Though Donald Trump still lost many of New Jersey’s heavily Latino towns to Kamala Harris, he boosted his share of the vote dramatically since 2016. (Photo by Allison Robbert-Pool/Getty Images)
Now that all the votes have been counted in the 2024 presidential race, the final results detail the inroads Donald Trump made with New Jersey Latino communities.
In places like Union City and Perth Amboy, where the Latino populations top 80%, support for Trump skyrocketed, with the president-elect winning 7,881 votes in Union City this year compared to 3,566 when he first ran for the White House in 2016, giving him 40% of the vote in 2024 versus 18% eight years ago.
In Perth Amboy, he nabbed 6,209 votes, up from 2,287 in 2016, increasing his share of the vote from 16% to 44%.
He lost both towns to Vice President Kamala Harris, but he helped close the margins considerably compared to eight years ago, just as he did statewide. Harris won New Jersey with 52% of the vote compared to Trump’s 46%. In 2016, the result was 55% for Hillary Clinton and 41% for Trump.
The story is similar in New Jersey’s other heavily Latino towns, large and small. In the state’s third-largest city, Paterson, which is 62% Latino, Trump won 13,819 votes compared to 3,999 in 2016. His newer vote total amounts to just 34% of the vote in Paterson this year, but he only won 9% in 2016. In Victory Gardens, a Morris County town with 1,500 residents, 74% of them Latino, Trump won 155 votes, up from 71 in 2016, giving him 38% of the vote this year versus 19% when he first ran.
Trump actually won the city of Passaic, which is 73% Latino, winning 8,775 votes in a normally Democratic city where he nabbed just 3,743 votes in 2016. Trump’s share of the vote in Passaic this year was 52%. In 2016, it was 23%. Trump won Passaic County by 5,800 votes, making him the first GOP presidential candidate to win the county in more than three decades.
Political experts say Trump’s inroads with Latino voters came from his focus on the economy and how he’d handle the flow of immigrants across our southern border.
Jose Arango, chairman of the Hudson County GOP, said Democrats lost touch with Latinos by treating them like a monolithic voting bloc that will always vote for their party, while Republicans spoke in plain language about economic policies that resonated more with voters, Arango said.
“The Democratic Party has gone so much to the left. It’s not based on religion or values, family-oriented values, no choices in education, nothing in business,” he said. “But they think because they talk about illegal and undocumented people, the Spanish community is just going to say OK.”
Trump racked up Latino support across the country, proving to be pivotal in clinching key states like Pennsylvania. In Texas, frustration over inflation and President Biden’s immigration policies drove Latino voters to the right. In California, most of the state’s 12 Latino-majority counties gave a larger share of their vote to Trump compared to 2020, according to CalMatters. Trump also won Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the most populous majority-Latino county in the country, where he nabbed 55% of the vote. Clinton won 64% of the county in 2016.
Arango said he knows many people who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020 but voted for Trump this year. After four years of struggling to pay their bills and secure housing, some feel “lied to” by the Democratic Party, he said.
He cited concerns about education, affordable housing, senior care, and child care for single mothers, particularly in urban areas. This is what everyday people wake up thinking about, he said, and Republicans targeted those voters.
Assemblyman Julio Marenco (D-Hudson) said economic pain meant cultural issues took a backseat this election. Marenco, who represents Hudson County towns like Union City and West New York that saw big swings toward Trump compared to his first White House run eight years ago, wasn’t surprised by the Republican shift, but didn’t expect it to be so extreme.
He said the GOP did a good job of plainly saying how life could be better under Trump, while Democrats went “too far, almost, on the woke stuff.” He spoke with a constituent who said they voted for Trump because Democrats were focusing too much on bathrooms.
“It’s a luxury to worry about those issues when you’re not able to feed your family. So we got to get back to basics,” he said.
Both Marenco and Arango cited former President Bill Clinton as a politician who garnered strong support among Latinos. He was tough on immigration while expanding tax credits to families, and Latinos connected more with the bipartisanship he pushed for rather than the progressive movement that exists today, said Arango.
“(The Democrats) forgot what President Bill Clinton taught us in 1992 — ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ We forgot that lesson and hopefully we’ll learn it very quickly,” Marenco added.
Political consultant Alexandra Acosta is head of the Somos New Jersey PAC, a nonpartisan group elevating Latino voices and representation in office. Acosta offered a warning for Trump, who campaigned on a platform of mass deportation and providing aid to small businesses. If he doesn’t follow through, she said, he won’t keep the support of Latino communities.
“We’re going to change our support and our vote based on your plan, and you saw that here,” she said. “I think there’s a sense that a lot of voters are kind of fed up in New Jersey and are just saying, ‘Enough with the BS.’”
Acosta said New Jerseyans may not support some more aggressive policies Trump has pushed, like ending birthright citizenship and deporting children who were born here. But there are Latinos who immigrated legally and support deporting immigrants who entered the county illegally, she said.
“If he treats our immigrant community with humanity and really does look at the backlog of criminals that are in custody … kind of clean house and depending on how he does with that, you could see the Republican Party gaining support with the Latino community,” she said.
Marenco agreed that some Latinos felt they needed to “give it a shot” after the last four years of people feeling the pressure of the economy and frustrated with the Biden administration’s immigration policy, but also stressed that people want a “humane approach to immigration.”
With a gubernatorial election approaching, the crowded field of candidates on either side of the aisle has a chance to attract Latinos to their party, but that means starting the outreach now, Acosta stressed.
“The data proves that we cannot be an afterthought — we are changing the results of the election, which, in turn, changes the future outcome of our country,” she said.