Paterson moved 34.0 points toward the Republican candidate between 2020 and 2024.

There is a ballpark inside a national park in Paterson, and the water you hear from the third-base line is the reason the city exists. Hinchliffe Stadium sits on the bluff above the Great Falls of the Passaic, the roughly 77-foot cataract that Alexander Hamilton picked out in the 1790s as the power source for what he called a "national manufactory." The Art Deco grandstand spent more than two decades abandoned after 1997; it reopened in May 2023 after a restoration of roughly $100 million, one of the last surviving stadiums where Negro League teams played. Larry Doby, who would break the American League's color line, was discovered here as an Eastside High schoolboy. Five future Hall of Famers crossed this infield.

That is Paterson in one place: a thing the country's founders willed into being, left to ruin, and rebuilt with outside money and federal designation. It is the pattern of the city. America's first planned industrial city was founded and run by a chartered corporation; today its police department is run by the state attorney general. And in 2024, the largest Democratic stronghold in Passaic County became the engine that flipped the county to a Republican for president for the first time in more than thirty years. Paterson now votes like the rest of the country, only more so.

The Lay of the Land

Paterson is built on a waterfall and around a river that loops back on itself. The Passaic drops over the Great Falls at the city's heart, and Hamilton's Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures cut a system of raceways — canals laid out by Pierre L'Enfant, who would go on to plan Washington — to carry that power to the mill floors below. The street grid still bends to the old industrial geometry. At roughly 8.4 square miles, Paterson is dense, packed, and the third-largest city in New Jersey, the seat of Passaic County since 1837.

The county around it is split by income and elevation. The cities on the valley floor — Paterson and Passaic — are Hispanic, working-class, and Democratic. The townships on the ridges to the north and west are something else: Wayne, with its 16,252 Trump votes in 2024; West Milford and Ringwood up in the Highlands; Totowa and Wanaque and Pompton Lakes, smaller boroughs that all broke Republican. To read Passaic County's politics is to watch the gap between the floor and the ridge. Paterson is the floor's anchor and its largest single block of votes, which is exactly why what happened to it in 2024 mattered so much to the whole.

Just north sits Haledon, the borough where strikers once gathered by the thousands because Paterson's own authorities would not let them assemble. The geography of dissent is old here, and it has not moved far.

How It Got Here

Hamilton's idea was self-sufficiency. The young republic imported its manufactured goods; he wanted a city that made them, powered by free-falling water, exempted from property taxes, owned by investors but blessed by the state. The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures was chartered in 1791, the city named not for any "Patterson" but for William Paterson, a New Jersey governor and signer of the Constitution. Cotton came first, then guns at Samuel Colt's mill, then locomotives. By the 1850s one product had eclipsed the rest, and Paterson became Silk City.

Silk made the city and silk nearly unmade it. By 1910 three of every four Paterson workers were foreign-born — Northern Italians, German dyers, Jewish weavers — and in January 1913 they walked out. It began at the Doherty Silk Mill when four members of a workers' committee were fired; within a week some 25,000 workers had shut roughly 300 mills and dye houses. The Industrial Workers of the World ran the strike: "Big Bill" Haywood, Carlo Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. The demands were an eight-hour day and an end to the four-loom system. Roughly 1,850 strikers were arrested. Two were killed by gunfire.

In June, Greenwich Village intellectuals led by John Reed staged the Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden, the strikers acting out their own walkout on a stage two hundred feet wide. It drew a crowd and lost money. Flynn later credited the pageant with hastening the strike's defeat by splitting the workers' attention from the picket line. The strike collapsed on July 28, 1913. The deeper reason it failed is the reason the city would decline: the mill owners simply ran their Pennsylvania plants through the walkout, and silk could not stay where labor demanded more than the looms could pay. The industry drifted to cheaper workers in Pennsylvania and the South. The strike Paterson lost is now its proudest historical possession, taught and commemorated; the jobs it was fought over left anyway.

What replaced silk was not another anchor industry but a century of arrivals taking up whatever work the era offered. That is the through-thread from 1913 to now.

Who Lives Here Now

Paterson counted 159,732 residents in the 2020 census, up from 146,199 in 2010, and recent estimates put it near that mark. It is young — a median age of about 33 — and it is, above all, a city of immigrants: roughly 44 percent of residents were born outside the United States, on the order of 70,000 people. The census records 62.8 percent of Paterson as Hispanic or Latino, with the Black population near a quarter and non-Hispanic white residents under eight percent.

But "Hispanic" flattens what the neighborhoods know to be distinct nations. Paterson's Latino population is heavily Dominican and Peruvian; the city hosts a Peruvian Consulate. And layered onto that is a second immigrant city that the demographic categories barely capture. South Paterson, along Main Street, is home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the United States — Palestinian, Syrian, Turkish, Jordanian — known to its residents and to the wider region as "Little Ramallah." There are Bengali blocks, too, and Pakistani and Indian families. Two great migrations occupy the same small city, and in 2024 they would move in two different political directions at the same time.

The median household income runs near $56,000 and roughly a fifth of residents live below the poverty line. The work that sustains the city now, as one local history put it, is done by service providers and small-business owners rather than factory hands. The looms are gone; the storefronts are full.

The Work

The largest forces in Paterson's economy today are the institutions that serve its people rather than the industries that once employed them. St. Joseph's University Medical Center, founded in 1867 by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, is a major academic medical center, a state-designated trauma center, and the safety-net hospital for a poor and immigrant population — one of the anchor employers in a city whose private payrolls thinned with the mills. The Paterson Public Schools and city and county government round out the institutional core.

The most visible economic bet of the last several years has been physical and symbolic at once: the roughly $100 million restoration of Hinchliffe Stadium, which broke ground in 2021 and reopened in 2023. The project paired the rehabilitated ballpark with a Negro League museum, 75 units of affordable senior housing, and a parking garage, stitched together from historic tax credits, redevelopment incentives, and pandemic-recovery funds. The stadium is owned by the Paterson Board of Education and sits inside the boundary of Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park, the federal unit established in 2009. Its anchor tenant is the New Jersey Jackals of the independent Frontier League, on a six-year lease.

This is the city's economic theory of itself now: that its history — the falls, the mills, the Negro League stadium where Larry Doby was found — is an asset that can draw visitors and dollars to a place that lost its industrial base. It is a bet on heritage in a city whose present residents mostly arrived after the heritage was made.

The Political Character

For most of this century Paterson did not have an interesting presidential vote, only an emphatic one. Barack Obama took the city with 90 percent in 2008 and 94 percent in 2012; Hillary Clinton held 90 percent in 2016. These were not margins so much as near-unanimities. Then the floor moved. Joe Biden won Paterson with 80 percent in 2020 — still a landslide, but the Republican share had doubled to nearly 19 percent. And in 2024, Kamala Harris carried Paterson with 62 percent to Donald Trump's 34 percent.

Read as a margin, that is a collapse of nearly 60 points since 2012, and more than half of it — about 34 points — came in the single cycle from 2020 to 2024. Read in raw votes, it is starker and more specific. The Democratic vote in Paterson fell from Biden's 38,453 to Harris's 25,054, a loss of 13,399 votes, better than a third of the party's total. Trump's vote rose from 9,053 to 13,819. And turnout dropped almost 16 percent: this was abstention as much as conversion. Trump's raw Paterson vote in 2024 was nearly three and a half times what he drew in 2016.

A swing that large is never one story, and in Paterson it was demonstrably two. The city's Latino districts moved toward Trump on the economy and inflation, the same drift that ran through Dominican and Peruvian neighborhoods across the region. The Arab and Muslim districts of South Paterson moved a different way, and for a different reason. In the three South Paterson election districts with the largest Palestinian populations, Harris essentially tied Trump — roughly 42 percent to 41 percent — with a significant share going to the Green Party, an unmistakable protest over the war in Gaza and Washington's role in it.

The cleanest proof that this was issue-driven and not a wholesale party realignment is downballot. In those same Palestinian districts, the Democratic House candidate, Nellie Pou, won comfortably, by about 52 to 33, while the top of the ticket was tying. Citywide, Trump ran thousands of votes ahead of the Republican Senate candidate. Voters who would not vote for Harris still voted for other Democrats; many simply did not vote the presidential line at all. This was a verdict on a candidate and a policy, registered by people who in most respects remained where they were.

The arithmetic also has limits worth stating plainly. The Arab and Muslim vote that broke so sharply is a passionate minority even in its own district. When the mayor of neighboring Prospect Park, Mohamed Khairullah, challenged Pascrell in the 2024 Democratic primary on a Gaza platform, he lost roughly three to one. New Jersey's 9th District holds Orthodox Jewish enclaves in Passaic and Clifton alongside South Paterson's Palestinians, which is part of why county leaders settled on Pou as a consensus replacement and why AIPAC backed her. The same war that cost Democrats votes on one block was a reason to hold them on another.

The consequence rippled up. Paterson is the largest Democratic reservoir in Passaic County, and when its margin fell by roughly 18,000 net votes, the county itself flipped: Trump carried Passaic by about 5,800 votes, becoming the first Republican to win it for president in more than three decades. The largest Democratic city in the county is what turned the county red.

The Texture

Paterson's culture is stacked in layers, like its history, and the layers are legible on the ground. The Great Falls became the central image of one of the major American poems of the twentieth century: William Carlos Williams spent decades on Paterson, five volumes published from 1946 to 1958, that personify the city as a sleeping man beside the cataract. Williams folded letters from a young Allen Ginsberg into the work; Ginsberg had grown up in Paterson, where his father Louis taught English at Central High School for some four decades. The comedian Lou Costello was a native son.

At Hinchliffe, the ghosts are Black baseball: the New York Black Yankees and New York Cubans called it home, and Josh Gibson, Monte Irvin, Oscar Charleston, and "Cool Papa" Bell all played there, with Duke Ellington giving a late concert on the grounds. In December 2023, on the centennial of his birth, Larry Doby received the Congressional Gold Medal, and Paterson renamed the block of Liberty Street that runs past the stadium Larry Doby Lane.

And then there is the food, which is the most honest map of who lives here now. A visitor working through South Paterson and the Latino corridors can eat Peruvian ceviche, Argentine empanadas, Turkish lahmajun, and Lebanese kanafeh within a few blocks. The looms wrote the city's first century; the kitchens are writing its current one.

Fault Lines

The deepest fault line in Paterson is the one written into its founding: who governs it, and from where. Hamilton's city was created and operated by an outside corporate authority, the SUM, chartered by the state. Two centuries later, the city's police force has again been placed under outside authority. In March 2023, officers shot and killed Najee Seabrooks, a 31-year-old violence-intervention worker who had called 911 himself during a mental-health crisis; police said he came at them with a knife. Weeks later, citing what he called a "crisis of confidence," state Attorney General Matthew Platkin superseded the entire Paterson Police Department, installed an outside officer-in-charge from the NYPD, and expanded a program pairing officers with mental-health responders. A grand jury later declined to charge the two officers.

The takeover became a years-long fight over local control. Mayor André Sayegh, who has led the city since 2018, fought it as an affront to local governance; an appeals court agreed in 2024 and ordered the chief reinstated. But in July 2025 the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed that decision and upheld the state's authority, and the department remains under Trenton's control. The argument is old in a city founded by an entity that answered to the state rather than to its residents.

The second fault line is the one 2024 exposed: a heavily immigrant, formerly near-unanimous Democratic city that no longer votes as a bloc, pulled in different directions by an economy that disappointed one community and a foreign war that broke faith with another. Sayegh, who once called Paterson "the capital of Palestine in the United States of America," embodies the tension; the question is whether the 2024 break was a moment or a beginning.

What to Watch

The first test is municipal and near. Paterson elects its mayor and council in a nonpartisan May 2026 election with no runoffs, and Sayegh is seeking a third term. The second is the seat that has belonged to Paterson's political class for a generation. Bill Pascrell Jr., the former Paterson mayor who held New Jersey's 9th Congressional District from 1997 until his death in August 2024 at 87, was replaced on the ballot by Nellie Pou, herself a Paterson native, who won by under five points in a district Democrats usually carry easily. Trump narrowly carried the 9th in 2024. Pou faces a competitive 2026 re-election, and Gaza still shadows it.

The sharpest question is whether 2024 was an aberration or a realignment, and there is already a data point on each side. In November 2025, Democrat Mikie Sherrill carried the 9th District by roughly 19 points on her way to the governorship — the off-year Republican gains in Paterson's region largely evaporated. That suggests much of the 2024 break was specific to Trump, to the presidential-year electorate, and to a war that may cool. Watch the South Paterson districts on a presidential night: they tied in 2024, and they will say first whether the city's two great migrations are drifting apart for good or snapping back to the party that, for a century, they made their own.