Features
Donald Trump and the 2024 Jewish Vote
By HENRY SREBRNIK How did American Jews vote in the November 5, 2024 presidential election? There’s no simple answer. American Jews are a hard-to-define religious and ethnic group spread across multiple American Census categories, possessing last names from at least a dozen different languages and clustered in places that are often overwhelmingly non-Jewish. It takes a team of demographers and sociologists to determine a plausible American Jewish population figure.
So deciding who qualifies as a Jewish voter is not that easy. Must they feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, however defined? Or can they be “simply” Jewish, perhaps with a non-Jewish partner and children not being brought up as Jews? (After all, we have Jews by birth who are “anti-Zionists” and supporters of Palestinian efforts to destroy Israel.) That’s why figures vary widely.
American Jews number less than 2.5 per cent of the total U.S. population. To be sure, Jews vote in much greater percentages (approximately 80 per cent) than the rest of the American public (about 66 per cent). 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 per cent of all funding to the Democratic Party and 25 percent of all funding to the Republican Party. For the 2024 election, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all people who identified as Jewish.
For about a century, American Jews, however defined, have been a reliable piece of the Democratic Party base, usually delivering two-thirds or more of their votes to the party’s presidential nominee. Over the last half century, going back to the 1968 election, Jews have favored the Democratic candidate by about 71 to 29 per cent. But in 2024, change was in the air, despite the absurd claims by some people that Donald Trump was an “antisemite.”
It turns out this proved largely baseless, according to the “2024 Jewish Vote Analysis,” a report released on November 20, 2024 by WPA Intelligence, a conservative political consultancy and analytics firm. In examining available exit polling, city and county data, and precinct data, it suggested that Trump’s strongest gains were among “those who live the most Jewish lives and reside in the most Jewish communities.”
Looking at Jewish neighbourhoods and towns, “the trends are stark and unmistakable,” WPA Intelligence stated. “Because Judaism is in some ways a communal religion and observant Judaism requires localized infrastructure, Jews who live in Jewish areas tend to be more religious and engaged. And in these neighborhoods, we see large shifts towards Trump.” Some of the most dramatic swings in the Jewish vote happened in New York. It also identified shifts in heavily Jewish areas of California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey,and Pennsylvania. (California, New Jersey, and New York are where more than 45 per cent of American Jews live.)
“The trend is apparent from Trump’s near-unanimous support among Chassidic and Yeshivish Jews; to his rapid consolidation of the Modern Orthodox vote; to incremental gains even in more liberal Jewish areas such as Oak Park and Upper Manhattan,” the report added. “So, too, is it diverse ethnically and geographically, occurring coast to coast and overrepresenting Persian and ex-Soviet Jewish communities.”
Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in New York City precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25 per cent. His 2024 performance in New York marked a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections.
Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily Jewish enclaves of deep-blue Democratic cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
These gains have been confirmed by the Jewish website Tablet. “Who Won the Jewish Vote?” by Armin Rosen, published on November 14, 2024, includes very detailed comparisons of precinct-level numbers from the 2020 and 2024 elections. It indicated that Trump did improve his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. “From the yeshivas 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 the Chabadnik shchuna in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Jewish areas voted in higher percentages for the Republican candidate than they did in 2020.”
Nearly every neighborhood in New York with a notable density of Jewish-specific businesses and institutions, be they Hasidic, Litvish, Syrian, Russian, Bukharan, Conservative, Reform or modern Orthodox, voted heavily Republican or saw a rise in Trump’s performance.
In Brooklyn, the Midwood precincts containing Yeshiva of Flatbush voted 62 per cent for Trump. In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s main post-Soviet Jewish enclave, Trump’s support was consistently in the 75-90 per cent range. In Crown Heights, headquarters of the Chabad Hasidic movement, Trump got 62 per cent of the vote this time around, likely on the strength of higher turnout among Chabadniks. Back in 2016, when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, he won 69 per cent of the vote in all of Assembly District 48, which encompasses Borough Park and Midwood (both largely Jewish communities). This year, he won 85 per cent of the vote in the district.
In the Bronx, Trump received 30 per cent of the vote in the precinct containing the Riverdale Jewish Center, and 38 per cent in the precinct with the neighborhood’s Chabad house. In Manhattan, a few of the borough’s lightest-blue Democratic precincts have the Yeshiva University campus at their center, and Trump managed to receive 37 per cent of the vote there. The Upper West Side, a traditional liberal Jewish political and cultural bastion, remained dark blue. But even there it was possible to see a shift.
Ranging a bit further afield, at least one plausible study, a poll taken by the Teach Coalition, an advocacy group founded by the Jewish Orthodox Union, found overall Jewish support for Trump in the New York suburbs at 40 per cent. Nassau County, where Jews make up close to 20 per cent of the population, saw Trump win it by five per cent, while Joe Biden took it by 10 in 2020.
The returns from other major American Jewish population centers tell a similar story, according to Tablet. Over 600,000 Jews live in New Jersey. The modern Orthodox stronghold of Teaneck gave Trump 35 per cent. In fact, he won 70 per cent of the vote in districts where most of the town’s synagogues are located. In Lakewood, where nearly every strain of Orthodox Judaism is represented, “Some of the precinct results are eye-watering,” reports Tablet. There, Kamala Harris got just 11.2 per cent. 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.
Trump carried Passaic County, home to a sizable Orthodox Jewish constituency. Jews make up about 25 percent of the county’s population and it has been a Democratic stronghold for decades. Biden took it with 57.5 per cent to Trump’s 41 per cent four years ago. In 2024, Trump won it with 50 per cent to Harris’s 46.5 percent. That’s a 16-point overall swing in Trump’s favor.
Voting data indicates that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in in the crucial state of Pennsylvania. It was one of the few states without a large Orthodox Jewish population where Trump did especially well with Jewish voters. Harris did win Pennsylvania Jewish voters by seven percentage points, 48-41, according to a survey conducted by the Honan Strategy Group for the Teach Coalition. However, 53 per cent of Jewish voters said they would have pulled the lever for her had Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro been her running mate, while support for Trump would have dropped to 38 per cent. Jewish community leaders claimed that Shapiro was subjected to an ugly, antisemitic campaign that led to him being passed over for the slot.
The Miami area is home to over 500,000 Jews. Aventura is one of the community’s bellwethers, and Trump gained 59.7 per cent this year. An almost identical shift happened in the Miami Beach community of Surfside, where Trump took 61 per cent. Bal Harbour, another Jewish enclave, saw Trump gain 72 per cent.
In Palm Beach County, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 per cent. Harris won this county by 0.74 per cent, while Biden won it by 13 per cent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly seven per cent while hers dropped an equal amount off Biden’s number. Almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 per cent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 per cent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 per cent of the Broward population.
In Los Angeles, where 560,000 Jews live, an article by Louis Keene, “How a Jewish Neighbourhood in Liberal Los Angeles Became a Stronghold for Trump,” published December 10 in the Forward newspaper, provides a detailed picture of the Jewish electorate. The political shift in Pico-Robertson, an Orthodox neighborhood in LA’s Westside, reflects voters “with a change of heart and changing demographics.”
Formerly majority Democratic, in 2024 for the first time, parts of Pico-Robertson turned red. Its two largest precincts swung for Trump, who received about 51 per cent of the votes compared to 44 per cent for Harris. Rabbi Elazar Muskin, who leads Young Israel of Century City, one of the oldest and largest synagogues in the neighbourhood, estimated that up to 90 per cent of his congregation voted for Trump, largely because of Israel.
As Yeshivish and Mizrahi Jews — those of Middle Eastern or North African heritage — have established a greater presence in Pico-Robertson, the area has become increasingly defined by a conservative culture and electorate. There is also a booming Persian population, as well as emergent Chabad and other Hasidic Jews.
A poll of Orthodox voters by Nishma Research in September found 93 per cent of Haredi voters supporting Trump; while data on the Persian Jewish community’s politics is harder to come by, community leaders said the numbers are similar.
Elsewhere in LA, the presence of a Chabad house or a synagogue was a reliable predictor of Trump support. For instance, Trump got 40 per cent of the vote in the North Hollywood precinct where Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic and Em Habanim Sephardic are located.
Los Angeles in turn mirrors the general trend in the rest of the country. Michigan is home to 116,000 Jews. West Bloomfield, centre of the Detroit-area Jewish community, went 43.7 per cent for Trump. Illinois’ 319,000 Jews live mainly in Chicago. Trump picked up votes in the Far North Side wards where Orthodox Jewish voters live, especially in the 50th Ward, where his vote increased to 46.85 per cent from 33.77 per cent in 2020.
Of course the Republican vote did not just come from the very religious. Trump also clearly gained among those most committed to Jewish identity, regardless of affiliation or observance, who were driven by concerns over left-wing antisemitism after the October 7 massacre.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his first term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump reminded Jews about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume the efforts to strengthen them. Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and he also moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
We must lay to rest the nonsense about Trump being antisemitic, lest we are to believe that the more Jewish you are, the more likely it was that you voted for an enemy of the Jewish people. Americans, including Jews, returned the arguably most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state to the White House.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
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