Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff made news by expressing his deep vexation with Jews who might vote for Donald Trump against the gentleman’s favored candidate, his wife Kamala Harris. He noted that Trump himself is deeply vexed by the reverse—Jews who still vote Democrat and therefore need their “head examined.”
Although the two men’s comments on the subject are quite different in tone, this is a good time to point out what each side is getting wrong about the Jewish vote and the upcoming election.
The Trump campaign and the Harris campaign are each making different mistakes here, and neither seems to want to change course. It might not matter, as the Jewish vote has never, to my knowledge, been decisive in a presidential election. But there is a real chance that this year could be an exception because of the persistent closeness of battleground states such as Pennsylvania. Either way, there is a great deal of room for improvement in both campaigns’ appeal to Jewish voters.
Let’s start with Trump. It’s hard to argue with Emhoff’s accusation that Trump speaks and acts in ways that would suggest fighting anti-Semitism is not in fact important to him, though it’s clear to the public that Trump doesn’t hate Jews. Nor does the public believe Harris does, for that matter. “My opponent is an anti-Semite” isn’t moving votes, nor should it.
But there is a way to understand each side’s blind spots on anti-Semitism and how they factor into a fairly unique—and unfortunate—set of concerns American Jews are grappling with this election season. Set aside, for now, the questions about personnel. It’s wholly valid to worry about who might have the president’s ear whether it’s Trump or Harris, but I’m not building out a scorecard here. I’m more interested in what Trump and Harris would hear if they truly listened to anxious Jewish voters.
Trump has a way of walking right up to a point and still completely missing it. The best example of this was when the former president addressed a gathering of Jewish Republicans and said “You’re not going to have an Israel if [Harris] becomes president … Israel will no longer exist.” To that oy, gevalt message he added: “If they win, Israel is gone. Just remember that. If they win, Israel is gone. You can forget about Israel, that’s what’s going to happen. So they have to get out on Nov. 5 and they have to vote for Trump. If they don’t, I think it’s going to be a very terrible situation.”
To state what I hope is the obvious: No, Israel will not disappear if the Democrats win the election. But before veering totally off course, Trump had put his finger on something real. This is the first time in the adult lives of many Jewish Americans that Israel’s place in the world has appeared vulnerable or even mildly precarious. Under attack from about six different directions, Israel was being lectured by its Western allies—two of whom then announced an offensive arms embargo that seemed designed to signal to the world that even the West preferred Hamas alive and kicking while the US poked and prodded at Israeli society’s internal divisions. The Biden administration spent months holding Israel back from going into Rafah (“I’ve studied the maps,” Harris ridiculously said), which ended up being where hostages were held and where Yahya Sinwar was ultimately tracked down and killed, as well as home to key tunnels that served as Hamas lifelines. Sometimes it really can feel like the world is lined up against Israel, and that was one of those moments.
Trump understood the vibe, as his opponents might say. But then he went and did something inexplicably counterproductive: he reinforced the fear.
Trump has never understood that his public statements matter. And the message Israel’s enemies heard when he made those comments was: You guys are close! You really might wipe Israel off the map this time. It showed an absurd lack of confidence in Israel to defend itself and suggested that the Iranian-backed coalition was on the right track; it had convinced the Americans that the momentum had shifted.
The state of Israel is what was supposed to take the fate of the Jews out of the hands of American (and other) presidents in the first place; doesn’t he understand that? Well, he ought to.
The Harris campaign, meanwhile needs to understand two things. The first is that Harris herself played a not-insignificant role in backing Israel into that corner. She cannot solve this by simply repeating that she supports Israel’s right to defend itself. She needs to somehow communicate to Jewish voters that she accepts some culpability for the fear they are expressing and give them reason to believe her presidency wouldn’t be four more years of that kind of pressure.
Second, the Harris campaign has put out several strong statements criticizing the anti-Zionist street mobs. But she undermines them by seeming to publicly agree with protesters who call Israel genocidal. Each time she does something like this, she encourages more of it.
And here’s the key: This outbreak of anti-Semitism of which those protesters are a part is here, in America. This is not an “Israel issue.” Saying “I support Israel” is not an answer to “what are you going to do about the fact that your administration has presided over an unprecedented explosion in public anti-Semitic sentiment?” Harris is talking to mothers and fathers who fear for their child’s safety on campus; Israel’s self-defense isn’t the point.
Harris has a terrible habit of treating all Jewish issues as Israel issues. Public institutions are ostentatiously violating civil rights laws by refusing to apply them to Jews. Harris’s support for Sinwar’s elimination isn’t relevant here. But you know what is? Saying those braying mobs are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be.”
Street violence against American Jews isn’t going anywhere if our leaders indulge anti-Semites’ stated motivation for their anti-Semitism.
This is what’s on the minds of anxious Jewish voters. So the Trump and Harris campaigns should stop saying they can’t understand why any Jew would vote this way or that. The candidates’ professed exasperation is a big part of the problem.
