost the city by more than 50 points. Last year, Mr. Trump carried the city, which is more than 70 percent Hispanic.
Passaic, both the city and the surrounding county with the same name, is ground zero for how Mr. Trump scrambled the state’s traditional demographic allegiances in 2024. While Mr. Trump did better in each of the state’s 21 counties, compared with his performance four years earlier against former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his biggest improvements were in the most diverse areas.
Despite his gains, Mr. Trump still lost Hispanic voters nationally, and the Sherrill campaign has worked — in English and in Spanish — to tie Mr. Ciattarelli to a president with sagging approval ratings.
There is no guarantee that Mr. Ciattarelli can match — let alone surpass — Mr. Trump’s showing last year, when the president did far better than expected, but still lost New Jersey by six points. Mr. Ciattarelli also must exceed his performance from four years ago, when frustration over pandemic-related mandates drove Republicans to the polls and Mr. Ciattarelli came within three points of beating the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Philip D. Murphy.
But to have any chance to wresting control of a state with roughly 850,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, Mr. Ciattarelli will have to make inroads in traditional Democratic terrain and with the 2.3 million voters who are not registered with either party.
The battle for Hispanic voters has been on full display in pre-election editions of the Spanish-language newspaper, El Especialito. As early voting began, Ms. Sherrill and the Democratic ticket were featured in five full-page ads while an interview with Mr. Ciattarelli ran next to a full-page ad of his own.
El Especialito and another Spanish-language newspaper, Americano, endorsed Ms. Sherrill and ran her photograph on their covers.
She also has broad institutional party support and last week, ahead of the first weekend of early, in-person voting, she won a key endorsement from nearly 150 Black faith leaders.
On Saturday, former President Barack Obama is set to be in Newark, the state’s largest city, with Ms. Sherrill. Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat whose mother emigrated from Colombia and whose father is Mexican, is expected to campaign with her on Sunday in West New York and Long Branch.
Representative Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat who leads the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said policies Mr. Trump had enacted during his second term were eroding the electoral gains he made in 2024.
“Trump’s support among Latinos isn’t growing — it’s crumbling,” she said. “From the rising cost of living to reckless deportation policies, our community feels betrayed.”
But in New Jersey, Mr. Ciattarelli’s efforts have shown early dividends. He has been endorsed by a handful of Democratic politicians, including Nicholas Sacco, the longtime mayor of North Bergen, in Hudson County. He won an endorsement last week from more than 100 Latino pastors and he is drawing newly minted Republicans like Adela Rohenda to campaign events.
Ms. Rohenda is 67 and lives in Jersey City. She traveled to a recent Ciattarelli event in Clifton carrying a Puerto Rican flag. She explained that she first voted for Mr. Trump, in 2016, because her son convinced her that a Trump presidency would give him a better chance at finding a job.
More recently, she has turned away from the Democratic Party over the issue of crime. “Now I’m Republican,” Ms. Rohenda said in an interview. “I voted Democrat 40 years.”
Some of Ms. Sherrill’s allies have expressed concern that she has been slow to try to make up ground that Mr. Ciattarelli covered extensively while running for governor in three consecutive races.
Rafael Collazo, the executive director of UnidosUS Action PAC, which has endorsed Ms. Sherrill, said “the big dynamic is they don’t know her.”
“They don’t want to support Ciattarelli,” he added, “but a lot of them don’t know Mikie Sherrill.”
Ms. Sherrill has shown up at Jersey City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade, Perth Amboy’s Hispanic Heritage Month Picnic and Union City’s 50th Annual Hispanic Parade, along with many other cultural events. At the same time, her campaign has invested heavily in Spanish-language advertising, where the Ciattarelli campaign has been mostly absent.
Kennith Gonzalez, a former executive director of New Jersey’s Republican Party now helping oversee Hispanic outreach for Mr. Ciattarelli, panned Ms. Sherrill’s ad strategy as cynical.
“Let me do all of these Spanish ads only connecting Jack with Trump. And let’s not offer anything, because the Hispanic community is too stupid to really care about the issues,” he said. “We just want to scare them with Trump.”
As the head of the Statewide Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in New Jersey, Carlos Medina is used to being courted by politicians, but he said there was a feeling among some Black and Hispanic voters “that the Democratic Party has abandoned them and only comes around in an election.”
After Ms. Sherrill was unable to attend several events sponsored by the business group, Mr. Medina said he had offered her an “olive branch” to speak virtually to his members at her convenience. Mr. Ciattarelli participated, but she sent her running mate instead. “I was pretty shocked,” he said.
Then, when Democrats used a clip from Mr. Ciattarelli’s appearance to attack him for being dismissive of “Black and Hispanic communities,” Mr. Medina said he was bewildered. “Now I’m being used as some sort of pawn in this argument,” he said in an interview.
Sean Higgins, a spokesman for Ms. Sherrill, said she had “partnered directly with Black and Latino communities.”
Of Mr. Ciattarelli’s efforts, he said: “Like a typical career politician, he tells groups what they want to hear — but he has never stood up for the Black or Latino community with his vote or his voice, and has now pledged his loyalty to Trump over the people of New Jersey.”
M. Teresa Ruiz, the Democratic majority leader in the State Senate who is among Ms. Sherrill’s strongest supporters, said the national Democratic Party had to “do much better” speaking with — not over — diverse communities like the one she represented in Newark.
“The work to build back the party has to continue,” she said. “We have to motivate people to get up off the sofas, to feel engaged, to feel recognized.”
Joshua Rodriguez, the pastor of Cityline Church, where Mr. Ciattarelli spoke on Sunday in Jersey City, said he remained puzzled by Mr. Trump’s ability to persuade Latino voters, given his efforts to significantly increase deportations.
“Trump definitely moved the needle a bunch in terms of the Latino vote,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Will Jack be able to do that? That’s what we’ll find out next week.”
Christine Zhang contributed reporting.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
The post A Republican Seeks to Match Trump’s Gains on Democratic Turf in New Jersey appeared first on New York Times.
