CLIFTON, New Jersey — Donald Trump’s victory in this heavily Hispanic corner of New Jersey gave Republicans hope they could turn his gains into a lasting foothold.

Those hopes have all but vanished two years later. Even their House candidate is criticizing the president’s immigration crackdown — and arguing her Democratic opponent should do more to push back.

“I’m not going to gaslight my community, because I don’t like to get gaslighted myself,” Rosie Pino, the Republican nominee for the state’s 9th Congressional District, told POLITICO after a flag-raising ceremony in the diverse suburb of Clifton, where she serves as a member of the city council. “I see what I see, and unfortunately some of the ways that the administration is bringing down orders to ICE and the lack of training within the department — it’s not OK.”

Republicans were eager to unseat Rep. Nellie Pou when her district voted for Trump after decades of supporting Democrats by double digits, putting her on their target list of vulnerable Democrats at the start of the cycle.

But with less than two weeks until Election Day, national Republicans have committed little money to defeating Pou and pulled back on their original ad reservations, and major Democratic outside groups haven’t found it necessary to spend anything defending her.

The lack of serious investment from either party has put Pou on what appears to be a glide path to reelection in her Paterson-based district. That’s hardly what either party thought would happen in the wake of the 2024 election, when Republicans hoped that the Hispanic voters Trump flipped to their side would become an enduring part of their coalition.

“The Hispanic community, we’re the ones who gave the victory to Trump,” said Jose Arango, the GOP chair in Hudson County, which makes up a small part of the 9th District. “And he has destroyed that coalition in a New York minute.”If Republicans were to hold the House — an outcome that many in the party increasingly believe is out of reach — making inroads in districts like Pou’s would be critical. But polls have instead shown Hispanic voters slipping further away, jeopardizing the GOP’s chances in races all over the country.

Some Republicans have responded by directly confronting the administration on its policies, like when Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar told Trump that his “immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far” in a campaign ad, earning a rebuke from the president. Not far from Pou’s district, vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in New York is running on a message that blames both parties for the country’s immigration woes.

Pou did little to accommodate the shift toward Trump. Of the 13 Democrats elected in Trump-won districts in 2024, she was the only one to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of the few to vote against the Laken Riley Act, an immigration enforcement bill passed early in Trump’s term. Republicans predicted that vote would cost her reelection.

Instead, Pou argues those votes have given her a boost in her district, and Pino is criticizing her from the other direction. After the city of Passaic canceled its Mexican Independence Day Parade over fears of immigration enforcement, Pino said Pou should have done more to convince Trump to hold ICE at bay — a tall order for a rank-and-file Democrat.

“I don’t know if that conversation happened, but no one has said it has, and that’s a disservice,” Pino said. “That’s what the congresswoman is supposed to do, is protect us in the 9th District.”Clifton, where both Pino and Pou spent a Saturday campaigning earlier this month, is just one example of Republicans’ political struggles. While Trump won the majority-minority town in 2024, Democrats have seen a major rebound in Passaic County, and Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill carried Clifton by a 61%-38% margin last year — one of dozens of Hispanic areas where Sherrill drastically improved on Kamala Harris’s numbers.

After launching a day of doorknocking with union members, Pou told POLITICO that although her constituents narrowly voted for Trump, they’ve now turned sharply against the president.

“He has caused a great deal of turmoil throughout the country,” said Pou, New Jersey’s first Latina member of Congress. “Certainly, my community, my district, my constituents are feeling it, and they are absolutely changing their position as a result of that.”For nearly three decades, the district was represented by Rep. Bill Pascrell, a pugnacious Democrat who devoted his final terms in office to trashing Trump and his allies. When the 87-year-old Pascrell died in the middle of his 2024 reelection campaign, Pou, then a state senator, was chosen to be his replacement as the Democratic nominee after a weeklong, insider-dominated process.

Pou’s far narrower-than-expected five-point victory over unheralded Republican Billy Prempeh that November prompted Democratic hand-wringing over whether the party might lose its grip on the district — and whether Pou herself would be able to keep up with the demands of a swing-seat representative. Republicans saw her progressive voting record in Congress, especially on immigration, as an opening, but Pou was undaunted.

“I vote my conscience, and the way that I think my constituents would want me to,” said Pou, who has often used her perch on the House Homeland Security Committee to criticize the president’s “cruel” and “unacceptable” immigration policies.

And in the nearly two years since Pou cast the Laken Riley Act vote, many voters appear to have moved towards her position. In August, the POLITICO Poll found that 50% of Americans thought the Trump administration’s deportation campaign was “too aggressive,” including 22% of Trump’s own voters.

In a district like the 9th, where many voters are immigrants and many others have immigrant family members or friends, those shifts may hit especially hard.

“Seeing something in front of you matters so much more than what people read in the press or people’s ideology,” said Dan Cassino, the director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll. “People are willing to support aggressive immigration policy, they like the idea, until they see it playing out in front of them.”That’s a dynamic that has reverberated across New Jersey wherever ICE has made its presence known, especially this spring, when protests put a national spotlight on the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark. A proposal to build another detention center in the suburban town of Roxbury has become a top campaign issue in GOP Rep. Tom Kean Jr.’s increasingly challenging fight for reelection.

Fighting against that tide is Pino, who has an unusual background for a GOP candidate: the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, the matriarch of a blended family of 11 children and a former Democrat who switched parties just a few years ago. Pino says her life story matches the incredibly diverse district she hopes to represent, and will help her appeal to voters who would otherwise scoff at voting for a Republican.

Pino was not the Republican establishment’s choice for the 9th District; that distinction instead went to Tiffany Burress, the wife of former NFL star Plaxico Burress. But Burress failed to catch on among voters or donors, and Pino won a narrow victory in the June primary. (Pou, despite angering local Arab American organizations with her stance on Israel, did not draw a primary challenge of her own.) Pino’s win came in spite of her own ideological idiosyncrasies, particularly on the issue of immigration.

Last November, she voted for a bill in Clifton that expressed support for New Jersey’s Immigrant Trust Act, a controversial bill that limits the extent to which local law enforcement can cooperate with immigration authorities — what Republicans deride as a “sanctuary state” law. Pino said that after discussing the issue with Clifton’s police chief, she decided it was something she was comfortable supporting, even if it meant blowback from her party.

“My Republican consultants from D.C. said, ‘Absolutely not. You cannot,’” Pino said. “And I said, ‘I’m a councilwoman. I have to make decisions based on where I am right now, not where I want to be. If this means that this will totally end my campaign, let it be.’”Pino has taken some immigration stances, though, that align with the Republican platform. Earlier this year, she spoke at a pro-ICE rally outside Delaney Hall, saying “we must support our men and women in blue.”

The numbers may ultimately not be there for a Pino victory. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Sherrill beat Republican Jack Ciattarelli by a 20-point margin in the 9th District, matching the kind of numbers Democrats used to get before 2024.

Pou, though far from the top fundraiser in the Democratic caucus, has raised more than $3 million to Pino’s $540,000, and only Pou has had a consistent advertising presence in the district. With the national environment tilting so strongly in Democrats’ favor and only minimal involvement from outside groups, that puts her in a dominant position.

“She’s raised money in a way that she’s never had to do before in her career. She’s been a good representative for the district,” said Phil Swibinski, a Democratic strategist who lives in the 9th District. “At the same time, I really think the dynamic is much more about Trump than anybody else.”Cassino was blunter: if Republicans think the 2024 result in the 9th District was the new baseline for support from Hispanic voters, they’re in for a rude awakening.

“2024 was an aberration, and I think everyone’s recognizing it as an aberration now,” he said. “This is not on anyone’s hit list.”