Where the GOP Lost Support This Past Week

By Jack Gillum, John West and Peter Champelli

Across Virginia and New Jersey in their gubernatorial elections this past week, the working-class, Hispanic and Black neighborhoods that helped return Donald Trump to the White House a year ago moved back toward the Democratic Party—even in areas that had swung heavily for him, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

The Democratic victor in the Virginia election, Abigail Spanberger, outperformed Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, by nearly 8 percentage points in places where Trump’s support in recent years had grown the most. Those diverse Virginia enclaves have more than twice the share of Hispanic residents and a higher percentage of Black residents than the rest of the state.

In New Jersey, in places where Trump had made the greatest inroads, the Democratic victor in that state’s race for governor, Mikie Sherrill, outperformed Harris by more than 16 percentage points. Hispanic residents make up more than 60% of those areas.

Republicans also lost ground among working-class voters. In places with the greatest share of households earning under $50,000, for example, Sherrill gained more than 6 percentage points over Harris’s performance last November.

New Jersey’s heavily Hispanic neighborhoods with a majority of Spanish-speaking households swung hard toward Trump in 2024, by nearly 16 points. But they swung back even harder toward Democrats this past week. Sherrill outperformed Harris by almost 20 points and even beat Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers. Households in which Spanish is spoken are often home to first-generation Americans, an increasingly powerful voting bloc.

The pattern was weaker in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods in which English dominates.

The surge in Democratic support during an off-year election reflected the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, which is driven largely by economic anxieties and cost-ofliving concerns, according to exit polls. If the Virginia and New Jersey trends continue nationwide into next fall’s midterm elections, Republicans’ already-narrow majority in Congress could be threatened.