In Philip Roth’s 1959 autobiographical novella, Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman drives out of northern New Jersey’s Newark, the state’s largest city, and cruises toward suburbia — its wealth, growth, and contentment intensifying with Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. “It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven,” Klugman muses.

In the Trump decade, those same suburbs brought Democrats to heavenly electoral outcomes. But this weekend before New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, the ultimate political gauge before next year’s nationwide midterms, Democrats find themselves disoriented in purgatory. New Jersey may go MAGA on Tuesday.

Amid increasing national disapproval of Trump’s economic stewardship, New Jersey is emerging as a crucial testing ground for America’s political realignment and the durability of MAGA’s emerging coalition of working-class former Democrats and minorities. In the gubernatorial race, Republican Jack Ciattarelli is making a second attempt following his narrow 2021 loss to Democrat Phil Murphy  —the first member of his party re-elected governor since 1977 — who has state-level approval numbers lower than Trump’s.

Now, Ciattarelli faces Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a congresswoman elected in the 2018 suburban revolt, when well-off boomers in wealthy places like New Jersey’s Chatham and Morristown renounced their Republicanism during Trump’s first term. But even around Morris County, home to both towns, Ciattarelli could make encouraging inroads that lead to electoral destiny.

According to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, Sherrill has a 3.6% lead over Ciattarelli, with one recent poll showing a one-point lead. A Republican victory is partly contingent on enough support in this vastly suburban state, and in Ciattarelli’s case, there’s an encouraging precedent: he won Chatham in 2021, for example, following Trump’s 19-point loss of the town in 2020.

But any strong suburban margins will prove futile without enough support among Hispanic voters in North Jersey, where Hispanic-majority communities outright favoured Trump in 2024, and in South Jersey, especially places like Gloucester County — home to Democrat-turned-Republican blue-collar voters — and Jersey Shore communities that comprise the heart of MAGA zeal.

If Ciattarelli prevails, his multilingual approach could become a MAGA playbook: addressing business elites in Summit, connecting with blue-collar voters in South Jersey diners, and courting Hispanic communities in historically Democratic North Jersey — where Tuesday’s results will test the GOP’s inroads with voters who swung heavily toward Trump in 2024, helping him win Pennsylvania too.

According to an NBC News analysis, Trump improved his voting margins in New Jersey’s 29 Hispanic-majority municipalities from the 2020 to 2024 elections. He even won Passaic County, where voters went 74% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now Ciattarelli must prove the endurance of this Hispanic support in places like Paterson, North Bergen, and elsewhere in North Jersey, where he has stacked endorsements from Hispanic Democratic leaders.

His approach is reminiscent of 1980, when Ronald Reagan kicked off his general election campaign at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. Back then, Reagan targeted ethnic Catholic Democrats linked closer to the 19th century than this one. Today, the precincts around Liberty State Park are Hispanic-majority and shifted toward Trump between 2020 and 2024. Meanwhile, the descendants of those long-gone Catholic voters form Sherrill’s base: first- and second-generation college graduates who rode boomer-era prosperity and now live amid the secular uniformity of central Jersey’s office parks and sprawling homes.

Danny Ramirez was born in Jersey City in 1980. He grew up in the city and attended an Italian Catholic parochial school. Today, the high school teacher is running as a Republican candidate for Passaic County commissioner. Ramirez noted the Hispanic shift toward the GOP in north Jersey, an historical dynamic comparable to what happened among ethnic Catholic Democrats in nearby northeastern Pennsylvania — where he attended the University of Scranton — a region with deep cultural links to Jersey cities like Paterson because of its burgeoning Hispanic population. Often, he will be heard telling voters, “I do believe you’ve been Republican your whole life.”

Historically, Hispanic voter turnout drops in off-year elections — in part fuelled by the associative four-year, across-the-board elections in countries like the Dominican Republic — but this Tuesday could prove an exception. In this state, local issues loom large: zoning, affordable housing, overdevelopment, public order, electricity bills, and taxes — infamously high in a state shadowed by the skylines of Philadelphia and New York. In the case of Hispanic voters, the 2024 election exhibited a GOP turnout unparalleled in electoral memory.

There are national issues — ICE raids and rising prices — that figure large among Hispanic voters. Ramirez acknowledged that he hears among friends who are small-business owners that “things are tight”. But in the case of New Jersey, he says, “it seems like all ire is directed toward eight years of Democratic rule.” The level of Democratic disaffection in North Jersey’s Hispanic communities will determine Ciattarelli’s fate, the GOP’s durability, and how MAGA plays out in 2026.