In the recent New Jersey governor’s race, the Democratic Party clawed back much of the ground it had lost with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential race, according to a township-level analysis of results by The New York Times.
The results are stark: The heavily Hispanic areas that shifted the most to the left in 2025 were virtually a mirror image of the places that had swung the farthest to the right in 2024. The outcome suggests that President Trump’s surge of support among Hispanic voters last year may have been fleeting, or at least not transferable to other candidates in his party.
Mr. Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters in 2024 stunned Democrats. Exit polls showed Vice President Kamala Harris slipping to the narrowest of majorities, winning only 51 percent of Hispanic voters. And a wave of heavily Hispanic areas, from the border counties of Texas to the Bronx, swung decidedly to the right, raising the possibility of a racial realignment.
The New Jersey governor’s race was the first big test of how enduring those changes might be.
The stakes were heightened by the fact that both the Democratic winner, Representative Mikie Sherrill, and her Republican rival, Jack Ciattarelli, had competed aggressively for the support of the state’s growing Latino population.
But in the end, the 2025 results in the most Hispanic corners of the state looked a lot more similar to Mr. Ciattarelli’s last loss, in 2021, than to Mr. Trump’s performance in 2024.
The Times analyzed data from more than 500 townships in the 19 of New Jersey’s 21 counties where results data was available, accounting for over 90 percent of votes cast in the governor’s race. (Union and Warren Counties have not yet reported township-level results.)
The two cities that shifted the most toward Democrats were those with the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in the state: Union City and Perth Amboy.
Ms. Sherrill won Union City by 69 percentage points, just a year after Ms. Harris had carried it by only 17 points. And Ms. Sherrill won Perth Amboy by 56 points, a year after Ms. Harris had beaten Mr. Trump by less than nine points there.
Across the state, Democrats improved the most in places with higher Latino populations.
Few places had drawn more attention after 2024 than Passaic County and its largest city, Paterson, which has a 63 percent Hispanic population.
Mr. Ciattarelli lost Paterson this month by 70 points — nearly identical to his margins four years ago — even though Mr. Trump had cut down his 2024 loss there to well less than half of that.
All told, nine of the 10 townships that shifted the most toward Democrats from 2024 to 2025 had a Hispanic population of at least 60 percent.
Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who has focused on Latino voters, said what has happened with Hispanic voters in recent years was not a “realignment” but a “de-alignment.”
“Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats and for Republicans,” he said. “They’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans.” He said economic frustrations were the chief driver of the swings for a voting population that tends to be more working class.
“The reason why Republicans lost on Tuesday night is precisely why Democrats lost one year ago: It’s economic failure to address those concerns and it’s going to be taken out on the party in power,” Mr. Madrid said.
The trend in Hispanic areas was not limited to New Jersey.
In California, the county with the highest share of Hispanic residents, Imperial, voted 59 percent to 41 percent for a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional maps that Democrats had backed as an anti-Trump measure. (Vote counting is historically slow in the state and the margins could still shift.) Mr. Trump had narrowly carried Imperial County, which borders Mexico, in 2024.
Off-year elections, of course, are different from presidential races in large part because so many fewer people vote. And turnout was especially low this month in the same predominantly Hispanic townships that swung the most in the Democratic direction.
For instance, turnout in Perth Amboy and Paterson was among the worst in the state compared with 2024, with the number of ballots cast at just 60 percent of what it was last year (statewide, it was about 77 percent). Overall, the total number of votes cast in predominantly Hispanic townships was eight points lower than in the rest of the state relative to 2024 turnout.
The question, then, is whether Latino voters who had backed Mr. Trump in 2024 changed their minds this year, or simply stayed home.
An earlier Times analysis suggested that the difference in who turned out did not explain all of Ms. Sherrill’s gains, because those who cast ballots were only slightly more Democratic in terms of party registration than the party’s overall gains.
Just looking at Perth Amboy and Paterson as an example: Registered Democrats had a 12-point turnout advantage over registered Republicans this year compared with last, voting records show. But Ms. Sherrill improved upon Ms. Harris’s margins by 44 points in these two cities. This suggests that while turnout was probably responsible for some of Ms. Sherrill’s gains there, she also flipped voters who backed Mr. Trump.
Every New Jersey county shifted toward Democrats. But a more detailed township-level accounting showed that there were a hundred or so towns in which Mr. Ciattarelli improved relative to Mr. Trump, even as his margin of defeat in the state was eight points greater. (There were more than 400 towns where Ms. Sherrill outperformed Ms. Harris’s margins.)
The places where Mr. Ciattarelli did better than Mr. Trump, including along much of the coast, tended to have very small Hispanic populations. None of the top 25 townships that shifted to the right had a Hispanic population of over 10 percent.
Those areas were instead mostly white and in particular college-educated. Twenty-three of the 25 townships that shifted most to the right had a majority of adults who were white with college degrees.
These areas included suburban and exurban parts of northern Bergen County as well as the suburbs of north-central New Jersey, including the parts of Morris and Somerset Counties that were sources of Mr. Ciattarelli’s relative strength in 2021.
But while Mr. Ciattarelli narrowly outperformed Mr. Trump in these places, he actually ran about nine points behind his own 2021 campaign.
Mr. Ciattarelli’s path to victory had been to replicate Mr. Trump’s gains in racially diverse parts of the state while showing his own past strength in the more white areas.
Instead, he did neither and Ms. Sherrill won resoundingly.
Township results for 2025 are from New Jersey’s county clerks. Historical results are from the New Jersey Division of Elections. Demographic data is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019-2023 American Community Survey. Union and Warren Counties have not yet reported 2025 township-level results, so they are not included in the charts above.
Research was contributed by Alex Lemonides, Caroline Soler and Irineo Cabreros.
Christine Zhang is a Times reporter specializing in graphics and data journalism.
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