Voters go to a polling place to cast their ballots on the last day of early voting for the 2024 election, November 1, 2024 in Atlanta. Photo by Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld
November 6, 2024

Exit poll results showed Tuesday that 79% of Jewish voters supported Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to 21% who said they voted for Republican former President Donald Trump. More responses continue to be added to the poll, conducted by a consortium of national media outlets, and the results could change.

If the current division continues, it would represent another election cycle in which Republican claims that Jews are flocking to their candidate because of Israel or anti-Semitism have come to naught.

Edison Research, which is conducting the poll for the consortium, surveyed voters in 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin – not in the two states that are home to the no more Jews. , New York and California. The results released Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning did not break down responses by religion in individual states like Pennsylvania or Michigan, battlegrounds where both campaigns appealed strongly to Jewish voters and where some told pollsters and to journalists that they were considering switching parties to vote for Trump.

Fox News conducted a separate exit poll that showed 67% of Jews voted for Harris and 31% for Trump. Another Jewish-focused poll conducted for the liberal pro-Israel group J Street is expected to be released Thursday.

Voters in the national poll were also asked about U.S. support for Israel and split almost evenly into three groups: 32% said support was too strong, 30% not strong enough and 31% about right. But there were sharp partisan differences on this issue. Among those who thought the United States was too supportive of Israel, 68% said they voted for Harris, while 81% of those who thought support was lacking supported Trump.

The issue of Israel emerged after more than a year of war in the Middle East that eroded its support around the world, including among leftists in the United States. That’s what some analysts say will keep some Jewish Democrats away from Harris this year. Conservative groups pushed hard to attract more Jews to Trump, with the Republican Jewish Coalition spending more than $15 million on television ads supporting the former president.

Trump and his supporters have argued that he is a supporter of Israel and would take a tougher stance against pro-Palestinian protests that many Jews view as anti-Semitic. In contrast, Harris and her Democratic surrogates — including Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband — highlighted Trump’s association with anti-Semitic figures and offensive comments, including his suggestion that Jews who did not support him were “disloyal” and should be blamed if he loses.

In another exit-poll question on the issues that most motivated their choice of president, 4% of voters cited foreign policy, which came in fifth behind the state of democracy (34%), l the state of the economy (31%), abortion. (14%) and immigration (11%). Among those who chose foreign policy, 54% said they voted for Trump and 39% for Harris.

Experts use exit polls to analyze elections by demographic groups and understand how different voters made their choices. But questions about horse racing aren’t always accurate, because some respondents don’t tell the truth about who they chose.

If Harris actually gets 77% of the Jewish vote, her support will nearly reach the all-time high of 80% that supported Bill Clinton in 1992.

Between 1996 and 2008, Democratic candidates for the White House obtained between 74 and 79% of the Jewish vote. In 2012, when President Barack Obama was running for re-election, he lost ground among Jews, and 30 percent of them supported his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

In 2016, 71% of Jewish voters supported Hillary Clinton over Trump; in 2020, the national exit poll did not collect enough responses from Jews to account for their voting distribution, although a alternative measure created by Brandeis University, using a different methodology, estimated it at 70% for Joe Biden and 30% for Trump.

Exit polls generally do not account for the roughly 25% of American Jews who identify both as agnostic or atheist and also as Jewish, a group that tends to be more politically liberal, meaning that ‘They may underestimate support for Democrats.