(JNS) A poll of registered New York voters suggests that a majority of Jews in the state intend to vote for former President Donald Trump in the presidential election in November.
New York Jews now favor Trump over President Joe Biden 53 per cent to 44 per cent, according to the Siena College poll, released on Tuesday. Jews in the state said that they intend to continue to back Democrats over Republicans 54 per cent to 39 per cent in congressional elections.
The poll has an overall margin of error of 4.2 percentage points in either direction, which means that a gap of 8.4 percentage points could potentially be dead even.
Jews made up just 8 per cent of the large sample of 806 people. That means the margin of error for the 65 Jewish respondents would be potentially much larger than 4.2 percentage points.
Mark Mellman, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS that “the margin of error for Jews in the Sienna poll is plus or minus 13 points on each number.”
“This poll tells us very little about how New York Jews will vote,” he said.
Mellman expects Biden, who “has been uniquely supportive of Israel,” to do well with Jews, as did Democrat Tom Suozzi, who beat Mazi Pilip earlier this month in a New York congressional election.
Sam Markstein, national political director at the Republican Jewish Coalition, sees things differently. Markstein wrote on Wednesday that the poll reflected a shift among Jewish voters.
“Jewish voters moving towards the GOP is a clear trend, long in the making,” he wrote. He cited Lee Zeldin’s comparative success attracting Jewish votes in the 2022 New York gubernatorial election.
Zeldin, who is Jewish and an RJC board member, did particularly well in New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
He won Rockland County in Upstate New York, which has the largest per capita Jewish population of any US county, by 12 points. He also garnered 88 per cent of the vote in New York City’s 48th Assembly District, which includes the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn.
That wasn’t good enough for Zeldin to win, however, as Gov. Kathleen Hochul was re-elected by a 6 per cent margin.
In the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center reported the national Jewish vote as 68 per cent for Biden and 30 per cent for Trump, which was a six point bump compared to his performance against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
