Are Hispanics America’s New Jews?

The Realignment That Was — and Why It Won’t Return

Something unmistakable shifted this week in New Jersey. In Union City — an overwhelmingly Hispanic enclave that briefly swung toward Donald Trump in 2024 — voters snapped back to Democrats with a force that stunned Republicans who had been celebrating what they believed was a durable realignment.

Union City is illustrative. Trump won only 19 percent there in 2016. In 2024, riding a nationwide Hispanic surge, he jumped to 41 percent. That pattern fed the Republican narrative that Hispanics were slowly but steadily realigning toward the GOP.

That narrative dissolved on Tuesday. The Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciatarelli captured just 15.1 percent of the vote in Union City — lower than Trump’s original baseline.

The question is why the reversal happened so quickly, and why it is unlikely to swing back again.

The core reason is brutally simple. Inflation angered working-class voters in 2021–22. Hispanic households, with fewer financial buffers, felt squeezed hardest.

Yes, economists repeated endlessly that global factors — not Biden — drove inflation. They emphasized that real wages had risen by 2024. But voters interpreted this as technocratic denial of their lived experience.

Trump offered nostalgia: low 2019 inflation, low mortgage rates, full employment. He promised to “restore” those conditions. Many believed him.

But as 2025 unfolded, those promises collapsed.
Tariffs didn’t lower prices; they raised them. Deportations disrupted labor markets and supply chains, further increasing costs. And the administration’s insistence that “prices are falling” felt to many like gaslighting.

A second force mattered just as much: Hispanics chose not to believe Democrats’ warnings about what Trump II would look like.

After all, they reasoned:
“If mass deportations didn’t happen in Trump’s first term, why would they happen in the second?”

That assumption evaporated in months.
In 2025, masked ICE agents began courthouse raids, street detentions, and fast-track deportations. The targets often included U.S. citizens or long-settled legal residents speaking Spanish in public.

The abstract became personal.
The hypothetical became visible.
And once that happens, political memory hardens.

As analyst G. Elliott Morris summarized:

Jewish Americans have long supported Democrats at levels far exceeding their economic self-interest. Even in 2024, Kamala Harris won 71 percent of the Jewish vote.
Why? Historical memory.

Generations of experience taught Jewish communities that:
Whenever bigotry is unleashed, they are next.

The current surge of open antisemitism inside MAGA — something that should surprise no one — reinforces that perception.

Hispanic voters, Krugman argues, are undergoing the same political awakening:
Not theoretical racism.
Not rhetorical xenophobia.
But lived, visible, threatening state power deployed against people who look like them.

That kind of lesson doesn’t fade.

Republicans briefly saw the possibility of a new multiracial working-class coalition.
They lost it — not because of messaging, but because of choices.

Choosing Trumpism meant choosing racialized enforcement.
Choosing nativism meant choosing permanent distrust from the communities being targeted.
Choosing mass deportations ensured permanent political memory.

This is why the realignment won’t simply swing back.
The GOP didn’t lose Hispanic voters for one cycle.
They burned a bridge.

Political scientists will debate the scale and durability of this break, but the pattern is historically consistent:
When a party becomes associated with explicit state-sponsored targeting of a minority group, that group does not return.

As Krugman frames it, the GOP squandered its best opportunity in decades: