A much-quoted Edison Research exit poll rattled expectations on Election Day when it claimed Kamala Harris had bagged 79% of the Jewish vote — disproving the notion that the left’s embrace of pro-Hamas protests would drive significant, maybe even historic, Jewish defections from the Democratic Party.
It was a stunning bit of data. Except it wasn’t true.
The poll was based on ten states — none of them New York, California or Massachusetts, where about half of America’s Jews actually live.
In other words, trying to learn anything about American Jewish voting patterns by looking at the Edison poll was like attempting to study the preferences of McDonald’s customers by interviewing people who only eat salad for lunch — it won’t tell you much you can use.
And yet, we’ve now had days of the media — and some Jewish communal leaders — responding to Trump’s rout by assuring everyone that no matter what, at least the Jews can still be relied on to vote Democrat.
One mindlessly progressive Jewish rag immediately published a piece celebrating this assertion as an indication that Jews are just too moral to fall for the manipulation of Orange Hitler.
But as real numbers started coming in, the storyline about Jews standing with the candidate who so crassly tried to market herself as Kamamala — a play on the Yiddish word for mother — quickly fell apart.
In New York, The Post reported, roughly 45% of Jewish voters voted GOP, delivering a mind-boggling 50% increase in Jewish support for Trump over 2020.
Rockland County, home to the highest concentration of Jews of any county in the nation, offered an even more dramatic story: In 2020, Biden won the county by 2 percentage points; on Tuesday, it was Trump by 12.
The same was true in New Jersey’s Passaic County, which another very sizable Jewish community helped flip from blue to red.
You can argue these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many of the Jews in the aforementioned counties are Orthodox, and more observant Jews naturally tend to be more conservative.
But that still doesn’t change the basic premise of what hard data now clearly shows: The Jewish vote is now evenly split between both parties.
The times, as a wise Jewish voter once put it, they are a-changin’.
And hallelujah. First, because a Jewish vote evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats is unquestionably a good thing.
The less Jews — or, for that matter, members of any other ethnic minority group — come to depend on and identify exclusively with one party and its institutions, the stronger American democracy grows.
But there’s an even bigger reason to celebrate the historical reddening of the Jewish vote: As Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon noted in a now-viral video endorsement of Trump, the Jewish vote has always been tethered to that of the working class.
Given the American Jewish community’s roots as hard-scrabbling immigrants and its traditional adherence to ideas of social justice, it’s long been the case that as go the Jews, so go blue-collar Americans.
And this week, we’ve seen both groups make beelines to the GOP.
That should give Democrats all the reasons they need to buckle down and dramatically rethink their party, their commitments and their candidates.
When your two most dependable bases decamp to the other side, you can no longer blame your defeat on racism, or misogyny, or any of the other boutique gripes with which America’s self-elected elites are comforting themselves these days.
Of course, the Democratic machine may stare at the abyss and decide that the abyss itself is to blame for its fall, and no further lessons need be learned.
Here’s hoping that’s not the case.
The Jewish vote of no-confidence — call it an exodus — should be all the incentive the Democratic Party needs to engage in the time-honored Jewish practice of heshbon nefesh, literally an “accounting of the soul.”
If this happens, it will result in America once again having two real parties with real differing ideas and real policies that address the problems of real people living in the real world.
And the Jews, who gave this country’s founders the moral language they sought to champion liberty and justice for all, will have once again done their part to keep America great.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
