WHOOPS -- DID WE SUGGEST THAT IT WAS A PERMANENT REALIGNMENT? SORRY ABOUT THAT!

In The New York Times, Christine Zhang and Shane Goldmacher note that the Hispanic vote in this year's New Jersey gubernatorial election tacked sharply to the left:

In the recent New Jersey governor’s race, the Democratic Party clawed back much of the ground it had lost with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential race, according to a township-level analysis of results by The New York Times.

The results are stark: The heavily Hispanic areas that shifted the most to the left in 2025 were virtually a mirror image of the places that had swung the farthest to the right in 2024. The outcome suggests that President Trump’s surge of support among Hispanic voters last year may have been fleeting, or at least not transferable to other candidates in his party.

Here are some of the numbers:

The two cities that shifted the most toward Democrats were those with the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in the state: Union City and Perth Amboy.

Ms. Sherrill won Union City by 69 percentage points, just a year after Ms. Harris had carried it by only 17 points. And Ms. Sherrill won Perth Amboy by 56 points, a year after Ms. Harris had beaten Mr. Trump by less than nine points there....

All told, nine of the 10 townships that shifted the most toward Democrats from 2024 to 2025 had a Hispanic population of at least 60 percent.

This is fascinating, because less than six months ago, Goldmacher was telling us that America had undergone a long-term voter realignment that spelled doom for Democrats:

Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier.

It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback.

... Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations....

Of the 67 counties in America with a majority Hispanic population, 66 voted more Republican in 2024 than in 2012.

Even more arresting is that the average swing toward the G.O.P. in those 66 Hispanic-majority counties was 23 percentage points — a political earthquake with which both parties are still coming to terms.

Most of the Very Smart People told us this would be a long-lasting realignment. A week after the 2024 election, Goldmacher's Times colleague Thomas Edsall wrote:

Developing trends favorable to the Republicans and threatening to Democrats have evolved over the past three presidential elections in a way that signals strength and durability. It will be difficult for Democrats to reverse these dynamics.

That was a couple of days after CNN's Eric Braudner told us that the 2024 election results

paint a daunting picture of a party whose national coalition has fractured — with suburbs where they’ve won squeezed as tight as they can be, Latinos rapidly realigning with the GOP, and Trump posting the sorts of marginal gains among both urban and rural voters that are difficult to overcome.

The Atlantic asked Patrick Ruffini, a Republican-aligned pollster, to write about all this in May, and he concluded:

In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous. Yes, the particular appeal with which Trump was able to attract Hispanics and young Black men may last for only an election cycle or two, but the fact that those communities are realigning to a party that matches their views on issues, particularly on cultural issues such as gender, means that many are likely to stick around.

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.

The conventional wisdom was that Democrats were extremely out of step with Hispanics and couldn't win their votes without a massive overhaul of their policy positions and public messaging. This past spring, Edsall quoted Rodolfo Solis, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, who said:

Many Latino Republicans express growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party, particularly around its perceived emphasis on racial identity politics and progressive social agendas. There is a sense that the party has moved away from the working-class, religious and family-oriented values that resonate in South Texas.

At the same time, the Republican Party is increasingly viewed as a space where conservative Latinos feel culturally and ideologically at home. What’s happening is a process of partisan and ideological sorting: Democratic disaffection leads voters to reassess their identity, and the G.O.P. offers a clear, affirming alternative that aligns with their views on religion, personal responsibility, gender roles and national identity.

Shortly after the 2024 election, Edsall quoted a tweet from Ritchie Torres, a left-centrist New York congressman:

Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like “Defund the Police” or “From the River to the Sea” or “Latinx.”

There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.

Obviously, Democrats were doomed -- until they won several elections on November 4 that proved they aren't.

Very Smart politics-knowers didn't have to leap to the conclusion that the apparent realignment was durable. They could have said the numbers look bad for Democrats while keeping an open mind about the durability of the realignment, and also while -- here's a radical thought -- entertaining the possibility that the actions of the Republican president might have an impact on how Hispanic voters see the Republican Party. I know that Murc's Law is in effect and only Democrats are seen as having agency in American politics, but New York magazine's Ed Kilgore got the situation exactly right last December:

... while Democrats should be worried about the future of Latino voting behavior, Republicans have no reason for complacency. It’s now Trump and the GOP who are fully responsible for economic conditions which could turn out to be much worse than vague positive memories of the first Trump administration might suggest. And while (as some polling indicates) Latino citizens may have a negative attitude towards the recent surge of migrants that has become so central to Trump’s grip on his MAGA base, it’s less clear the mass deportation regime Trump has pledged to undertake immediately is going to go over well among Latinos, even those who voted for him. A recent Pew survey showed that Latinos were significantly less supportive of a major deportation program than other voters. And if the Trump administration pursues deportation round-ups in a cruel and ham-handed way (which elements of Trump’s base would welcome as a virtue rather than as a vice), or by methods that affect Latino legal immigrants and native citizens (most likely via ethnic profiling by law enforcement officials), we could see a pretty significant Latino backlash.

In other words, while some Latino trend towards the GOP may be inevitable all things being equal, it’s hardly guaranteed and could be sharply reversed.

Nailed it.

Everyone who focuses on politics knew that Trump had pledged to run a radical, disruptive government if he won in 2024. They knew his second term wouldn't be at all like the first three years of his first term, when Establishment aides acted as constraints on his worst instincts. They knew he was planning a horrific roundup of immigrants. They knew that he couldn't keep his promises to lower prices and that the tariffs he touted would fuel inflation. And yet they contended that nothing he did would have an impact on the behavior of voters who'd moved right in previous elections.

All they had to do was express doubt about the permanence of the realignment, but apparently that was too much to ask when a more satisfying story -- Democrats in disarray! -- was right there.