American Jews are a notoriously hard-to-define religious and ethnic voting group. Outside of a handful of highly concentrated Jewish communities in Greater New York City, South Florida, Los Angeles, Washington-Baltimore, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, Boston, and Philadelphia, Jews are often clustered in places across the country that are overwhelmingly populated by non-Jews, making it difficult to survey them accurately. To make the task even harder, there is also an ongoing dispute among pollsters over how to identify members of the American Jewish community, and specifically how to characterize those who claim to have Jewish ancestry but do not define themselves as Jewish by their religious faith.
According to the widely respected 2020 Pew population survey, “Jews of no religion” account for 27% of the American Jewish population. Whether to include those “Jews of no religion” in the overall count of Jews in this country makes a significant difference when analyzing Jewish voting patterns in the November 5 presidential election.
More specifically the question of whether such Jews are included in the national Jewish vote count is a major factor in answering the politically sensitive question of how many American Jews voted for Donald Trump rather than Kamala Harris on November 5. Not surprisingly, secular leftist Jewish voter groups, such as the J Street lobbying organization, and the Jewish Democrat Council of America (JDCA), prefer to go by polls that include Jews who do not define their Jewish identity by religious belief, such as the National Election Pool’s exit poll, whose results were widely reported by most major news organizations and networks.
UNDERCOUNTING ORTHODOX VOTERS
That poll found that 79% of those voters it identified as Jews voted for Kamala Harris, which is roughly consistent with the Jewish vote estimates from previous presidential elections. However, that exit poll did not sample voters in states with the largest Jewish communities, such as New York, New Jersey, and California, where the vast majority of American Orthodox Jews live, which means that Orthodox voters were largely excluded from its 79% Jewish voter estimate.
On the other hand, more religious Jewish political advocacy groups, such as the Orthodox Union-affiliated Teach Coalition that advocates for government funding of yeshivos, prefer to rely on surveys like the Fox News poll which did fairly sample the Jewish vote in Orthodox communities. The Fox News poll found that Jewish voter support for Kamala Harris was only 66% this year, representing a significant fall-off from Joe Biden’s Jewish vote four years ago. The resulting improvement reported by the Fox News polls in Donald Trump’s Jewish vote over four years ago was significant enough to become a talking point for the Republican Jewish Committee. The much lower Fox News poll estimate of the Jewish vote for Kamala Harris was also consistent with the pattern set by other traditionally Democrat ethnic voting blocks, such as working-class Latinos and black men, who voted in much larger numbers for Trump this time than they did in the 2020 election.
The 13-point difference between the Jewish vote estimates in the two polls is politically significant. If the National Election Pool’s exit poll is accepted as more accurate, then it would mean that, unlike other historically Democratic-voting constituencies that defected to Trump in large numbers, Jewish voters as a whole remained loyal to the Democrats despite the party’s recent shift to the political far-left and the stepped-up criticism of Israel by progressive Democrat leaders for its conduct of the war in Gaza.
WHO IS A JEWISH VOTER?
The JDCA and J Street have also touted the November 5 election findings of a Democrat polling firm called GBAO Strategies, which also counts “Jews of no religion.” It found that only 25% of Jewish voters in the crucial battleground Pennsylvania voted for Trump, which is very close to the estimate of 26% of Jews that voted for him nationally. While that still represented a 5-point improvement for Trump compared to the findings of the same poll in the 2020 election, Halie Sofer, who is the CEO of the JDCA, still claimed that the difference was “not meaningful” even though it was well outside of the poll’s 3.5% margin of error.
On the other hand, if the Fox News poll estimate of the Jewish vote is considered to be the more accurate of the two, then it would mean that Harris and other Democrat candidates did lose a significant percentage of their Jewish support in the November 5 election. That would help to explain why Trump and the Republicans did so much better by attracting roughly 40% of Jewish voters this time than four years ago, especially in key places like the congressional swing districts in Pennsylvania and the New York suburbs where the Orthodox represent a much more significant portion of the overall Jewish vote than the 9% national average.
Rather than relying on polls that do not fairly reflect the true strength of the Orthodox component of the American Jewish community, the Teach Coalition commissioned its own poll, conducted by the Honan Strategy Group, of 600 Jewish voters on November 5 who live in congressional swing districts in New York State. It differed from the GBAO survey because, according to the group’s head, Bradley Honan, “We asked people if they were Jewish or not, and if they weren’t, we said thanks very much, we’re going to move on.”
According to the Honan poll, even in the traditionally liberal-voting New York City suburbs, support for Trump reached 40%. The large Orthodox Jewish vote also played a role in the fact that Trump on November 5 was able to win Nassau and Rockland counties which he had lost to Biden four years ago. Furthermore, according to the Honan poll for the Teach Coalition, in addition to the Orthodox vote for Trump, “The more liberal branches of Judaism [also] saw really significant movement towards Trump,” possibly as a result of the October 7 attack and the subsequent surge in antisemitism.
WHY JEWS HAVE TRADITIONALLY VOTED FOR DEMOCRATS
Historically, American Jews have consistently and overwhelmingly supported Democrat presidential candidates and their liberal domestic policies since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the past 90 years, Jews continued to vote for Democrats by large margins even when they were opposed by strongly pro-Israel Republican candidates, such as Ronald Reagan, and even Donald Trump, four years ago, despite his strongly pro-Israel first-term record.
But the November 5 election was an exception to that rule. While Jewish voters, like other Americans, may have been attracted to Trump by the popularity of his overall campaign positions, those positions did not change much from when Trump lost the Jewish vote to Joe Biden four years ago and to Hillary Clinton eight years ago by much larger margins. That suggests that another factor must have been at work this time.
The major difference for Jewish voters was that this election took place while Israel was under siege and fighting for its life on multiple fronts against Iran and its terrorist proxies. At the same time, the October 7 attack had unleashed a surge of open antisemitism on college campuses across the country.
Jewish voters were keenly aware that Israel’s survival largely depended upon the military and diplomatic support it was receiving from the Biden-Harris White House which was not entirely reliable. They also noted a deeply disturbing anti-Israel and pro-Muslim outcry from the progressive wing of the Democrat party that was supporting the Harris candidacy and which she failed to fully disavow. Accordingly, many of those usually liberal-voting Jews chose this time to vote for Trump instead.
WHY THE NATIONAL JEWISH VOTE IS SO SIGNIFICANT
Because Jewish voters as a whole are traditionally much more active politically than other voting groups, the loss of a significant percentage of their votes and campaign contributions does not bode well for the prospects of Democrats in future elections.
It might also prompt party leaders to reconsider their positions on Jewish-sensitive issues, such as progressive proposals for a U.S. arms embargo against Israel while it is still fighting a multi-front defensive war, and the party’s post-October 7 tolerance for antisemitic demonstrations and the intimidation of Jewish students on college campuses across the country.
According to an article on the November 5 election results by Armin Rosen, a staff writer for Tablet Magazine, especially based upon the Fox News poll’s results, the recent swing of Jewish voters towards Trump “would mark a potential turning point in the relationship between Jewish Americans and both major political parties. Based on Tablet’s comparison of precinct-level numbers from the 2020 and 2024 elections, Donald Trump improved his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. From the yeshivos of Lakewood, New Jersey, to the bagel shops of New York’s Upper West Side; from Persian Los Angeles to Venezuelan Miami; from the Detroit suburbs to Brooklyn’s Boro Park, Crown Heights, and Flatbush, Jewish areas voted in higher percentages for the Republican candidate than they did in 2020.
TRUMP’S GAINS IN NEW YORK CITY
Early in the 2024 presidential campaign, in May, some political analysts ridiculed the Trump campaign for “wasting” its resources on organizing a Trump rally in a public park in the South Bronx, given the fact that just four years earlier Biden had beaten Trump in New York State by a 23% margin and in New York City by 76% to 23%, a massive 53-point, better-than 3-1, margin. But in light of the actual election results in New York City on November 5, Trump’s decision to hold the rally in the Bronx, and his prediction of a possible upset victory in New York, no longer seem so outlandish. In this election, Trump reduced Harris’ margin of victory compared to Biden four years ago statewide by almost half to 12 points, and in New York City by 15 points (68%-30%). Veteran pollster Nate Silver wrote in his post-2024 election analysis that “Almost no place has seen a bigger increase in Trump support than the five boroughs [of New York City],” a shift in which the city’s Jewish neighborhoods played a major role.
In New York City, Tablet’s vote analysis revealed that in every Jewish neighborhood in the city, whether populated by Chassidish, Litvish, Syrian, Russian, Bukharan, Conservative, Reform, or Modern Orthodox Jews, Trump made significant gains over his performance four years ago. For example, in heavily Jewish Midwood Brooklyn, Trump commanded 62% of the vote, compared to just 41% he received in 2020.
In only two of the eight voting precincts in Boro Park adjoining 13th Avenue between 39th and 64th Streets, was Harris able to get 10% or more of the votes, compared to the at least 12% of the vote that Biden received in all but two of them. In one of those Boro Park districts on November 5, Trump beat Harris by a landslide margin of 770-44.
In the three Crown Heights voting districts nearest 770 Eastern Parkway, the increase in turnout by Lubavitch voters enabled Trump to increase his vote to 62% compared to 52% four years ago. Crown Height community activist Yaacov Behrman told Rosen, “I think people are scared of the Democratic Party because of elements of the left that have gone radical, and the party hasn’t done enough to distance themselves from them.”
Trump also made significant gains in Jewish-populated districts in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx and in Forest Hills. He also made significant inroads in the Jewish neighborhoods of Manhattan, cutting down Harris’ lead in some of the most concentrated liberal voting areas in the country.
TRUMP’S SURGE IN JEWISH COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY
In the heavily Jewish Aventura suburb of Greater Miami, Trump’s vote increased to 59.7% compared to 46.6% four years ago. Similarly, in the nearby Miami Beach Jewish community of Surfside, Trump improved from 48% of the vote in 2020 to 61% on November 5.
In Jewish community after Jewish community, in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, the West Bloomfield area of Detroit, and Teaneck, New Jersey, the pattern of significant vote gains by Trump was repeated.
In the Torah stronghold of Lakewood, New Jersey, Trump improved on his already impressive victory in 2020. Joe Biden’s share of the vote 4 years ago was 17.2% dropping to just 11.2 % of the Lakewood vote for Harris on November 5. By giving Trump 87.7% of their votes, the Jews of Lakewood gave their city the distinction of being the most pro-Trump town in the state of New Jersey.
The Orthodox preference for Trump was so strong that in Lakewood’s voting district 27, Harris was completely shut out, losing by a margin of 366-0. In District 36, Trump won by a margin of 560-1. While nationwide voter turnout dropped in 2024, the Lakewood vote grew from 30,000 in 2020 to 35,000 this year, with the vast majority of them going to Trump.
Lakewood most of all, and other Orthodox Jewish communities across New Jersey, combined to make a major contribution to Trump’s dramatic gains in his vote count on November 5 over his performance four years earlier, cutting his margin of loss statewide from 16 points to Biden in 2020 to just 6 points in November against Harris.
THE MANHATTAN JEWISH VOTER ANOMALY
While it is clear that Trump received overwhelming support from Orthodox voters across the country on November 5, that does not explain the significant gains he also made in the mostly non-religious upscale Jewish neighborhoods on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
One might be tempted to argue that those non-religious Jews, as citizens of this country, were also influenced by Trump’s populist positions on economic, moral, social, criminal, and border issues, in the same way as the 2.3 million more American citizens who voted for Donald Trump on Election Day than voted for Kamala Harris.
However, that would ignore the fact that most of those secular and religiously alienated Manhattan Jews who voted for Trump are not members of the working class who made up the bulk of Trump’s national voter base. Rather, those Manhattan liberal Jews generally see themselves as part of the college-educated elites who voted for Harris by an overwhelming margin on November 5.
IS THERE A POST-OCTOBER 7 JEWISH VOTER AWAKENING?
Nevertheless, many of those alienated Jews were so deeply influenced by the horrors of the October 7 attack and the subsequent nationwide and worldwide surge in antisemitism that they did not follow their longstanding Democrat voting patterns.
For many of these liberal Jews, the dominant issue in this election was not the fallacious Democrat accusation that Donald Trump represented a danger to American democracy, but rather the very real threat to the survival of Israel and the personal safety of every Jew in America.
By voting for Trump, however reluctantly, due to their self-interest in Jewish survival, these minimally identifying Jews were responding to the long-suppressed “pintele Yid” that had been awakened deep within them by Klal Yisroel’s collective post-October 7 trauma.
Whether those Jewish voting concerns will remain dominant over their secular-liberal political beliefs in future elections remains to be seen, but the November 5 voting results do offer reason to hope that even these Jews may not yet be irretrievably lost to the powerful amoral forces of assimilation that saturate today’s ant-religious media-dominated popular American culture.
