In the weeks leading up to New Jersey’s big governor’s race, the political world discovered Passaic County.
The diverse county, pundits said, was a bellwether for Republicans’ ascendance and Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters. Trump stunned Democrats by winning there last year, the first GOP presidential contender to do so in more than three decades. That included the city of Passaic, where three-quarters of the residents are Hispanic.
So the question loomed over this year’s election: Could the GOP’s Jack Ciattarelli continue the momentum and ride it to victory over Mikie Sherrill? Was the Democratic Party doomed as members of its Latino base turned rightward?
The efforts by groups like Door-to-Door and Make the Road to win Passaic back were a mix of old-school, door-to-door campaigning and modern technology.
Smartphones make collecting data easy, allowing voter-turnout groups to tell which residents and which issues to emphasize, said Marc Pfeiffer, associate director at Rutgers’ Bloustein Local Government Research Center. That allowed for more effective coordination of campaigning.
Democrats learned from 2024’s stumbles and engaged with voters across the state, he said. The party carried all five New Jersey counties that Trump won last year.
“They figured it out,” Pfeiffer said. “They set their strategy and then executed it.”
Paul and Pfeiffer said pictures that proliferated on TV and social media — such as parents taken into custody by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as they picked up their children from school — impacted voters in New Jersey. They likened it to the Elián González case in Florida, which helped sink Democrats’ chances of winning that pivotal state in the 2000 presidential election.
The dramatic image of a rifle-toting Justice Department agent charging into a room to take custody of the young Cuban child in April 2000 not only won the Miami Herald a Pulitzer; it resonated with thousands of Cuban American voters. Democrat Al Gore lost Florida and the 2000 election by 537 votes out of 6 million cast.
In 2025, ICE raids had a similar impact, said Pfeiffer.
“It was not a good look for the government,” he said.