What the Shift in the Jewish Vote Could Mean for the GOP

By Philip Klein

Thursday, November 21, 2024

 

Jewish voters make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and are concentrated in states that aren’t in play during a presidential election year. But in a race that polls showed to be a toss-up, during a year when Israel was at war and antisemitism was exploding, the Jewish vote was the subject of an unusual amount of attention.

 

The Jewish electorate, it should be said, is not monolithic. Just as the voting patterns of those who were raised Catholic but do not practice the faith differ from those of regular churchgoers, there is a wide gap between different denominations of Jews. Orthodox Jews, who are culturally conservative and strongly connected to Israel, overwhelmingly back Republicans; secular Jews, who tend to agree with Democrats on economic and social issues, have traditionally given higher priority to those issues than to concerns about the Jewish state, even when they do care about Israel.

 

The October 7 attacks and their aftermath, however, scrambled things. Not only did the scenes from that day horrify American Jews and give many of them a stronger sense of connection to Israel, the response to the attacks also shook their assumptions about who their friends are. Over the decades, many Jews have felt that the Democratic Party was the more tolerant and welcoming one. But it soon became clear that the outbreak of antisemitism in major cities and on college campuses was being fueled by the Left. While these events did not change the fact that most Jews agreed with Democrats most of the time, the post-10/7 environment did jostle some potential voters who were once reliable Democrats, making them more open to voting for Republicans.

 

Once the results were in from the presidential election, the data on the Jewish vote yielded some contradictory findings. Polls published by CNN and a consortium of other news organizations found that Jewish voters went for Kamala Harris by a 78 percent to 22 percent margin, which would be in line with typical Democratic dominance among the group. But a Fox News voter analysis, conducted along with the Associated Press and different news organizations, found a narrower 66 percent to 32 percent gap. Though Harris still won Jewish voters outright, the shift toward Trump would represent the best performance among that group by a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan won 39 percent of the Jewish vote in his defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980.

 

The Fox News data found that in New York, with its large Orthodox population, the Jewish vote was especially tight, at 55 percent for Harris to 45 percent for Trump, whereas the comparatively more secular and spread-out Jewish population in California went for Harris by a more lopsided margin, 76 percent to 22 percent. CNN exit polls do not break out the Jewish vote at the state level, so it’s hard to pin down where the big discrepancy is with Fox/AP. But the preponderance of evidence from the results in heavily Jewish areas pointed toward a shift in Trump’s direction.

 

Take Rockland County in New York, which has the highest concentration of Jews of any single county in the U.S. In 2020, the county went for Biden by two points, but this time Trump carried it by twelve. This pattern held in other counties with large Jewish populations, including Brooklyn and, in New Jersey, Passaic County (a long-time Democratic stronghold that Joe Biden won by 16 points and Trump flipped) and Ocean County (where Trump improved his already sizeable margin). It’s hard to imagine these shifts happening without an increase in the Jewish vote for Trump.

 

At Tablet, Armin Rosen did a deeper dive that looked at data at the precinct level and found a similar pattern in heavily Jewish neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey, California, and Florida. About Florida, for example, Rosen found:

 

The Miami area is home to over 500,000 Jews. Aventura is one of the community’s bellwethers, and the Dade County town hosts a dense cluster of Jews from across the religious, national, and linguistic spectrum. Trump leaped from 46.6% of the Aventura vote in 2020 to 59.7% this year, winning all but one of the town’s seven precincts. An almost identical shift happened in the much smaller Miami Beach community of Surfside, where Trump went from 48% of the vote in 2020 to 61% in 2024.

 

The case for Trump’s having gained ground among Jewish voters was also bolstered by a survey of Pennsylvania and of swing congressional districts in New York by the Honan Strategy Group on behalf of Jewish Voters United and Teach Coalition (an Orthodox group that promotes Jewish religious education). It found that Harris won just 48 percent of Jewish voters in Pennsylvania and 49 percent of Jewish voters in that batch of New York districts, with Trump at 41 percent in each.

 

While Trump’s Electoral College victory was large enough to mean that the outcome didn’t depend on a shift in the Jewish vote, that shift likely contributed to more comfortable margins in the battleground states (where there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish voters) and likely helped Trump win the popular vote by shrinking Democratic margins in blue states with large Jewish populations, especially California, New York, and New Jersey (together home to millions of Jews).

 

The shift in the Jewish vote could be a one-off, given the special circumstances of the 2024 election. The Pennsylvania/New York survey found that four in ten Jewish voters said that the rise of antisemitism and the October 7 attacks had a “significant impact” on their decision. As we gain more distance from the event, Jewish voters may return to historical voting patterns.

 

That said, there is reason to believe that Republicans can build on what happened in this election. The campaign that Harris ran demonstrated how Israel (and even antisemitism) has become a huge wedge issue for Democrats. She attempted an awkward dance of trying to placate the progressive and noisy pro-Hamas elements of her party by, on one hand, lambasting Israeli conduct of the war in Gaza and, on the other, sympathizing with the “emotion” of the protesters while still trying to portray herself as a supporter of Israel. When desperate, Harris dispatched her husband, Doug Emhoff, a nonobservant Jew who once had to delete a social media post that botched the story of Hanukkah, to talk about her brisket recipe and how she felt her support for Israel in her kishkes, the Yiddish equivalent of feeling it in her gut. In four years, the issues of Israel and antisemitism will still divide Democrats.

 

On the flip side, Trump had no worries about running on his strong pro-Israel record and on taking a more aggressive approach to antisemitic protesters (even vowing to deport foreign ones). Not only is the base of the Republican Party staunchly pro-Israel, but the most prominent purveyors of antisemitism and anti-Israel narratives (media figures, woke college students and professors, DEI departments, the U.N. and other international bodies, urban socialists, etc.) are all, as it happens, nemeses of the modern GOP coalition.

 

Trump’s ability to win over more Jewish voters than had previous GOP candidates was hampered by his frequently taunting Jews who wouldn’t vote for him despite his record on Israel as ungrateful. In a September speech to the Israeli-American Council National Summit, Trump went as far as to warn that if he didn’t win the election, “the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that.” There is also his poor judgment that led him to dine with prominent antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and to keep Tucker Carlson in his orbit even as the former Fox host promoted revisionist World War II narratives that see Adolf Hitler as misunderstood. These unforced errors no doubt turned off some Jewish voters who might otherwise be open to supporting a Republican.

 

That said, Trump’s early national security appointments signal that the administration wants to continue the policies of his first term. His choices suggest an eagerness to take a tough line against Iran, crippling it economically so it cannot fund its terrorist proxies that threaten Israel and the United States; to remove restrictions on arms sales to Israel and support its efforts to end the war in Gaza in victory; and to fight the antisemitism of the United Nations. Trump has also threatened universities that do not crack down on antisemitism with a loss of federal funds and accreditation.

 

If Trump follows through on his promises, the Republican nominee four years from now will have an opportunity to build on the gains among Jewish voters by arguing that the Democratic Party is compromised by the radical Left, and that Republicans are the only ones who can be trusted to keep Jews secure both at home and abroad.