Speaking to the Zionist Organization of America in August 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy proclaimed that “friendship for Israel is not a partisan matter, it is a national commitment.” This was the political world into which I was born. Politicians of all political stripes regularly announced their support for Israel. And the American Jewish community was largely united in its support of Israel. Speaking for much of the Jewish community in 1972, Rita Hauser, a Nixon campaign director in New York City, stated that “as an issue, Israel is primordial.” How things have changed in the last half century, in both American politics and the Jewish community. Today, Israel is clearly a partisan, and divisive, issue. Shockingly, however, it is not an especially decisive issue for most Jewish voters. And the reason is that beyond the 10 to 15 percent of American Jews who are either ultra- or Modern Orthodox, Israel is far from the top of most Jewish voters’ list of priorities—trailing abortion, climate change, immigration, inflation, and health care, according to a recent study published by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

A survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, an organization led by prominent Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jewish respondents agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States.” The division within the Jewish community is particularly sharp among younger Jews, where the survey found that 38 percent of those under 40 believe that Israel is an apartheid state. A Pew study confirmed this troubling trend, finding that only 41 percent of Jews under 30 had a favorable view of Israel, compared with 69 percent of those older than 65.

And where the Jews go, so too go the Democrats. Despite Democrats long and venerable history of support for Israel, beginning with Harry Truman’s rush to be the first world leader to recognize the State of Israel, Democrats’ views toward Israel have changed dramatically over the past few decades. In March 2023, Gallup found that Democrats are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis, by a gap of 49 to 38 percent. Fifty percent of Democrats say that Israel bears a lot of responsibility for the current war with Hamas and Hezbollah, versus only 21 percent among Republicans. Even after Hamas’s murder of approximately 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the Democratic Party has continued to distance itself from Israel. A study by the Brookings Institute found that notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, President Biden’s strong statements in support of Israel at the start of the war, 44 percent of Democrats running for Congress in 2024 did not even mention Israel in their campaign materials. Seven percent of Democratic candidates even declared that Israel is committing genocide and/or that the United States must stop supporting Israel in the war.

Before jumping into the data, it’s also worth asking why anyone even cares about the Jewish vote, given that American Jews number less than 2.5 percent of the total population. To be sure, Jews vote in much greater percentages (approximately 80 percent) than the rest of the American public (about 66 percent). But the Jewish role in American politics goes well beyond the ballot box. In 2016, the Jerusalem Post reported on a study showing that Jews donate 50 percent of all funding to the Democratic Party and 25 percent of all funding to the Republican Party. This past year, in a truly astounding statistic, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all people who identified as Jewish.

All of this critical rhetoric about Israel from leading Democrats was bound to have an impact on the Jewish vote. And it did. Donald Trump this year exceeded the percentage of Jewish votes for any Republican since Ronald Reagan. But Trump did well with voters of all stripes, becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2000. So what was special about the Jewish vote this year?

_____________

Immediately after the election, CNN published data from its exit polls in which it claimed Harris had beaten Trump among Jewish voters 79–21. This number was quickly touted by left-leaning Jewish groups as proof that Trump hadn’t made inroads into the Jewish community even as it became clear that large parts of the Great Blue Wall were starting to crumble. But the CNN poll was quickly debunked as woefully incomplete. It covered only 10 states, and did not even include New York, California, or New Jersey, where more than 45 percent of American Jews live. Fox News and the Associated Press then published their own exit polling results, which found that 66 percent of Jews voted for Harris and 32 percent voted for Trump. The Fox/AP data clearly seem much more plausible. After all, Trump got 30 percent of the Jewish vote in 2020 against Biden, and it’s inconceivable he could have fared more poorly among Jews against Harris, when every other constituency (including even young women, whom the Harris camp was sure would vote for her due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade), voted more heavily for Trump in 2024 than it had for Joe Biden four years earlier.

While the data from the recent election show a move to the right by Jewish voters, it was not nearly as significant a shift as many Republicans had hoped for, given the prevailing political winds post–October 7. In fact, the Trump-ward shift was only partly due to Jewish perspectives on the pro-Israel positions of the two leading candidates. An even bigger factor was that the fastest growing segment of the Jewish community, the ultra-Orthodox Jews (or Haredim), voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And while their votes were certainly influenced by the perception that Democrats are more hostile than Republicans to Israel and even complicit in the rise of anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses, the Haredi vote for Trump was also heavily influenced by social issues. The ultra-Orthodox community is strongly opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and the entire LGBTQ agenda.

The rightward shift in the Jewish vote has been accompanied by a general weakening in the traditional Democrat coalition. Back in 1968, when Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey, 81 percent of Hispanics voted for Humphrey, about the same percentage as Jews, leading longtime Commentary contributor Milton Himmelfarb to quip that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” No longer. Today Jews vote for Democrats more strongly than do Hispanics, who gave Harris only 56 percent of their vote. Likewise with black voters, who supported Democrats at a 90 percent level in every presidential election between 2000 and 2020 before falling this year to 83 percent. And working-class voters, the linchpin of the Democratic coalition built nearly a century ago by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave Kamala Harris only 42 percent of their votes. Harris’s share of the vote among all Americans earning less than $50,000 was 48.5 percent. Only 16 years ago, Obama got 63 percent of voters making less than $50,000.

As the rest of the traditional Democratic coalition has been heading for the exits, American Jews have been remarkably resolute in their embrace of the Democratic Party. Over the last half century, going back to the 1968 election, Jews have favored the Democratic candidate by about 71–29 percent. There have been some small deviations from this mean. Most famously, Reagan got 39 percent of the vote against Jimmy Carter, who got 45 percent (with third-party Independent candidate John Anderson getting the remaining 14 percent).¹ With that exception, the Jewish vote for Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump has been consistent—with Republican winners garnering close to 30 percent and Democrat winners getting between 75 and 80 percent.

While the recent election showed an improvement in the Jewish vote for Trump, it was not a dramatic move. And some of the decline in Jewish support for the Democratic nominee is simply a reflection of the party’s overall lackluster performance. Not only did Harris in 2024 underperform Biden in 2020 by about 6.8 million votes, but the Democrats lost control of the Senate too. In retrospect, Obama’s 2008 election victory over John McCain was the high-water mark of the modern Democratic Party, and the party has never recovered from his two terms in office. In 2009, when Obama was inaugurated, Democrats controlled both chambers in 27 state legislatures. That fell to only 13 states when he left office. He entered office with a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a 257-seat majority in the House. When he left, Democrats had 48 Senate seats and 194 House seats.

Although Harris may have run an aimless campaign after her accidental coronation, and while Biden may have caused his party significant harm by misleading the public about the true state of his health, Trump launched his presidential comeback preaching to a public that was desperately looking for a new direction. So perhaps the increased Jewish vote for Trump isn’t really a partisan shift. Trump is no more a traditional Republican than he is a traditional Democrat. Had Barack Obama not been in the White House in 2015 when Trump mounted his first run for president, Trump could just as easily have run his campaign promoting lower taxes, border enforcement, tariffs, and eschewing foreign entanglements as a Democrat instead of as a Republican.

At bottom, the story of the Jewish vote is really a tale of two communities—the ultra-Orthodox, who vote like Evangelicals and are about 10 percent of the total Jewish population, and secular Jews, who constitute 85 percent of the total and who vote more solidly for Democrats than any demographic besides blacks, with whom they are now virtually tied. Though the American Jewish community numbers only about 7.6 million people, the 2020 Pew Research Center study reported that the number of Jews in America has actually increased by 35 percent since 1990. This, despite an intermarriage rate of around 60 percent. How can this be? Pollsters ask people how they identify, and a growing number of people, while not Jewish according to strict Jewish law, identify as Jews. But it is also, and more important, the product of the very high birthrate among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Whereas the average birthrate in the United States is now 1.7, and among secular Jews it is even lower, at 1.4, it is 6.6 children on average per woman among Haredi families. And this is bound to have a large and continued impact on the Jewish vote.

More than 85 percent of American Jews (who are neither ultra-Orthodox nor Modern Orthodox) are solidly in the liberal camp and show little sign of abandoning the Democratic Party. In fact, the National Election Pool’s exit poll promoted by CNN (the one that showed that 79 percent of Jews voted for Harris) probably underrepresents the percentage of secular Jews who voted for her, since that poll included votes in Florida, where a sizable number of Modern Orthodox Jews reside. A poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute showed that Reform-affiliated Jews voted for Harris at a rate of 84 percent, with Conservative-affiliated Jews only slightly behind, at 75 percent. The same poll found that 74 percent of Orthodox Jews (Haredi and Modern Orthodox) voted for Trump.

Even when you add the pro-Trump observant Jews into the mix, American Jews still voted for Harris in greater percentages than any other major religious group in America. Catholics voted 41 percent for Harris; Protestants gave her 37 percent; Mormons came in at 25 percent, and Muslims only at 20. The only “religious” group that surpassed Jews in their support for Harris were described in the Washington Post poll as “voters with no religion” who voted for Harris over Trump 72 to 25 percent—a ratio that actually puts them behind Reform and Conservative Jews in their ardor for Harris.

It is only in the ultra-Orthodox communities that Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And that is not
really a new phenomenon. A few of the individual precincts tell the story. Brooklyn is home to some of the largest Haredi Jewish communities in the United States, and Election District 9, inside Assembly District 48, is in the heart of Borough Park, where Yiddish is the primary language spoken by 89.6 percent of the residents and English is the primary language of only 8.5 percent. In 2020, Trump got 90 percent of the vote, so there was no question how this pocket of Brooklyn would vote in 2024. But Trump upped his percentage to 97.2 this time around. Back in 2016, when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, he won 69 percent of the vote in all of Assembly District 48, which encompasses Borough Park and Midwood (also a largely Jewish community but not predominantly Haredi). This year, he won 85 percent of the vote in the district.

The story in New Jersey was similar. In 2020, Biden won the state by 15.9 percent. This year, Harris won by only 5.5 percent. And the Jewish vote moved even more sharply. In Lakewood, New Jersey, home to the largest Haredi community in the state, Biden got 17.2 percent while Harris fell to 11.2 percent. In one Lakewood precinct, District 27, Trump won all the votes, 366–0, and in another, District 36, he won 560 votes, losing only a single vote.

Such bloc voting in the ultra-Orthodox community is not that rare. Indeed, just a week before the election, the leader of the Kiryas Joel community of Satmar Hasidim in Orange County, New York, appeared to endorse Trump publicly. Though there is debate within the Satmar community as to what the Grand Rabbi, Aaron Teitelbaum, actually did, what is known is that a pamphlet claiming to be from the “voting committee” of Kiryas Joel circulated shortly before the election suggesting that the rabbi endorsed Trump “due to concerns that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris may pose a threat to the ‘Jewish people’ if she is elected president.”

Understanding the factors that drive the Haredi vote is critical to understanding how the Jewish vote is evolving, given that their birthrate is quadruple the birthrate of the rest of the Jewish community. To be clear, the Haredi community is by no means monolithically Republican. In state and local elections, they usually vote for Democrats because their primary issue is public assistance (a Pew study found that 43 percent of Haredim earn less than $50,000 per year). In presidential elections, however, Israel and social issues loom large for Haredim, and as long as Democrats pursue a socially liberal agenda, the Haredi vote will be lost to them.

Israel, on the other hand, is a complicated issue for them. Although the leaders of many Haredi communities are ideologically opposed to Zionism (because they believe that Jews should not have sovereignty over the Land of Israel until the Messiah comes), most Haredi Jews are still more likely to vote for the candidate they believe is more friendly to Israel. According to a Pew survey, 55 percent of Haredim claim to be “very emotionally attached to Israel,” so some of the increase in the intensity of the Haredi vote for Trump may well be Israel-based.

But are there really any swing voters left in the Jewish community for whom Israel is the pivotal issue? Let’s turn to the Modern Orthodox community, which constitutes just 3 percent of American Jews; they reside mostly in small pockets of New York, New Jersey, California, and Florida. They are certainly not MAGA voters. In a survey conducted by the Jewish polling service Nishma Research weeks before the election, Modern Orthodox Jews didn’t place Trump among their five most admired politicians, listing Nikki Haley, Ritchie Torres, John Fetterman, Josh Shapiro, and Ron DeSantis all ahead of him. Contrast this with the Haredim, who listed Trump first by a large margin.

These Modern Orthodox Jews do cast their votes based on whom they perceive is better for Israel. And this year, a poll conducted by Nishma shortly before the election found that 45 percent of Modern Orthodox Jews would pull the lever for Trump. Though it’s hard to pin down the precise Modern Orthodox vote, because these voters reside in communities surrounded by more liberal Jews, the Nishma predictions seem to have been pretty accurate. In the Riverdale section of the Bronx, home to a large modern Orthodox community anchored by several synagogues and one of the most popular Jewish day schools in the country, Trump received 30 percent of the vote in one precinct and 38 in another. In the area of New York City where Yeshiva University is located, home to the intellectual center of Modern Orthodoxy, Trump got 37 percent. Compare these figures with Trump’s vote count on the liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he made a marked improvement over his 2020 vote count (when he got more than 10 percent of the vote in only 35 of 120 precincts). This year, he surpassed 10 percent in all but 18 of the 120 precincts. Perhaps the most accurate indicator of the Modern Orthodox Jewish vote is Teaneck, New Jersey, where Trump’s share of the vote increased between 2020 and 2024 from 27 percent to 35 percent.

Alas, if Israel is the key political issue for only 3 percent of Jewish voters, then the future of American support for Israel is a matter of grave concern. Indeed, were it not for the Evangelical community, who constitute 15 to 20 percent of the population and are passionate about the sovereignty of the State of Israel, American politicians would have little political incentive to support Israel or even to appeal to voters based on Israel policies. As someone who grew up during the halcyon years when Israel drew genuine bipartisan support, I recognize this as a sad state of affairs. And there are even more ominous signs on the horizon.

Already, the declining support for Israel among the Democratic base has impacted decisions by the party leadership. In the recent election, there was broad consensus that Pennsylvania was the single most important state that Harris had to win in order to beat Trump. Josh Shapiro, the hugely popular Jewish and Zionist governor of the state, was at the top of her short list for vice president and had much higher approval ratings in the state than did Harris. Nevertheless, when it emerged shortly before the Democratic National Convention that Shapiro had lived in Israel as a youth and even volunteered on an Israeli army base, he became an untouchable. In lieu of picking the most popular politician in the key swing state, Harris chose Tim Walz, the progressive governor of Minnesota, a state that has voted Republican in only two presidential elections since 1932.²

Nor has October 7 done much to shake up the political landscape in the Jewish community. The American Jewish Committee in June 2024 reported that 85 percent of American Jews “believe it is important for the U.S. to support Israel in the aftermath of October 7,” and 57 percent say they are “feeling more connected to Israel or their Jewish identity after October 7 than before.” But if the rise of anti-Semitism across the United States has reminded Jews of their identity, outside of the small number of observant Zionist communities, it has yet to have had much impact on Jewish voting patterns.

If secular Jews are safely ensconced in the Democratic Party, and Haredi Jews (at least in presidential elections) are equally committed to the Republican Party, Israel will surely find itself much more isolated politically in the United States in the coming decade.

Jay Lefkowitz has previously written for COMMENTARY about the Jewish vote. You can find those articles here, here, and here.

^{1 That was an unusual election in which the Jewish vote moved hard against Carter both as a reflection of the overall swing in the popular vote (Reagan won the popular vote by a nearly 10 percent margin) because of the strong reaction by American Jews to Carter’s perceived hostility to Israel (one of his UN Ambassadors voted in the Security Council to censure Israel, and then another met with a senior official in the PLO at a time when the U.S. had pledged not to deal with the PLO at all).
2 Notably, Pennsylvania was one of the few states without a large Orthodox Jewish population where Trump did especially well with Jewish voters. According to a survey by the Honan Strategy Group for the Teach Coalition, an affiliate of the Jewish Orthodox Union, Harris beat Trump in the state by a relatively narrow margin of 48 to 41 percent among Jews. This result may reflect the Pennsylvania Jewish community’s strong reaction to Harris’s rejection of Shapiro for vice president. That same poll found that, had Shapiro been on the ticket, Harris’s number would have risen to 53 percent.}

Photo: AP Photo/Wong Maye-E

We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.