The US midterms were a quietly good night for America's Jews

 Yesterday, they are likely to have stuck to their traditional political moorings: some 70 percent of Jews told pollsters before the election that they favoured the Democrats in the mid-term elections, with 24 percent backing the Republicans. And, as might be expected from a group of voters who tilt overwhelmingly towards the Democrats, 70 percent of Jews approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, a good 20-30 points higher than the national average. 

 The Democrats don’t have it all their own way. As a Pew Research Centre survey found last year, three-quarters of Orthodox Jews identify as Republican, a trend among Haredis which has grown over the past decade.

 Nonetheless, while the “kosher vote” is small overall, it can help make a difference in close races in battleground states. As an analysis by staff at Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute before the 2020 presidential election suggested: “Because of their concentration in a few states and their relative homogeneity in political outlook, Jewish voters are an important part of the electoral math, especially in states or districts that are considered competitive.” 

 Nearly 1.5 million Jewish adults, it showed, live in the key swing states — including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — in which the outcome of elections often largely rests. “In these competitive states, higher rates of voter turnout or greater support for the Democratic Party could make a critical difference in the outcome,” the Brandeis analysis of Jewish voting patterns concluded.

Joe Biden’s poor approval ratings and voter concern about inflation, the state of the economy and rising crime – combined with the electorate’s traditional desire to hammer the governing party in mid-term elections – should have made yesterday a bloodbath for the Democrats. In 1994, 2010 and 2018 voters inflicted a drubbing on Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the first congressional elections to occur after they had entered the White House. Biden, it appears, has escaped a gruesome “shellacking”.

 Three interrelated factors – anger at the Supreme Court’s decision in June to end the nationwide right to abortion, fears of the threat posed to democracy by election-denying “MAGA Republicans”, and the presence of a swathe of high-profile, far-right candidates endorsed by Trump – appear to have blunted https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/takeaways-midterms-election-2022/ the expected assault on the Democrats’ control of the House of Representatives and Senate and assisted it in a string of knife-edge governors’ races. 

 

Jewish voters shared these anxieties. A pre-election poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute indicated that 45 percent of Jews chose fears about the fate of democracy and 38 percent picked abortion as the two issues most important to them when casting their votes. The economy and inflation, climate change, gun control and voting rights followed behind. Each of these issues, other than the economy and galloping prices, are traditionally Democrat strengths.

 

The performance of Jewish candidates meanwhile reflected the election’s nail-biting outcome. 

 

With the Republicans needing a net gain of only five seats to take control of the House of Representatives, a clutch of moderate Jewish Democrats in seats which were largely captured in the 2018 “blue wave” mid-terms were always likely to be vulnerable.

 

But here the Republicans’ performance appears to have been patchy. The party knocked off https://www.timesofisrael.com/elaine-luria-jewish-democrat-on-jan-6-committee-loses-virginia-house-race/ US Navy veteran Elaine Luria, a dogged Democrat centrist whose “toss-up” Virginia district Trump narrowly won in 2016 but Biden captured in 2020 in an equally tight contest.

 

However, a fellow “national security Democrat” – so-called because of their military and intelligence backgrounds – Elissa Slotkin is projected https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/us/elections/results-michigan-us-house-district-7.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=election-results&context=election_recirc&region=LiveAlertCard to survive in an equally tough fight to hold her Michigan district. Slotkin’s effort was aided last week by the endorsement of Liz Cheney, a conservative former Republican leader in Congress, who has been ousted from her party for voting to impeach Trump last year and playing a leading role in the committee investigating the 6 January assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.

 

In what may turn out to be a theme of the night, Luria was defeated by a Republican candidate - another female Navy vet, state senator Jen Kiggans – who projected a moderate image, while Slotkin appears to have bested Republican challenger Tom Barrett, who struggled to shake off his hard line on abortion.

 Like Slotkin, another Jewish moderate Democrat, Susan Wild, whose Pennsylvania district the Republicans fought desperately to win, also appears to be clinging on, although the outcome remains uncertain. If the seat does flip to the GOP, the victor, Lisa Scheller, will boost the small number of Jewish Republicans in Congress. Max Miller, a Jewish former Trump aide, will definitely be in the Republican House caucus, having won an Ohio district which backed the former president in 2020.

 In New Jersey, Josh Gottheimer, an alumni of the Clinton White House and unapologetic “New Democrat”, easily fought off the Republicans having campaigned on a pitch of lower taxes and backing “cops, firefighters [and] vets”. Likewise, another Jewish member of the New Democrat Coalition caucus, Minnesota Democrat Dean Phillips comfortably held his district.

 And the ranks of moderate Jewish Democrats will have some new faces. Dan Goldman, the Democrats’ chief counsel in Trump’s first impeachment trial, held New York’s solidly blue 10th congressional district. The real contest in the seat took place in the summer when Goldman beat left-winger Yuh-Line Niou in the Democrat primary. Max Rose – a former veteran elected in 2018 who frequently tangled with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent member of the “Squad” of hard-left Democrats – had less luck and failed to recapture the Staten Island district he lost to the Republicans in 2020.

 If, as expected, the Republicans eventually eke out a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the survival of these Jewish moderates will be good news. As observers say, they’ve helped https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/all/the-moderate-jewish-democrats-in-the-firing-line-in-the-midterms-3zu8Ugl3jY6qNSdnqXpYej provide ballast to the party – providing a counterweight to “Squad” on issues such as Israel – and fought for bipartisanship on critical foreign and national security policy issues.

Had the Republicans achieved the “red wave” which they hubristically chattered about incessantly in recent weeks, we would have likely seen some high-profile Democrat heads roll overnight. So far, there’s been very little of that. The Democrat governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, for instance, survived an unexpectedly strong challenge by the Jewish former Republican congressman, Lee Zeldin. The Republicans last achieved an upset and felled an incumbent Democrat governor in the 1994 mid-terms when the “Gingrich revolution” saw the GOP win control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. But last night wasn’t such a joyous night for the Republicans. 

 Zeldin cut into the Democrats’ margins in the gubernatorial race but his strong association with Trump, vote not to certify Biden’s victory, and anti-abortion stance meant he ultimately came up short. Zeldin has learned the hard way the price of mistaking the attitudes and prejudices of the Republican base for the electorate as a whole, especially in a “blue” state like New York.

 Conversely, Lauren Boebert, a far-right congresswoman, appears to be in trouble in her Trump-backing Colorado district. Democrat Adam Frisch, a self-proclaimed “moderate, pragmatic Jew”,  is locked in a tight contest with the QAnon favourite, who has been accused of ties to extremist groups, parrots Trump’s false claims of a “stolen election” and declared earlier this year: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.” Elsewhere in Colorado, the Jewish governor, Jared Polis, won re-election. Four years ago, Polis became the first openly gay man to be elected as a governor.

 Another Trump-anointed far-right Republican, Doug Mastriano, appears headed to for a heavy defeat in Pennsylvania at the hands of the state’s Jewish attorney general, Josh Shapiro. Mastriano – one of the most prominent election deniers – fought a particularly ugly race against Shapiro in which he was accused of issuing an “antisemitic dog whistle” by turning the Democrat candidate’s childhood attendance at a Jewish parochial day school into a campaign issue. Mastriano’s campaign was also reported to have paid Gab, a far-right social media platform, nearly $37,000 in “digital marketing fees”. Mastriano, who the Republican Jewish Coalition refused to endorse, said he rejected “antisemitism in any form”, while his wife helpfully added that she suspected she and her husband “probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do”. 

 Still, Mastriano’s campaign ended on a high with a Messianic Jew performing a rendition of a song that included the words “All you do is work hard, there is absolutely no one who could say you are a bum!” to the tune of “If I Were A Rich Man”.

 Nonetheless, thanks to the issue of abortion – the chief concern of Pennsylvania voters, according to exit polls – and the backing of about nine in 10 black voters, Shapiro pulled off an impressive win in a swing state which, without such a kooky candidate, the Republicans might have expected to win in a difficult year for the Democrats. Indeed, Mastriano’s presence on the ballot may also have potentially cost the Republicans a much-needed Senate seat, dragging down celebrity TV doctor, Mehmet Oz, who was endorsed by Trump.

 Mastriano and Boebert are far from the only hard-right Republican candidates accused of ties to extremists and antisemites. Their performance has been a mixed bag, with some, such as Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona’s Paul Gosar, returning to Congress. But other far-right newcomers – such as Darren Bailey who was defeated in the race for Illinois governor by the Jewish incumbent Democrat JB Pritzker or Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox – have been easily defeated by the Democrats. In Arizona, Blake Masters, the Republican senate candidate who has attracted the backing of prominent white supremacists, is trailing and the New York Times has the contest leaning towards the Democrats.

 The Democrats’ small but noisy hard-left grouping in the House of Representatives – many of whom adopt a hostile stance towards Israel – appear to have survived largely intact with Ocasio-Cortez in New York; Rashida Tlaib in Michigan; Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar; and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts all returning to Washington. Other left-wingers, such as Cori Bush, Betty McCollum and Jamal Bowman, were also re-elected. 

 In Illinois, the ardently pro-Palestinian congresswoman Marie Newman was defeated in a primary in June and has been replaced by the more moderate Sean Casten, who won his Democrat district last night. In Pennsylvania Democrat newcomer Summer Lee, who AIPAC attempted to defeat in both May’s primary election and in the general election, also looks on course for victory. More positive news comes from New York, where Ritchie Torres, a young, gay liberal and ardent supporter of Israel, glided towards a second term. Also victorious was Shontel Brown, a pro-Israel Ohio Democrat who has twice defeated “Squad” wannabe Nina Turner in primary elections.

 Biden’s own longstanding support for the Jewish state, echoed by the leadership of both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, meant that, even with the Democrats’ wafer-thin majority in Congress, the hard-left wasn’t able to leverage its power to inflict damage on US-Israeli relations. However, the potential presence of the far-right in a new Netanyahu government will inevitably play into the hands of anti-Israel “progressives” and complicate the picture for the Jewish state’s supporters in the Democratic party.

 Just as the far-right appears to be doing immense damage to the Republicans, the Democrats should not be complacent about the long-term threat posed by the still-marginal hard-left. In 2020, disaster was averted when Bernie Sanders’ path to the presidential nomination was blocked by fellow moderate candidates like Pete Buttigieg swiftly dropping out on the contest and rallying behind Biden. Biden’s nomination was sealed by black voters who, unable to afford the electoral damage wreaked by the hard-left’s gesture politics, act as a bulwark for common-sense and moderation in the party. 

 Indeed, Democrats need only look across the Atlantic to see how quickly a centre-left party can be corrupted and left politically and morally holed if a rampant far-left is allowed to gain a foothold. 

 But, for now, the Democrats – and American Jews – should perhaps be left to quietly celebrate a night which, thanks to Donald Trump and his far-right acolytes, turned out not nearly as bad as they’d long feared.