ELIZABETH, New Jersey — When Donald Trump won the presidency last November, he did so with unprecedented levels of new support from Latino voters across the country. In big cities, towns, and suburbs around the country, these voters — both new, previously disengaged voters and former Democrats disillusioned with the status quo — flocked to Trump and Republican candidates. The result: about an 11-point improvement from Trump’s 2020 performance, which itself was already a major achievement compared to 2016.

It was a great realignment that many Republicans had been predicting, and it had finally arrived. But whether it would last was an open question. A more popular Trump could either wield new Latino support for his economic, border, immigration, and social proposals to secure an enduring multiracial, working-class coalition for future Republicans. Or he could squander it all away by going to the extreme.

Republicans were optimistic. Trump had managed to tap into dissatisfaction not just with the economy, but with Democratic ideology, and transform it into sustained Republican support.

“A populist shift in the form of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was enough to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party, they aren’t going back,” warned the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini as recently as May.

But by the summer, it was clear the second scenario was happening. Tariffs, DOGE instability, lingering economic malaise, and new immigration enforcement in big cities had collapsed Trump’s approval ratings; his polling numbers among Latino and Hispanic Americans had fallen off a cliff — plunging 20 points by one count.

“Trump betrayed us,” one former Democratic Latino voter told me in May. “People voted for one thing: the economy. A good economy. And these tariffs are hiking everything up.”

The answer to the question of whether Latino voters have soured on Trump is, pretty clearly, yes. But that just raises a new one: Has their increasing displeasure with Trump’s second term resulted in a new interest in the Democratic Party?

We’re now on the eve of the first real trial of this question: in just a few days, voters in New Jersey will decide on new leadership for their state. The Garden State is a test case:

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