In the end, vice president Kamala Harris did win new Jersey, but the margin between Harris and Donald Trump was much smaller than expected just five points.

One of the many factors that explain the shrinking gap points to the surge in Hispanic men voting for Trump this year.

Nearly half, 47%, went for Trump.

One of the best examples of this can be found right here in Hudson, Bergen and Passaic counties, which are heavily Latino and Hispanic.

Trump flipped or was winning in those locations at last count.

That's for the first time, though, in all three of his presidential bids.

Raven Santana takes a deeper look at why.

I think it was a real wake up call for Democrats.

Both state and nationwide.

Obviously, for new Jersey, we're heading right into a gubernatorial.

So this has, you know, leaves a lot of big questions and sends a lot of big signs to both parties and chairmen in terms of how they're going to set up for this gubernatorial in a year.

Kamala Harris may have won here in new Jersey, but director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling Ashley Koning says it wasn't by much.

We saw large swaths of voters going for the Republicans on the ballot, particularly when it came to Trump.

And we have about a five point margin between Harris and Trump, which is far and away so much different than what new Jersey has looked like in the past several decades.

And I think about less than half of what Biden won by in 2020.

This really points to the national trends we've also been seeing with Republicans doing very well, and Trump especially doing very well on the ballot across the country on election night.

So much so that The New York Times, as Nate Cohen actually said, new Jersey looked more like a swing state on election night.

Koning points out the Garden State, which traditionally leans blue, so key counties flipped from blue to red.

She says that shift was primarily due to Latino male voters.

We see some of the top Hispanic Latino counties, like Passaic and Cumberland County, which flipped for Trump.

We see that, other counties which are have heavily Hispanic and Latino communities.

We see that Trump's numbers rose in those counties, even if Harris won them.

So this seems to be correlating with a lot of the national patterns we see when it comes to Latino voters, specifically Latino male voters.

That shift is being considered a victory for Latinos, says Hudson County Republican Chair Jose Arango.

Hispanic community, you have to talk about economic instability in the neighborhood.

And choices in education.

When we started to talk about, you know, all the other things that don't have nothing to do with it everyday, the issue that you have, as a, as a Hispanic, that they lost touch, they lost communication.

And, and Donald Trump maybe was vulgar and sometimes the way that he express himself.

But he was talking about the issues that everybody cared.

His sentiments are shared by Kenneth Gonzalez, an official with the new Jersey Republican Party.

Gonzalez says he believes Latinos, especially in new Jersey, felt abandoned by the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party's message was stronger than ever this year, and that's because working class voters abandoned the Democrat Party because they realized that the Democrat Party abandoned them.

And with the Hispanic population and the black population, it was the exact same thing.

These are voters that the Democrat Party has taken for granted, not only in new Jersey, but in the entire country for so many years.

The Hispanic vote isn't even pulled many times because it's considered to be reliably Democrat.

And now everyone's realizing they're going to have to rethink that, because the Hispanic community is not buying what the Democrats are selling anymore.

Still, Patricia Campos Medina says there is some hope as Latinas have not jumped ship yet.

Latino men did vote.

More numbers for Trump because he was able to sell them a message on the economy that appealed to them.

Latina women this stay with Kamala because we identify more with her, the issues around reproductive freedoms and our opportunity for our children.

Campos Medina is on a mission to make sure new Jersey Latinas don't make a similar shift as Latinos.

She says reflection is key as Democrats prepare for the governor's race.

So if we don't respond to the needs for economic policy, package investment in their businesses, an opportunity to grow.

If there's one thing that everyone agreed on, it's that something needs to change and no group of voters should ever be taken for granted.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.