From New Jersey to Hawaii, Trump made inroads in surprising places in his path to the White House

TOTOWA, N.J. (AP) — Patrons at Murph's Tavern are toasting not just Donald Trump's return to the presidency but the fact that he carried their northern New Jersey county, a longtime Democratic stronghold in the shadow of New York City.

To Maria Russo, the woman pouring the drinks, the reasons behind Trump's win were as clear in the runup to the election as the shot glasses lined up on the high-top tables. A mother raising two kids on her own in Passaic County on a barkeep's income, she saw it not just in light of her own situation but those of the people around her.

“Anybody can see what’s going on, you know? The prices of everything. And me being a single mom?” she said. “I notice that when I go shopping – just like everybody else does.”

Although Trump's win once again reflected a deep political divide across the United States, he made inroads in surprising places. From the suburbs of New Jersey to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New York City congressional district to reliably liberal Hawaii, Trump gained ground even as support for Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, dropped off.

AP VoteCast, a far-reaching survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, found that Trump made substantial gains among Black and Latino men, younger voters, and nonwhite voters without a college degree, compared with his 2020 performance.

Common themes emerged in the AP VoteCast data. Voters were most likely to see the economy and immigration as top issues facing the country. More voters said their family's financial situation was “falling behind," compared with 2020. When they voted, Trump supporters were thinking about high prices for gas, groceries and other goods and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Even in Hawaii, dominated by Democrats since the 1950s when labor unions organized sugar and pineapple plantation workers who built the state’s middle class, Republicans had commanding victories.

In West Oahu, for example, where many plantations have given way to suburban development, school teacher Julie Reyes Oda, a Republican, flipped one state House district in the heavily blue-collar, working-class town of Ewa Beach. In the district next door, state Rep. Diamond Garcia held on to a seat he turned Republican two years ago. Democrats still control supermajorities in both chambers, but the GOP’s nine House and three Senate seats are the most the party’s had in the Legislature since 2004.

Newly elected Republican state Sen. Samantha DeCorte said voters in her Waianae district west of Honolulu have long been frustrated by a lack of resources for basic needs such as public safety. Residents feel like they have to look over their shoulders when they are pumping gas, DeCorte said.

“They don’t want to go to the grocery store at night because they have to walk back to their car in the parking lot," she said.

Economic concerns, including the high cost of housing, may have figured prominently in the thinking of some Hawaii voters. On an island where the median cost of a single-family home tops $1.1 million, many people, including large numbers of Native Hawaiians, have been forced to move to the continental U.S.

In New Jersey, AP VoteCast showed that Trump grew his support among nonwhite suburban voters and younger women, in addition to the demographic swings that showed up nationally. In New York, the survey showed especially large movement toward Trump among nonwhite men without a college education, although a majority of that group still supported Harris, the vice president.

About half of New Jersey voters said Trump would better handle the economy, according to AP VoteCast, while about one-third said this about Harris, giving him a slightly bigger advantage on the issue there compared with national numbers.

Few places better demonstrated Trump’s strength in traditionally blue areas than Passaic County, where Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the county in more than three decades.

Interviews with voters and experts suggest Trump’s hammering on the economy influenced how people voted or whether they stayed home.

“Those people taking the subway into Manhattan, they live in a very different world than those people who live in Manhattan,” said Richard F. Bensel, a political historian at Cornell University. “They live in very different worlds in terms of the pressures that they feel, challenges that they feel in life, and they don’t want to be preached to.”

Sebastian Giraldo, a member of the Air Force stationed in Del Rio, Texas, who was home in Queens on leave recently, said it was a “no brainer” to vote for Trump despite having supported Democrat Joe Biden four years ago.

“Just the current trajectory of the United States these last four years have obviously been downhill,” he said. “I mean, for everybody, I think it’s been harder to live. The grocery shopping, buying clothes and gasoline. Just living.”

Ramon Ramirez-Baez, a 66-year-old writer and community activist in the Queens borough of New York, said he voted for Trump and encouraged others to do so despite being a registered Democrat who had voted for Democrats in the past four presidential elections and even ran unsuccessfully for the Legislature as a Democrat.

The native of the Dominican Republic, who came to Queens more than three decades ago, blamed Biden administration immigration policies for the explosion of prostitution, illegal brothels and unlicensed food carts that have bedeviled his neighborhood in recent years.

The White House’s position on the war in Gaza peeled away some Muslim voters in key swing states such as Michigan, and it cost them elsewhere, too.

Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New Jersey, said he voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein over Harris, though he backed other Democrats.

“It’s a protest vote,” he said. ”We’re not going to just give you our vote.”

In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, who previously captured a House district claimed by Trump in 2020, carried Passaic County in his winning Senate race. It shows, he said in an interview, that people see local and state issues differently than national ones. He said voters have told him they appreciate his focus on “broken politics."

“If these are people who are distrusting of government, I think my message is saying, like, look I am also frustrated with how things are happening."

Ocasio-Cortez, like Kim, invited split-ticket voters to weigh in on social media about how they could back both Trump and her. That resonated across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where John Coiro, a patron at Murph's and a Trump supporter, said he respected her for asking the question.

Trump’s performance could force a reckoning among Democrats in places where they are accustomed to winning regularly.

Ralph Caputo, a former state legislator from northern New Jersey, said Trump, unlike Democrats, connected with different groups of voters. Trump was sharper, too, Caputo said, because he had been tested in the primaries, something Harris did not face because of Biden's late withdrawal from the race in July.

“Those days are over where you just put somebody up for election and think they’re going to win because they’re on a Democratic ballot,” Caputo said. “They can’t win automatically.”

Associated Press writers Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York, and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.

Murph's Tavern, owned by Peter Murphy, the GOP chairman of Passaic County, New Jersey, is in the heart of Totowa, N,J., in Passaic County, which went for President-elect Donald Trump in the election. It was the first time in more than three decades the suburban New York county went for a Republican. (AP photo/Mike Catalini)

Ramon Ramirez-Baez, a voter in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, that is a part of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., district, poses for a photo on Nov. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Philip Marcelo)

Eduardo Giraldo, left, and Sebastian Giraldo, voters in the part of the New York City borough of Queens that is represented by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., pose for a photo on Nov. 12, 2024. The elder Giraldo, who owns an insurance business, voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, but his 24-year-old son, who is in the Air Force, voted for President-elect Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Philip Marcelo)

Mara Russo, a bartender at Murph's Tavern in Totowa, N.J., speaks about why she supported President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. Totowa, in suburban New York's Passaic County, went for a Republican for president for the first time since 1992. (AP photo/Mike Catalini)

In the new horror movie, “Heretic,” Hugh Grant plays a diabolical religious skeptic who traps two scared missionaries in his house and tries to violently shake their faith.

What starts more as a religious studies lecture slowly morphs into a gory escape room for the two door-knocking members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, underscoring just how well-suited religion can be for terrifying and entertaining thrill-seeking moviegoers.

“I think it is a fascinating religion-related horror as it raises questions about the institution of religion, the patriarchy of religion,” said Stacey Abbott, a film professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, whose research interests include horror, vampires and zombies.

“But it also questions the nature of faith and confronts the audience with a debate about choice, faith and free will.”

Horror has had a decades-long attraction to religion, Christianity especially in the U.S., with the 1970s “The Exorcist” and “The Omen” being prime examples. Beyond the jump scares, the supernatural elements of horror and its sublime nature pair easily with belief and spirituality — and religion’s exploration of big existential questions, Abbott said. Horror is subversive. Real-life taboo topics and cultural anxieties are fair game.

“It is a rich canvas for social critique and it can also be a space to reassert traditional values,” Abbott said in an email.

Religions and horror tackle similar questions about what it means to be human — how people relate to one another and the world, said Brandon Grafius, a Biblical studies professor at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit and an expert on Christianity and horror.

“So much of religion is about how we grapple with the reality of death. … Helping us make meaning even in the face of that reality,” said Grafius. “Horror really serves that same process, as a way to reflect on death.”

Not only does Christianity translate well for U.S. audiences, it has a lot of raw material for moviemakers to work with, he said.

“Christianity emerged as a strongly dualistic religion, where forces are either good or evil,” Grafius said. “Even though the U.S. is moving away from being a nation dominated by Christianity, we still have that dualism deep in our bones.”

Among the more recent religion-themed horror films, “The Conjuring” franchise, including “The Nun” movies, show paranormal investigators battling demons, Abbott said, while “The First Omen” and “Immaculate” offer critiques of patriarchal attempts to control women’s bodies.

“These films seem to be a direct response to many of the debates that are happening in the U.S. these days," Abbott wrote in her email. “These different approaches to religion in horror illustrate the way in which the genre is engaging with a very live debate around religion or more specifically how religion is being used to assert control (which is what ‘Heretic’ is all about).”

Grant, who plays Mr. Reed in the new movie, told The Associated Press that he shared some of his “Heretic” character’s skepticism, although not necessarily from a religious perspective:

“There is a part of me — probably a not very attractive part of me — that likes to smash people’s idols. Anyone I feel is being a bit too smug or too pretentious, I don’t like to see that. I like to just take them apart a little bit.”

Horror can be challenging. It acts as a dark mirror that can reveal things people don’t want to admit and fears they don’t want to face, said the Rev. Ryan Duns, a Jesuit priest and theology chair at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

If done well, both religion and horror are unsettling, he said.

“Religion, when it unsettles, asks us am I living up to the person I have been called to be or am I complicit in systems of violence, oppression, injustice, going with the status quo,” said Duns, who wrote the “Theology of Horror” and teaches a course on it as well. “In the horror movie, the monster threatens normality — threatens to destroy our status quo.”

But they deviate from there. In horror, there is no way out, Duns said. He pointed out that defeating a movie's monster doesn’t prevent sequels, hence “Jaws 2,” “Terrifier 3,” “Return of the Killer Tomatoes” and more.

In Christianity, it is Jesus and the Gospels threatening the status quo, but they offer hope and a way out, he said.

Ti West mixes religion into the narrative of his new movie, “MaXXXine,” a horror film about an adult film star trying to break into mainstream movies. West, who also wrote and directed “The Sacrament,” a horror movie inspired by the Jonestown Massacre in 1978, said he doesn’t actively set out to tell stories with prominent religion narratives, but religion can be ripe for mining.

“It kind of depends on the story,” West said, “Anything with morality wrapped up into it, they kind of go hand in hand at times. And it’s like religion is such a major part of every culture everywhere that … I feel like sometimes it’s such a major part of life that gets put aside in movies.”

Beyond poor storytelling, the mixing of horror and religion can go wrong if the movie is meant to offend the believers of a particular faith, said Lisa Morton, an award-winning horror author whose written books on Halloween and paranormal history.

But it can really go right. Morton’s all-time favorite movie is “The Exorcist,” a holy horror icon and a peak example of the genre. “The Omen” followed it.

“All of the contemporary bloodlines kind of trace back through those two,” said Morton. “It’s interesting how they keep getting rebooted over and over.”

Abbott agrees religion should be portrayed respectfully, just as she expects accuracy and respect for science in movies, though not every detail needs to be perfect. “But some horror films, like exorcism movies, are built upon the fact that they are drawing upon real rituals and then taking them to a more extreme conclusion,” she said.

Osgood Perkins, who wrote and directed “Longlegs,” a horror movie about an occultist serial killer, invented the religious material in his film, piecing together whatever felt right from his imagination and real life.

“I just make it up,” said Perkins. “But then you catch hold of something like the Bible verse and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is really rich.’ Beasts coming out of the sea with heads and horns and crowns and things like that. I didn’t make that up.”

For Duns, an accurate portrayal of religious rituals and symbols — without over doing it — can add heft to a scene.

“The rituals of the churches have been stylized and lived out for centuries,” Duns said. “When movies are silly or are sloppy with it, the power of the gesture and the power of the symbols are lost.”

AP reporter Krysta Fauria contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

FILE - Pope Benedict XVI, in white at center, stands still on the cobblestone pavement behind a family carrying a wooden cross, during the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) torchlight procession celebrated by the pontiff on Good Friday at the ancient Colosseum in Rome, April 6, 2007. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito, File)

FILE - Hugh Grant poses for a portrait to promote the film "Heretic," Oct. 27, 2024, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Alan Ruck, from left, Alfonso Herrera, Ben Daniels, Geena Davis, creator/executive producer Jeremy Slater and executive producer/director Rupert Wyatt participate in the panel for "The Exorcist" during the Fox Television Critics Association summer press tour, Aug. 8, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)