The Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, reshaped the world. It has scrambled Middle Eastern alliances, sparked conflict on college campuses, and led to war as Israel continues its effort to free the over 100 hostages still held in Gaza . But has it changed how Jews vote in the United States?
For nearly a century, Jews have been a rock-solid part of the Democratic coalition. Even as the parties have realigned — Vermont has gone from rock-ribbed Republican to loyally Democratic and Alabama has flipped the other way — Jewish voters have consistently cast their ballot for Democrats. As Mark Mellman, the head of Democratic Majority for Israel put it, “Jews have been one of the most Democratic groups in the country. Only LGBTQ Americans and black Americans have been more loyal to the Democratic Party in recent decades.”
The question is whether the growing cleavage on the Left over Middle East policy, accelerated in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s ensuing war against Hamas in Gaza, has done anything to affect this. There is certainly anecdotal evidence as American Jews have grown increasingly concerned about antisemitism and some left-wing elected Democrats have supported efforts to impose an arms embargo against Israel while almost all congressional Republicans have stood steadfastly behind the Jewish state. The perceived partisan divide on Israel has even led to outlandish statements from former President Donald Trump , who insisted that American Jews who vote for Democrats should “have their head examined” and derided Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, for what Trump has viewed as insufficient support of Israel. “Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian. Can you believe it? He’s become a proud member of Hamas,” Trump said at a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, rally in July. Schumer has been a vocal critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has written a book warning about the rise in antisemitism that will be published in 2025.
This has been amplified by Vice President Kamala Harris ’s decision to tap Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate over Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA). Shapiro drew disproportionate criticism from progressives over his support for Israel, with efforts to dub him “Genocide Josh,” even though his policy positions were virtually identical to others on the vice presidential short list. Many have argued that the distinction was made because Shapiro is an observant Jew.
The problem, though, in determining how the Jewish vote is shifting in the United States is that there aren’t that many Jews. American Jews make up roughly 2% of the population, and their numbers are meager enough that there wasn’t enough data in the exit polls in 2020 to break down specifically how Jewish voters cast their ballots. The 2016 exit polls did, however, have Hillary Clinton receiving 71% of the Jewish vote while Trump received a mere 24%, totals broadly in line with past historical patterns.
The initial challenge is that it is hard to measure Jewish voters. Although many Jewish voters cluster, Jews in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods tend to be different than Jews who live in more mixed neighborhoods. And trying to use last names, a common practice in political data, as a standard also leads to uneven results. For example, based on last names alone, an analysis would find former Maine Sen. Bill Cohen to be Jewish and former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman to be non-Jewish. In fact, Coleman is a practicing Jew, while Cohen, although he has a Jewish father, is not practicing. Amplifying this is the amorphous nature of what it means to be Jewish and whether it is about a religion, an ethnic identity, or both. A self-identified Jew could be an Orthodox observer of the Jewish Sabbath who refuses to eat milk with meat or merely a nonpracticing atheist who simply refuses to eat corned beef with mayonnaise. The result makes polling a challenge.
Yet it’s not as if the political opinions of Jewish Americans are thus left a mystery. There are long-organized efforts from both parties to woo their votes.
Matt Brooks, the longtime head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, boasted about his group’s efforts to woo Jewish voters in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia. The RJC was planning on spending $15 million in order to do the polling and analytics necessary to target Jewish voters who were solidly for Trump, leaning Trump, or persuadable in swing states.
In his view, Republicans were “gaining market share in the Jewish vote with the rise of antisemitism. For the first time since the 1930s and 1940s, there’s real insecurity in the Jewish community.” However, he noted the Jewish community “is not monolithic” and that appealing to these voters is about more than just talking about concerns about antisemitism and tensions in the Middle East but also about the economy and inflation.
Brooks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, said he believes that Trump’s emergence at the political stage has accelerated this shift among American Jews toward the Republican Party. “He has an incredibly strong record to take to the Jewish community, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are probably the worst on these issues,” Brooks said as he pointed to Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and his administration’s role in the Abraham Accords that established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Muslim countries.
Needless to say, Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a different tack. She dismissed Republican efforts to woo Jewish voters as Sisyphean: “Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Jewish voters have supported Democrats every election, and that really has not changed despite Republican efforts in every election cycle to win over Jewish voters.” It wasn’t just that most Jewish voters were aligned with the Democrats on Middle East policy, she argued. “Israel is a threshold issue and a candidate has to meet or surpass a certain level [of support for the Jewish state], and the overwhelming majority of candidates do,” she said. Soifer noted that there are a handful of exceptions — such as Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO), who lost their primary elections this year.
Instead, she said that Jewish voters simply are more aligned with Democrats on their basic values. “The No. 1 issue for Jewish voters in 2022 was defense of democracy, just as it is in 2024, and the No. 2 is abortion rights.” Further, in contrast to Brooks, she argued that American Jews are repelled by Trump: “One of the most consistent realities about Jewish vote in the past three cycles has been extraordinarily low level of support for Trump.”
The challenge and the complexity of the Jewish vote is that both Brooks and Soifer, despite seemingly inherently contradicting each other, are right.
One well-connected Democratic strategist noted, “If you look at just a graph of Jewish votes over time, you see Jewish vote being pretty flat at 70% since forever. That's bad if you look at people who look like Jews demographically, well educated, in inner-ring suburbs — that group has shifted 15 points towards us. Are you saying 85% of Jews should vote for Democrats or maybe the goyim are just becoming more Jewish?”
This was echoed by Matt Knee, the chief data officer at WPA Intelligence, a top Republican firm. He noted Jews aren’t behaving like other white, college-educated voters and that “it’s being counteracted by other factors.” Knee argued that “Trump specifically connects on Jewish matters with the kinds of Jews who lean Republican. He talks about Israel and Jews and politics like they do. It comes off authentic.”
However, Knee added, “The overall populist shift in demographic appeal is a challenge, but that is about more than Trump. But it cuts both ways, and there are myriad other reasons for Jews to leave the Democratic Party.”
Other divides in the Jewish vote did resemble those among non-Jewish voters. Mellman pointed out that “the most important differentiator in voting behavior is religiosity, as it is in most other communities. Orthodox Jews tend to be much more Republican than every other part of Jewish community, but that’s true of frum Catholics, frum Protestants, and frum others,” using the Yiddish term for religious. “It looks like [it] is uniquely Jewish, but it's not.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
A poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute from April, before Biden dropped out, showed the incumbent getting about two-thirds of the Jewish vote. However, there were huge divides based on denomination. Eighty-three percent of Orthodox Jews were supporting Trump, while only 18% of Reform Jews and 24% of Conservative Jews were doing so. There is no good data, though, since Biden has dropped out of the race and Harris, who doesn’t have the incumbent’s 50-year pro-Israel record, has taken his place on the ticket. Further, there still is the uncertain nature of the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas to achieve a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. Any deal before would certainly lower the salience of the issue for voters.
Mellman told the Washington Examiner that even with Harris as the nominee, “I would be surprised if a majority of Jews didn’t support her. But is it going to be as strong as it was four or eight or 12 years ago? That’s an open question.”
Ben Jacobs is a reporter in Washington, D.C.
Most Popular
Comments / 0