The Republican Jewish Coalition is celebrating President-elect Donald Trump’s vote share among Jewish voters in the 2024 election, as they believe it is the “highest number for any Republican presidential candidate since 1988.”
The organization cited a voter analysis conducted by Fox News in partnership with the Associated Press that found 66% of Jewish Americans voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, whereas 32% backed Trump. The figures resemble a Pew Research Center poll released last month that found Harris holding about two-thirds, or 65%, of support from Jewish voters.
KEY DATES FOR THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION
While Harris led Trump by over 30 points among Jewish voters, Fox’s findings point to Trump having made slight inroads among the demographic. In 2020, only 30% voted for Trump, according to an Associated Press survey, whereas in 2016, just 24% supported Trump, according to the New York Times exit polls.
“It’s the highest number for any Republican presidential candidate since 1988 and it’s fully one-third higher than Trump’s own showing in his first campaign in 2016,” said Jon Lerner, who is working with RJC as a pollster.
Matt Brooks, the CEO of RJC, said the organization was “thrilled” with “both the outcome with the election of President Trump, but also because of the historic shift in the Jewish vote.”
The large majority of Jewish people have consistently voted for Democrats in previous cycles, but the Israel-Hamas war sparked divisions as a spike in antisemitism unleashed by last year’s attack in Israel led to widespread protests.
“For those who care a lot about Israel, this has been a lifesaving election — this election makes a massive difference in how best to protect Israel, how best to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah,” said Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary for George W. Bush, in an RJC briefing call with reporters on Wednesday.
“I think it’s even possible that Hamas may release the hostages prior to Jan. 20, 2025, which we all know has a historical ring to it,” Fleischer added.
WHAT TRUMP HAS PROMISED TO DO ON DAY 1 IN THE OVAL OFFICE
Still, exit-polling data has been somewhat contradictory. CNN exit polling found Harris beat Trump among Jewish voters 79% to 21%. Lerner is downplaying the results of that exit poll, highlighting it was not a national poll and interviewed fewer self-identified Jewish voters.
“It was only conducted in ten states and it did zero interviews in New York or New Jersey with the largest and the fourth largest Jewish populations in the country, with 28 percent of all the Jewish voters nationwide,” Lerner said. “The other shortfall is that the exit poll only interviewed a total of 460 Jews, so that’s one-eighth of the size of the AP study.”
The Fox News voter analysis also found that 46% of New Yorkers who identified as Jewish supported Trump over Harris. In comparison, Trump received 37% of the state’s Jewish vote in 2020, while Biden received 63%.
Jon Reinish, a Jewish Democratic strategist based in New York, said Democrats have not done enough to reassure voters that the left flank of the party does not represent Democrats as a whole.
“Look at the Jewish vote in New York, in a blue state, it moved really significantly to the right, because I think the Jews have seen what’s playing out on college campuses and what is being condoned in the subways on the streets, and I think that Jews don’t feel safe,” Reinish said.
“The Rashida Tlaib’s and Ilhan Omar’s — they have defined this crisis for a lot of Jews,” he said. “Democrats need to deny and disavow them because they are clearly hurting Democrats and the Democratic brand.”
“The sooner that Democrats make the decision to separate from these people, very decisively and loudly, the better.”
The Fox News analysis’s findings come after the organization spent $15 million on advertising across battleground states this cycle and launched a sophisticated micro-targeting effort from data they collected identifying Jewish voters who could be persuaded to vote for Trump in critical battlegrounds.
“We directed ads directly to the set top boxes and the Smart TV’s in the people’s homes we were targeting,” Brooks said. “So we could microtarget to the lowest level precisely who we wanted to see our ads based on our modeling and our data.”
WHAT HAPPENS NOW THAT TRUMP IS PRESIDENT-ELECT
As part of RJC’s advertising, the organization released a final ad ahead of the 2024 election that showed three Jewish women talking about Israel being under attack and the threat of rising antisemitism on college campuses.
“Not only was this the biggest campaign ever. It was also the most sophisticated and technologically advanced campaign ever,” Brooks added.