The real Jewish vote

And why it matters

Why do we care how Jews voted? We’re a blip. A rounding error in the polls. It doesn’t really matter how we vote.

But it does. For me, it’s: Did we put our own survival at the top of the issues pile? Did we see clearly who our friends are and who they are not? Did my people learn lessons? But also to show the outside world: look, we did.

I had anecdotes. Liberal Jewish friends who leaned in over dinners and whispered “I’m voting for him.” One after another made the confession. One couple in particular, lifelong friends of mine, shocked me into silence when they said they had voted Trump. They were committed Democrats (MSNBC watchers! Howard Stern listeners!) who had spent years arguing with me. I knew they didn’t trust Kamala Harris on Israel and I figured they would sit it out. They live in New York, they don’t have to vote. But they did. And they voted for him.

I felt the sea change when Lizzy Savetsky, a Jewish influencer, tipped to Trump. I generally don’t believe that endorsements matter that much. If Oprah and Taylor and Beyoncé couldn’t swing it, who could? But I took Lizzy’s seriously. She’s an important figure in the Jewish world, she’s beautiful and smart, focused on her family and very outspoken. I saw her as representative of a specific voting bloc that I saw emerging: women who are normally repelled by Trump but set that aside to do what’s best for the country. It wasn’t just that she was voting for Trump, it was that she was admitting to it on Sid Rosenberg’s extremely popular New York City morning radio show. Lizzy Savetsky being out with her Trump support, despite the fact that it would hurt her, and cost her followers, made me think something was moving. She wasn’t like Taylor and Beyonce, they took the easy position. She was like Travis Kelce and Jay-Z, neither of whom made endorsements. But Lizzy did.

Anecdotes aren’t data, yes, of course, but data can be bad too. It’s why people recoiled so hard from Ann Selzer’s flawed Iowa poll in the closing days of the presidential election. Her “gold standard” poll showed Trump losing Iowa to Kamala Harris by 3 points. It didn’t make sense. People on the ground in Iowa were dumbfounded. Trump would end up winning Iowa by 13. Her poll was data, not anecdotes, and it was wrong.

The first Exit Poll to hit on Election Day caused that same recoil. Jews had allegedly voted 79% for Kamala Harris. I didn’t need to look into that to know it was wrong but the number spread like wildfire and is still being used today. First, it didn’t include California, New York and New Jersey. It polled Jews in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. A more reliable Associated Press Survey found Donald Trump had gotten 24% of the Jewish vote in 2016 and 30% in 2020.

We were expected to believe that after the last year, of Hamasniks on campus (and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both saying they had a point) and the Biden administration playing games with Israeli security, that number had plummeted to 21%. It was a joke. The only state on the list with a significant Jewish population was Florida. As I wrote in The New Jew back in January 2023, “Florida in particular is becoming a home for the wayward right-leaning Jew. Florida Jews went 41% for Trump in 2020. Exit polls showed Gov. DeSantis climbing to 45% of the Jewish vote in his recent election.” Florida was already in the 40s before this election. Are we expected to believe Trump got, what, zero, in the rest of those states?

Then there were the state exit polls that told a different story. In those, Jews polled at 45% for Trump in New York. 41% in Pennsylvania.

Trump would have had to have had total collapse in the states not polled to get 21%. The idea that Jews in Georgia or Texas will somehow be less conservative than northeast Jews is one that simply doesn’t hold water.

I took issue with this graphic shared by the Republican Jewish Coalition. How does he get over 40% in states with huge Jewish populations but somehow end up with 32% nationally? The math, as the kids say, is not mathing.

The one state exit poll that’s missing is California. The one poll that has a mention of Jews in a CA exit poll had them at 22% for Trump. The same exit poll had Muslims at 0% for either Trump or Harris. That’s…unlikely. And even at 22%, California has fewer Jews than New York. Average just the two states, using their state exit polls, and you get 33%. But what about all the other states where Trump hit the 40s?

But set aside the exit polls which, as I wrote in New Jew, “require someone to tell the truth to a pollster, something a lifelong Democrat switching sides for the first time might not be ready to do.” As I note, my friends voting for him, were not shouting it from rooftops. They were whispering it to me, someone they knew to be a lifelong conservative who would embrace their move.

In Tablet magazine, Armin Rosen did a deep dive into some numbers of actual vote totals from heavily Jewish areas. For example, these from Jewish parts of New Jersey:

“Some of the precinct results are eye-watering. Trump earned a 366-0 shutout in district 27, and was one vote shy of perfection in district 36, which he won 560-1. Trump prevailed in district 15 by a count of 3,168 to 177. Turnout dropped nationally in 2024, but Lakewood produced 35,000 votes for Trump this year, a 5,000 increase from 2020.”

Or these numbers from John Podhoretz in Commentary:

“In Palm Beach County, Florida, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 percent. Kamala Harris won this county by .74 percent last night. Biden won it by 13 percent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly 7 percent while Harris dropped 7 points off Biden’s number. Again, we cannot know what the delta was in the Jewish community, but almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 percent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 percent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 percent of the Broward population.

How about Nassau County, NY? Jews make up close to 20 percent of the population. Trump won Nassau by 5 percent. Biden took it by 10 in 2020.”

I live in south Florida, and spend a lot of my summers in Nassau County, in both places a MAGA hat and a huge Magen David is a standard beach look.

And what of California? Here’s Rosen:

“In Los Angeles, where 560,000 Jews live, the presence of a Chabad house turns out to be a reliable predictor of ideological diversity. Precinct 090002A, home to Chabad of Beverly Grove, might be the most evenly split district in the entire country, with Trump winning a razor-thin 1,100-1,090 majority. Biden won the area by 7 points in 2020. It isn’t just the familiar Chabad house mix of observant Jews, post-Soviet immigrants, and recent college grads that seems to correlate with higher Trump margins. Trump also got 40% of the vote in the North Hollywood precinct where Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic and Em Habanim Sephardic are located, a 5-point improvement since 2020. In 2020, Pico-Robertson was an area of heavy Biden support with light-red islands surrounding the area’s Orthodox institutions. The red areas are darker and larger now, and the neighborhood is essentially purple until the Santa Monica Freeway.”

If Trump gets 40-50% of the vote in overwhelmingly Jewish areas of LA, how does he get to under 30% in the state? Not possible.

Look, it’s important to me that Jews shifted politically in this election but I was not counting on miracles. Pre-election I was predicting an 8% boost to 38%. Change takes time, I would tell anyone who asked. Since October 7th, but also since the first Trump term which was the most pro-Israel of any president of my lifetime, the Jewish vote should be a Republican landslide, yes, but an 8% jump would do for now.

I now think that the actual Jewish vote total was far higher. Looking at the vote totals in precincts with a high percentage of Jewish voters, taking into account Trump’s underpolling in general, and the state exit polls, I put the number into the mid-40s. It’s a political earthquake for Democrats and it makes sense that they would want to minimize any fallout from that reality.

There are a lot of people hoping Jews have not moved. Liberal Jewish outlets continue to run the absurd 21% number as gospel because they need it to be true. They can not allow the Jewish electorate to shift this sharply away from them. For liberals who have long thought demographics=destiny, the fact that Orthodox Jews are voting in such astronomical numbers for Republicans, while having a high number of babies, means that Jewish vote being majority Republican is around the corner.

Rosen quotes the Democratic firm GBAO Strategies:

““The biggest problem Democrats have with Jewish voters is there aren’t more of them, because if there were there’d be very different outcomes,” Jim Gerstein, lead pollster for GBAO, said in a Nov. 13 conference call organized by JDCA [Jewish Democratic Council of America.] “They’re not a swing constituency, and they’re certainly not a Republican constituency,” Gerstein added later in the event. “You have to look at the Jewish population as a core Democratic base constituency.””

They need this to be true in order to maintain their power and influence. It is not.

Jew-haters, whether on the left or right, also continue to push the 21% number. They want to send the message to Donald Trump, and to other Republicans, that these people are not appreciative and you shouldn’t support them since they don’t support you. I don’t think Donald Trump falls for that, he stood at the grave of the Lubavitcher Rabbi in a yarmulke, he’s intrinsically supportive of Israel, he gets it, but I can’t be as certain about other Republicans. It’s hard to convince politicians to speak to the issues that affect a tiny sliver of the population in the first place and if that population doesn’t vote for them, after supporting their very survival, it’s not crazy for a politician to lose interest in pursuing that demographic.

Don’t let the pushers of the 21% nonsense get away with it for their political ends. The number is in the 40s. Nearly half of Jews voted Republican in this presidential election, a historic number. We learned. Look, we did.