At a nondescript Exxon gas station in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood just over the river from Manhattan, something unusual is going on.
The place is a local gathering spot for café con leche or espresso from Ramirez & Sons, the Cuban coffee shop tucked inside. But on this weekday afternoon, it’s serving as something besides the normal café y chisme (gossip): A backdrop for Spanish-language campaign videos for the Republican Party.
Juan Barbadillo, a retired salesman who was born in Cuba and has lived in New Jersey for a half-century, goes on camera to lament his skyrocketing utility bills, which he blames squarely on Democrats. Shooting the video is Kennith Gonzalez, who leads Hispanic outreach efforts as executive director of the New Jersey Republican State Committee.
Why We Wrote This
Hispanic voters swung hard to Donald Trump last fall, helping him secure the White House. Were those gains an anomaly – or the beginning of a more permanent partisan realignment? The New Jersey governor’s race this year will provide an early test, in a state whose population is one-fifth Hispanic.
Their political views once made them outliers bordering on curiosities in this community, where serious Republican candidates didn’t even bother to campaign. But that’s changing.
Hispanic and Latino voters of all stripes swung hard to Donald Trump across the nation last fall, helping him secure the White House. The president lost Latino voters by just three percentage points in 2024, after losing them by a 25-point margin in 2020 and by an even wider margin in 2016.
That big swing was especially evident in the Garden State. Mr. Trump lost New Jersey by just 5.9 percentage points, the closest a GOP presidential candidate has come to winning there since 1992, helped in large part by double-digit gains in many Latino-heavy communities.
Now, New Jersey Republicans are hoping they can capitalize on those shifts to win the governorship this fall, in a state whose population is one-fifth Hispanic and is viewed as a key bellwether for the mood of the national electorate heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli is running again, after losing the governor’s race four years ago. He’s facing Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who has held a tough swing district since 2018.
Mr. Gonzalez worked for Mr. Ciattarelli’s campaign in 2021 while still in college, when “a lot of Republicans seemed to just write off” the Hispanic community. In the wake of Mr. Trump’s surprising performance with Latinos last fall, Mr. Gonzalez says the party is working much harder to win them this time around.
Mr. Trump “didn’t invest any resources in this area, it was an organic thing,” he says. “So with a little bit of work, or a lot of work that we’re going to be seeing this year from the Republican Party… we are due for a big, big, big shift.”
But while Republicans believe they can build on Mr. Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters – potentially giving the GOP an edge this November in states from Arizona to Pennsylvania – there are some indications that those gains might instead be slipping away. Many Latinos who backed the president last fall because of frustration over the cost of living say they’ve seen no improvement. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s nationwide deportation push has struck some Hispanic voters, even those concerned about illegal immigration, as overly aggressive.
Jose Arango, the chair of the Hudson County Republican Party, says his party has a golden opportunity with Latinos that could effectively lock in a GOP majority for years to come. “If we turn the Hispanics with us in a solid way, we’re going to have a majority in Congress no matter what,” he says.
But he worries that the Trump administration’s deportation policies are undercutting that momentum, especially as the administration rounds up unauthorized immigrants who have lived and worked here for decades without breaking other laws.
“I hear from families that agree with the president, people who voted for the president, but they worry now that he’s not only getting rid of criminals, he’s going to get rid of labor,” he says. “We’re not against the president’s policy. But we have to be careful we don’t overdo it.”
Backsliding in polls
Nationally, polls show that Mr. Trump is backsliding with Latinos.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-August found the president’s job approval rating had dropped to 32% among Hispanic voters, the lowest in that survey since he returned to office. The Pew Research Center pegged Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Hispanic voters at 27%; it was 28% in a recent Economist/YouGov poll.
Equis Research, a Democratic polling group that focuses on Latino voters, recently found that a quarter who say they voted for Mr. Trump in November now are disappointed (19%) or regret their vote (8%). Democrats led among Hispanic voters by 53% to 29%, a margin much closer to 2020 than 2024; 11% of Latino Trump voters now say they plan to vote for a Democrat in the 2026 midterms.
Dozens of conversations with Latino residents in northern New Jersey reveal unhappiness with Mr. Trump’s handling of the cost of living, along with concerns about his interior immigration enforcement policies.
Bergenline Avenue, the main drag of a handful of Hispanic-majority cities across the river from New York City, was once nicknamed “Havana on the Hudson.” Today, the artery isn’t just Cuban: Its busy blocks are packed with restaurants, barbershops, and bodegas flying flags from every corner of Latin America.
Mr. Trump won 42% of the vote in the town of West New York last fall, a big increase from his 30% showing in 2020 and 23% in 2016. He topped 40% of the vote and more than doubled his vote share from 2016 to 2024 in Union City, the next town south, as well as in Elizabeth, another heavily Hispanic town further south down the New Jersey Turnpike.
Mr. Barbadillo was the local GOP nominee for state Senate in 2021, and won just over a quarter of the vote in the heavily Democratic district. By 2024, however, he says neighbors in the town, which is more than three-quarters Hispanic, started quietly telling him that they planned to vote for Mr. Trump. The biggest reason? Spiraling costs.
But now, Mr. Barbadillo worries that support might be slipping – as prices under the Trump administration have continued to rise – and he’s worried that the president’s tariffs will push costs even higher. A former salesman for Goya Foods, he says that local stores used to sell four cans of the company’s tomato sauce for a dollar as recently as a year ago. Now, they’re 74 cents apiece. The Hershey kisses his wife likes have nearly doubled in price. “You’re gonna get a nice steak? When you touch it, you burn,” he said, jerking his hand back theatrically with a laugh.
The impact of immigration raids has also unquestionably been felt in the community. When asked about President Trump, it’s the first thing most people bring up, including those who had voted for him.
Many also seem afraid to talk. Most in this community primarily speak Spanish, and among those willing to speak to a reporter, roughly half say they can’t vote because they’re residents, not citizens. But the American citizens in the community are feeling the effects of the raids as well.
The owner of a laundromat in Elizabeth says that her heavily Latino clientele has thinned significantly in recent months. She thinks many are avoiding public places where they could be the target of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The clerk at Ramirez & Sons Coffee says the shop’s business has recently dropped off, and speculates that immigrants are staying home out of fear.
Even some enthusiastic Trump supporters express unease with the deportation push.
Walter Baloco, a barber born and raised in Elizabeth, voted for Mr. Trump three times – to the consternation of his Colombian family and many friends. He defends the president’s economic policies, blaming high prices on lingering problems from President Joe Biden’s time in office. But he is conflicted about the current deportation push: He believes something “had to be done” about illegal immigration but says it’s wrong for the administration to arrest people who’ve been “living here for so many years.”
If “they’re working and paying taxes and doing whatever they have to do to stay – I feel like those people should stay,” he says.
Campaign outreach ramping up
Both gubernatorial campaigns know they have serious work to do with Hispanics.
Mr. Ciattarelli himself acknowledged he should have done more to try to win over Hispanic and Black voters in his last election, which he lost by just three points.
“There’s no better way to put it: My team was too white,” he said during a 2022 speech. “I did well in the Black and brown community, but I could have done even better.” He’s recently popped up at Dominican restaurants in Paterson and an Ecuadorian parade in Newark.
As the calendar turns to September, both sides are now launching TV advertising. But before that, there were few signs of active campaigning here – from either candidate.
At a Dominican barbershop on Bergenline, the owners say they backed Mr. Trump in every election since 2016 and displayed Trump campaign signs. But they weren’t aware of the looming governor’s race, a common reaction among Latino voters here.
The only campaign signs for governor the Monitor spotted in two days in town were in a shuttered storefront – for a candidate who’d lost the June Democratic primary to Representative Sherrill.
Most public polls have found Ms. Sherrill with a lead in the mid-to-high single digits, a range that sources say matches internal polling on both the Democratic and Republican side. While there hasn’t been any public polling specifically focused on Hispanic voters, some poll crosstabs indicate that Ms. Sherrill has some work to do to shore up the Latino vote. A Fairleigh Dickinson poll in July found her leading Mr. Ciattarelli by 41% to 27% among Hispanic voters, a closer margin than most Democrats would want to see.
Off-year elections always have lower turnout than presidential years, and the Hispanic vote tends to drop even more. It’s unclear which candidate that would benefit: Many Latino Trump voters in New Jersey didn’t vote down-ballot last fall, but low Latino turnout overall will likely still hurt Democrats.
Democrats promise that their Hispanic outreach efforts this fall will ramp up significantly.
“After November, the Democrats have really heard a wake up call. … People are really going to be heavily working towards getting out that Latino vote,” says Laura Matos, who represents New Jersey at the Democratic National Committee and is a board member of Latina Civic Action, which backs Ms. Sherrill. “It’s going to be a very, very clear indicator of where things are potentially headed for the midterms.”
Still, some Democrats privately say Ms. Sherrill needs to pick up the pace with Hispanic outreach.
Ms. Sherrill has held a swing district that is predominantly white (though it is 16% Latino) since 2019. She won her crowded gubernatorial primary with 34% of the vote, but didn’t perform quite as strongly in Hispanic areas. She’s recently attended a Peruvian parade in Paterson, a Puerto Rican festival in Hudson County, and done a number of interviews on Hispanic-focused TV and radio programs.
“Throughout the campaign, Mikie has been in close communication with the Hispanic and Latino community – meeting communities where they are, listening to the issues facing them,” Sherrill campaign spokesman Sean Higgins tells the Monitor.
Democratic Sen. Andy Kim, a former House colleague of Ms. Sherrill’s, won New Jersey’s open Senate seat last year. He says Ms. Sherrill faces some of the same “growing pains” he went through, moving from a mostly white, politically competitive district to running statewide “in an exceedingly diverse state.” Ms. Sherrill has picked his brain on the race, he says, commending her laser-like focus on cost-of-living issues.
The rightward trend of New Jersey’s Hispanic vote is “something that definitely is concerning,” he says. But “putting that focus in pays off. So, it’s not something that’s insurmountable.”
The Democratic National Committee recently gave $1.5 million to New Jersey Democrats for the race, in part to “expand our reach to key constituencies that we lost ground with in the November 2024 elections.”
But while many Latino voters express frustration with President Trump, that doesn’t mean they’re ready to flock back to Democrats. Cost-of-living issues cut both ways in New Jersey, where Democrats have held the governorship since 2018, and federal immigration issues aren’t as directly relevant in a governor’s race.
And some former Democratic voters might just stay home.
Working her shift at a children’s clothing store Kid City on Bergenline Avenue, Maria Zapeda says she voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But in 2024, the Guatemala native, U.S. citizen, and longtime New Jerseyan didn’t like either candidate – and sat out the election.
She has friends and family who “wanted a change” and backed Mr. Trump, and says many are now having second thoughts.
“Everybody’s frustrated. They reject him now. They say, ‘Why [did] I vote for the guy?’ I hear it a lot,” she says.
But Ms. Zapeda still stands by her decision not to vote for Kamala Harris. For now, she says she’ll probably vote in this fall’s governor’s race. She just hasn’t made up her mind about which candidate she’ll vote for.
