TOTOWA, NJ (AP) — Patrons at Murph’s Tavern are toasting not only Donald Trump’s return to the presidency but also the fact that he has taken over their northern New Jersey district, a longtime Democratic stronghold in the shadow of New York City has.
For Maria Russo, the woman who pours the drinks, the reasons for Trump’s victory in the run-up to the election were as clear as the shot glasses lined up on the high tables. As a mother raising two children alone on a bartender’s income in Passaic County, she saw this in airy not only of her own situation, but of those around her.
“Everyone can see what’s going on, you know? The prices for everything. “And that I’m a single mother?” she said. “I notice that when I go shopping – just like everyone else.”
Although Trump’s victory once again reflected a deep political divide in the United States, he made breakthroughs in surprising places. From the New Jersey suburbs to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New York congressional district to reliably liberal Hawaii, Trump gained ground even as support for Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, fell.
AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of more than 120,000 voters across the country, found that Trump made significant gains compared to his 2020 performance among Black and Latino men, younger voters and nonwhite voters without college degrees.
Common themes emerged in the AP VoteCast data. Voters were most likely to believe the economy and immigration were the country’s biggest problems. Compared to 2020, more voters said their family’s financial situation had “fallen behind.” When they voted, Trump supporters were thinking about high prices for gasoline, food and other goods, as well as the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Even in Hawaii, dominated by Democrats since the 1950s when unions organized sugar and pineapple plantation workers who built the state’s middle class, Republicans won significant victories.
In West Oahu, for example, where many plantations have given way to suburban development, schoolteacher Julie Reyes Oda, a Republican, flipped a House district in the heavily blue-collar working-class town of Ewa Beach. In the district next door, state representative Diamond Garcia retained the seat he made Republican two years ago. Democrats still hold a supermajority in both chambers, but Republicans’ nine seats in the House and three in the Senate are the most the party has held in the legislature since 2004.
Newly elected Republican state Sen. Samantha DeCorte said voters in her Waianae district, west of Honolulu, have long been frustrated by a lack of resources for basic needs like public safety. Residents feel like they have to look over their shoulders when they fill up, DeCorte said.
“They don’t want to go to the grocery store at night because they have to walk back to their car in the parking lot,” she said.
Economic concerns, including high housing costs, may have played a major role among some Hawaii voters. On an island where the average cost of a single-family home exceeds $1.1 million, many people, including many native Hawaiians, have been forced to move to the continental United States
In New Jersey, AP VoteCast showed that, in addition to the demographic swings seen nationally, Trump also gained support among nonwhite suburban voters and younger women. In New York, the poll showed a particularly enormous swing toward Trump among non-white men without a college education, although the majority of that group still supported Vice President Harris.
About half of voters in New Jersey said Trump would handle the economy better, according to AP VoteCast, while about a third said the same about Harris, giving him a slightly larger advantage there on the issue compared to national numbers.
Few places demonstrate Trump’s strength in traditionally blue areas better than Passaic County, where Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the county in more than three decades.
Interviews with voters and experts suggest that Trump’s aggressive approach to the economy influenced how people voted or whether they stayed home.
“The people who take the subway into Manhattan live in a very different world than the people who live in Manhattan,” said Richard F. Bensel, a political historian at Cornell University. “They live in very different worlds in terms of the pressures they feel, the challenges they feel in life, and they don’t want to be lectured to.”
Sebastian Giraldo, an Air Force member based in Del Rio, Texas, who was recently home in Queens on leave, said it was “a no-brainer” to vote for Trump, even though he supported Democrat Joe Biden four years ago have.
“The current trajectory of the United States over the last four years alone has obviously been downhill,” he said. “I mean, for everyone, I think it was harder to live. Shopping for groceries, buying clothes and gas. Just live.”
Ramon Ramirez-Baez, a 66-year-old writer and community activist in the New York City borough of Queens, said he voted for Trump and encouraged others to do so despite being a registered Democrat who has voted for Democrats in the last four presidential elections voted and even ran unsuccessfully for the legislature as a Democrat.
The Dominican native, who came to Queens more than three decades ago, blamed the Biden administration’s immigration policies for the explosion of prostitution, illegal brothels and unlicensed food trucks that have plagued his neighborhood in recent years.
The White House’s position on the war in Gaza has turned off some Muslim voters in key swing states like Michigan and cost them elsewhere as well.
Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New Jersey, said he voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein over Harris despite supporting other Democrats.
“It’s a protest vote,” he said. “We won’t just give you our vote.”
In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, who previously captured a Trump-claimed House district in 2020, campaigned for Passaic County in his victorious Senate race. It shows, he said in an interview, that people see local and state problems differently than national ones. He said voters told him they appreciated his focus on “broken politics.”
“If these are people who distrust the government, then I guess my message is: Look, I’m also frustrated with the way things are happening.”
Ocasio-Cortez, like Kim, invited divided voters to speak out on social media about how they could support both Trump and her. That echoed across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where John Coiro, a guest at Murph’s and a Trump supporter, said he respected her for popping the question.
Trump’s performance could force a reckoning among Democrats in places where they are used to winning regularly.
Ralph Caputo, a former state lawmaker from northern New Jersey, said Trump, unlike Democrats, has connections to different groups of voters. Trump was also sharper, Caputo said, because he was tested in the primaries, something Harris was not exposed to due to Biden’s delayed withdrawal from the race in July.
“Gone are the days when you just put someone up for election and think they’re going to win because they’re on a Democratic ballot,” Caputo said. “You can’t win automatically.”
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Associated Press writers Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York, and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.
