Something big happened in New Jersey Tuesday — namely, Hispanic voters made a major voting reversal. Last year, across the country Hispanics swung Republican in a significant departure from past voting patterns, helping propel Trump to victory. But yesterday, in New Jersey, they swung back hard to the Democrats. And I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: They won’t be going back to the G.O.P. for a very long time.
Jonathan V. Last very helpfully focuses on Union City, N.J., an overwhelmingly Hispanic area. Donald Trump got only 19 percent of the vote there in 2016. But in 2024 he received more than twice that share, 41 percent. This pattern was replicated across the country, leading ebullient Republicans to tout a widespread, durable realignment of Hispanic voters toward their party.
Durable, that is, until it wasn’t. The Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, Jack Ciatarelli, received only 15.1 percent of Union City’s votes on Tuesday. What happened?
In this case, the simple answer is the right one — it’s the economy, stupid. The 2021-2022 surge in prices infuriated many Americans, particularly working class Americans who have little surplus to spare. Biden economists pointed out until they were blue in the face that this was not Biden’s fault – that inflation had surged everywhere. They also pointed out that wages had risen too, so much so that workers’ purchasing power was higher in 2024 than it had been before the pandemic. It didn’t matter: making these statements was interpreted as tantamount to denying people’s felt reality. Economics comparisons are abstract while the price of eggs is not. Furthermore, workers believed, as they always do during wage-price spirals, that they had earned wage increases that were being unfairly snatched away by inflation.
So many voters turned to Trump, believing his promises that he would bring prices down to pre-Covid levels. They remembered the low inflation, low mortgage rates and full employment that prevailed on the eve of the pandemic and let themselves be persuaded that Trump would turn back the clock.
But, equally important, the 2024 Hispanic swing to the Republicans was also a function of what voters chose not to believe. Namely, many Hispanics chose not to believe warnings that a second Trump administration would be an era of racial profiling and mass deportations, of Hispanic communities terrorized by ICE agents.
After all, the reasoning went, that didn’t happen during Trump’s first term. So many Hispanic voters brushed aside dire warnings from Democrats that an emboldened Trump II would be very different.
But as Tuesday’s results showed, they know now. As G. Elliott Morris puts it,
the best explanation for 2025 is that voters didn’t know what they were getting with Trump 2.0 last November, but now they do — and they don’t like it.
They know now that Trump’s promise to lower prices was just another scam, that his tariffs and deportations have in fact driven prices higher. Moreover, the continual insistence by Trump and his minions that the economy is great and that prices are down adds insult to injury -- an attempt to gaslight them into disbelieving their own eyes.
For Hispanic voters, even worse is the devastating discovery that everything Democrats warned would happen to them under Trump II is happening. Suddenly, America has become a place where it’s not safe to have brown skin or speak Spanish with your family, even if you’re a citizen.
So Tuesday showed that the Hispanic vote has re-realigned. And my prediction is that this won’t be a pendulum. Republicans had their chance to win over a new bloc of voters; but by indulging Trump’s violent racism and nativism, they have lost them and will probably never get them back.
Why do I feel confident in saying that? By analogy with the Jewish vote. Bear with me here.
One of the longstanding anomalies of U.S. politics has been the consistent support of Jewish Americans for Democrats, despite the fact that as a relatively high income group Jews are more likely than the average voter to benefit from tax cuts. Granted, Republicans have peeled off a few votes among Jews who strongly support the Netanyahu government. But even so Kamala Harris received 71 percent of the Jewish vote.
What explains this persistence? Historical memory. Jews have many generations’ worth of experience with right-wing antisemitism. Many of us understand, I believe, that whenever bigotry of any kind is given free rein, we’re always next in line.
And sure enough, rabid antisemitism is surging within MAGA, which should surprise absolutely nobody.
As I see it, Hispanic voters are now learning a similar lesson. Until this year many of them could brush off evidence of right-wing racism, including Trump’s tirades about Mexican rapists, as unlikely to affect their lives. Now they’re seeing friends and family grabbed on the street by masked government thugs. Many will never trust the right again.
I’d be the first to admit that I am neither a political strategist nor a political scientist. But I don’t think I’m wrong about this. As I see it, the G.O.P. didn’t just lose the Hispanic vote for one election. It has lost that vote for good.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.
