Democratic insiders are scratching their heads of a shocking flip in traditionally liberal New Jersey. Diverse, suburban Passaic County, which went 74% for Hillary Clinton in 2016, voted for president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday.
The hourglass-shaped region in the northern part of the state is usually true-blue thanks to big down-county cities like Paterson.
But the sea of blue dried up on Trump seized a stunning victory with 95,0000 votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 89,000.
When asked what went wrong, one Democratic insider simply said, “I don’t know.”
“These numbers are bizarre,” he said, pointing to results that showed Trump nipping at Harris’s heels in the overwhelmingly liberal city of Paterson.
“It seems to me a lot of people voted against their best interest,” he said. “Maybe it was an emotional thing.”
There is a bit of a demographic wave hitting the county of about 515,000: The black population in some of its bigger cities and towns is shrinking, only to be backfilled by more culturally-conservative Latinos.
Passaic County is 38% white, nearly 45% Hispanic and 15% black.
Twenty years ago, the Hispanic population was just 30%. That means someone like Trump, who plowed wide inroads into the Hispanic community, could benefit from the demographic shift.
Trump’s support among Hispanic voters has shifted 16 points in his favor nationwide, according to exit polls.
Democratic victories have also gotten more narrow over the years as a result — the county went for Hillary Clinton by 52 points in 2016, but that shrank to a 16-point victory for Biden in 2020.
“That shift has been happening for a decade, maybe more,” the insider said.
“But a presidential election is when you get a lot more Latinos to the polls,” he continued. “African Americans are a more reliable Democratic voter, but in Paterson, for instance, there are just a lot more Latinos.”
“So even if a smaller percentage comes out, the numbers grow.”
That mirrored a shift throughout the state, with Republicans besting their 2020 numbers in nearly every county — which, according to the NJ Globe, appears to have stemmed from voting pattern changes among minority voters.
The Garden State GOP also banked lots of early votes, with 400,000 taking to the polls before Election Day.
Democrats narrowly outpaced them with 418,000 — even though Dems have more than a million more registered voters, the Globe said.
In the end, Harris’ five-point margin of victory in New Jersey was the worst of any Dem in the state’s presidential contests since 1992.
Few voters seemed surprised Wednesday morning — but they offered myriad reasons why Trump flipped the county, ranging from the economy to immigration to some people being simply unwilling to vote for a woman.
Pat Deady, a 61-year-old Republican from the up-county town of Ringwood, stood outside a Quick Chek in the central Passaic town of Wayne as he attributed the win to people’s frustration with taxes and inflation.
Meanwhile, he said, some of his more liberal friends simply sat the election out.
“They just said they couldn’t stand anything the Democrats are doing, but there’s no way they can get behind Trump,” he said. “It kind of made sense a little bit — if you really hate them both, then why are you picking one?”
Demitri Gonzalez, a 25-year-old of Puerto Rican descent from Paterson, voted for Harris but attributed her loss to a flood of misinformation online.
“People don’t do their research,” said Gonzalez, a college grad with a history degree. “They just go off what they read in the headline. They don’t read the article, they read the headlines.”
“A lot of Hispanic and black men moved to the right because inherently, our culture is conservative … because of how deep the religious values are,” he continued, noting that his own dad voted for Trump despite his pleas.
Another person, a 60-year-old black man from Paterson, was more succinct.
“Nobody knew nothing about her — that’s what the problem was,” he said, adding that it might have been different had she been in the race longer.
“You already know about that evil motherf—er,” he said, referring to Trump. “But people said it: What good is a change if you don’t know what you changing to?”