Even if there are no major changes in the voting behavior of American Jews today, this election will have marked something of a shift in how we understand the “Jewish vote.” That is because there is such a thing as an “undecided Jewish voter” in 2024.
In Michigan, former teachers union leader David Hecker has been tasked with the Kamala Harris campaign’s Jewish get-out-the-vote operation. A Democrat campaigning for the Democrat, Hecker doesn’t surprise anyone when he tells Jewish Insider he doesn’t expect a Jewish vote swing toward Donald Trump. But he did say this: “The undecided people I’ve interacted with, who the campaign has interacted with, are not voting for Trump. It’s a question of whether they’re voting for president or not.”
The other sign of genuinely undecided Jewish voters in the key battleground state was that the Harris campaign sent Rep. Ritchie Torres to rally Jewish voters to the Democratic ticket. Torres is one of the few Democrats with strong credibility not just on Israel but on domestic anti-Semitism.
There are two things that set Torres apart from the average pro-Israel Democrat, however. The first is that he’s not Jewish. First gentleman Doug Emhoff has been the campaign’s Jewish mascot; North Carolina Rep. Kathy Manning grew up in Michigan and before running for Congress served as the first woman chair of the Jewish Federations of North America. (Like Torres, Steny Hoyer isn’t Jewish, but unlike Torres, Hoyer is a complete nonentity in this discussion.)
The second difference is that Torres is unabashed about his Jewish advocacy and doesn’t shy away from confrontation or ruffling feathers. Manning and Emhoff care deeply about being seen as Democratic team players and their Jewish advocacy is milquetoast and inoffensive. Putting Torres out there shows the campaign is more worried about Jewish votes than about a mean tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other pitchforks-and-torches anti-Zionists in the Democratic coalition, such as Michigan’s own Rashida Tlaib.
Torres’s deployment in Michigan, where Democrats have spent a year begging and pleading Arab voters for forgiveness for Joe Biden’s support for Israel over Hamas, marks the first time in decades the party hasn’t taken Jewish votes for granted.
In other words, this is the first national election in a long time in which the campaigns are competing for Jewish voters at all, rather than voters who happen to be Jewish.
There is nothing wrong with courting and tabulating the latter; the “Jewish vote” is counted each election the same way other minority voting groups are counted. It is fully legitimate—it just doesn’t give us much information, because these voters are very rarely voting on Jewish issues. Yes, plenty of liberal Jews will say that “abortion is a Jewish issue/value,” but that just proves the point. In fact, the attempt to shoehorn secular political causes into a “Jewish” framing has always been strong evidence that Jewish voters themselves feel somewhat self-conscious about the lack of explicitly Jewish issues atop their list of concerns. That self-consciousness is unnecessary—there is no shame in voting for what you believe is on the line in a political election. And in fact it would be healthier to simply acknowledge the difference between politics and religion and leave it at that.
Jews are not the only Americans who face such a quandary. As the left-of-center Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters has pointed out: “If by ‘Catholic vote’ you mean those who vote this way or that way because they are Catholic, there is no such thing and it is better to render the noun in the plural as ‘Catholic votes.’ Increasingly, the political views of Catholics are determined less by their religious affiliation than by their partisan allegiance.”
Similarly, elections in the modern era have been keeping track of the “Jewish votes.” But there was no evidence for the existence of “the Jewish vote.”
This year, that has changed. I have heard more than one person say something to effect of: “I wasn’t shocked by Oct. 7 in Israel but Oct. 8 in America.” Meaning that the horrific massacres carried out by Hamas were perfectly in character for a terrorist group that exists solely to carry out the mass murder of Jews. But many Jews here and around the world did not expect to see the streets and public squares of major American cities fill to the brim with people celebrating those atrocities. They did not expect to see U.S. campuses become, overnight, outposts of explicit Hamas and Hezbollah superfans. They were surprised that members of the U.S. Congress would make pilgrimage to the tentifadas calling for genocide against the Jews, and that a Democratic congresswoman would headline a China-backed conference whose organizers were affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization. They were unnerved by the successful campaign to prevent a Jewish governor from becoming Harris’s running mate.
Jewish Democrats did not, by and large, stop being Democrats. But they did stop being invisible—at least in Michigan and Pennsylvania. What this means for the concept of the “Jewish vote” going forward will not be apparent for some time, because it’s never clear whether one election constitutes an outlier or the beginning of a trend. Additionally, there are not many Jewish voters, at least compared to other politically prominent ethnic and racial groups, no matter how you count them—and so there will be even fewer Jewish voters who start to consistently vote on Jewish issues.
Jews don’t need to be “emancipated” from the Democratic Party—or any party. But they do need to be emancipated from their invisibility to the major parties. If that is changing, it is a change for the better.
