Analysis
American elections are one place where Jews do count
The Jewish vote swung in the swing states, and elsewhere too. It could swing back as soon as the next midterms
November 14, 2024 10:55
4 min read
The Jewish vote swung in the swing states, and elsewhere too. It could swing back as soon as the next midterms
November 14, 2024 10:55I watched the election results in the newsroom of a Washington, DC magazine. We all expected a long night, followed by days, if not weeks, of recounts, litigation and even riots. But a pattern emerged early in the evening. It decided the result long before dawn – and it shows that the Jewish vote is up for grabs.
The result comes down to this: Donald Trump gained on his 2020 tally in rural counties and Kamala Harris failed to meet Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers in the suburbs.
The burbs are where most Jewish Americans live. We can’t discount the Jewish vote in districts that flip from red to blue and back on a few hundred votes. But how should we count it? And can Trump and the Republicans count on it in the long run? The pollsters cannot agree on how Jewish Americans voted. After the elections on November 5, the National Election Pool claimed that 79 per cent of Jewish Americans voted for Kamala Harris. This would be the second-highest Jewish vote for a Democratic candidate ever recorded, just behind Al Gore’s 80 per cent in 2000 and just ahead of Obama’s 78 per cent in 2008.
I don’t buy it. The NEP is an aggregate of polling by TV networks in ten states. It doesn’t include New York, New Jersey or California, which have three of the largest four Jewish populations. And only old people watch cable news these days.
Meanwhile, a larger Fox News poll estimated that Trump took 32 per cent of the Jewish vote nationally. That would be just above Mitt Romney’s 30 per cent in 2012 and Donald Trump’s 30 per cent in 2020.
The Fox tallies could be closer to the truth. It’s not impossible that the Jewish vote held steady because Jewish voters switched in both directions, with some push to the Republicans by campus riots and October 7, while others clung to the blue team because their neighbours and colleagues will disapprove of voting for Trump.
Neither of these polls examine the local level – especially in the swing states, which is where all presidential elections are decided. Look at that kind of data and you can see that the Jewish vote is shifting rightward in two different ways.
The first shift is demographic. The Jewish population is becoming more Orthodox and more conservative. This trend will only intensify in coming years. The second shift , however, is reversible. The Democrats have alienated Jews along with other previously reliable constituencies like African Americans and Latinos.
In New York State, Fox News exit polls found that Trump’s share of the Jewish vote rose from 37 per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent this year. In Orthodox-heavy Rockland County, which has the largest Jewish population of any county in the nation, Trump won 56 per cent. In Brooklyn, another Orthodox stronghold, Trump grew his vote by 6 per cent since 2020. But the Brooklyn result also reflects the huge rightward swing of Latinos.
In New York State, Jews turned right like the other ethnic minorities that the Democrats took for granted and lost. The state-level swing to Trump was so big that New York State (Harris +11 per cent) was more closely contested than deep-red Florida (Trump +13 per cent).
New York was a swing state in presidential elections before 1984. Another couple of cycles like this one, and it could be in play again. The same goes for New Jersey, where Orthodox Jews give Lakewood County one of the world’s highest birthrates.
Kamala Harris sunk her chances in the swing state of Pennsylvania when she rejected its moderate governor, Josh Shapiro, as her vice-presidential candidate. An exit poll reported that Pennsylvanian Jews voted 48 per cent for Harris and 42 per cent for Trump.
The Donald won Pennsylvania by a similarly-sized seven-point margin. As in New York State, it looks like demography and local factors are helping to shift the Jewish vote rightwards, in step with larger trends.
Another swing state, Georgia, shows how a largely non-Orthodox Jewish electorate is evolving as party loyalty frays and national identity fragments.
Georgia’s Jews fit the national profile of Jews when it comes to holding a college education, but only 39 per cent of them describe themselves as Democrats, versus 65 per cent nationally. Another 14 per cent describe themselves as Independents who lean Democratic. They sound like the sort of voters that the Democrats have alienated and insulted nationally.
A quarter of Georgia’s Jews live just north of Atlanta in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, where 4.8 per cent of adults are Jewish. Nearly half (48 per cent) of the 6th District’s Jews call themselves Republicans, though most of them also describe themselves as “liberal”. Jews are less thick on the ground next door in GA-7, but no other Georgia district has such a high percentage of Jewish Independents.
There are 148,000 Jews in Georgia. In 2020, Joe Biden won the state by 13,000 votes. This year, Donald Trump won it back by 110,000 votes.
Ritchie Torres, the pro-Israel Democrat who represents the 15th District of New York, is in no doubt about how small shifts in key districts are reflected in this year’s Electoral College total: “If you are delusional enough to believe that the far left’s hyperbolic and hysterical hatred for Israel led to no less of Jewish support in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, then I have 270 electoral votes to sell you.”
So long as America remains polarised, its elections will remain tight. The Jewish vote swung in the swing states, and elsewhere too. It could swing back as soon as the next midterms, which are only two years away. Add a slow-moving demographic shift inside the Jewish electorate to this epochal turbulence, and American elections will remain one place where Jews do count.