How well did Trump do with Jews in 2024?

Exit polls say "Meh," but analyses of precincts and of campaign contributions suggest October 7 and wokeness may have hurt Democrats.

Jews make up a quite small percentage of the U.S. population, but of course they tend to be influential politically, owing to their high average levels of verbal intelligence, energy, wealth, donations, humor, and so forth.

So, I’ve been wondering since the election whether Jews tended to swing strongly toward the right in November, as did some other groups, such as most racial minorities.

While Jews tend to be sensitive to new trends in thought in a number of domains, their voting was remarkably stable for the most of the last century. Jewish-Americans have consistently voted quite Democratic in presidential elections since the 1930s.

Milton Himmelfarb famously observed a couple of generations ago that Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. But in 2024, Puerto Ricans didn’t vote like Puerto Ricans, so what about Jews?

If anything would seem likely to change Jewish partisan orientation, the distressing series of events that began October 7th, 2023 might seem a contender.

On the one hand, both Biden/Harris and Trump came down hugely in support of Israel during the ongoing war. On the other, it quickly became apparent that a whole lot of younger and more educated nonwhite Democrats are not at all supportive of Israel, and some are not so sure about Jews in general. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Republicans, with the exception of a tiny anti-Semitic online fringe, have been pro-Israel and pro-Semitic.

So, what happened among Jews in 2024?

There are three main sources of data: exit polling, precinct analysis, and campaign donations.

It’s hard to get a big enough sample size of Jews to be confident, but surveys reported that the Jewish vote was at least as pro-Democratic in 2024 as normal, with the AP poll reporting Trump got 32% of the vote and the Edison poll saying only 22% of Jews.

Precinct analysis tends to tell a different story, with more Jewish neighborhoods tending to swing toward Trump in 2024.

Paywall here.

The paywalled part of the post is 2000 words long and includes my table of the 50 biggest campaign contributors of 2024, including whether they appear to be Jewish or gentile.

The Republican Jewish Coalition’s report from WPA Intelligence consultants shows quite a few examples of fairly Jewish districts moving in a redder direction:

Major Population Center Case Study: Los Angeles

While the precinct data is not yet available in an efficient form to the general public, the Los Angeles Times was able to acquire and map the precinct results. Below are some key Jewish areas, all of which showed significant movement and new red precincts. These maps show the areas of Beverly Hills, Pico-Robertson, and Beverlywood. The heavily-Persian Beverly Hills, the largely Modern Orthodox Pico-Robertson, and its higher-income counterpart to the south Beverlywood turned from mostly blue to mostly red. In 2020, only the Northern part of Beverly Hills was red. In 2024, these regions were almost entirely red.

Most of the areas trending red are single family home neighborhoods. Jewish married men have tended to be centrist for some time, while Jewish single women tend to be very liberal, with married women and straight single men in between.

The dark blue area east of Beverly Hills in the 2024 map is West Hollywood, which is more apartments, more singles, and especially more gay men.

There are also differences by education. An analyst writes me:

Advanced college degrees were associated with negative Trump support at a significant level. My guess a lot of these are the Jews that live in, as you say, "primarily Episcopalian neighborhoods." The small business owner Jew with a family is much more likely MAGA than the Jew with a Ph.D. living in DC or Manhattan.

My guess is that while Beverly Hills is very, very rich, it’s not as educated as, say, Georgetown in D.C. or the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Beverly Hills is more for people who clawed their way to the top of the entertainment industry, or, increasingly, the business world in general (movie stars are getting priced out of Beverly Hills by the global rich). Their descendants will likely tend to get fancier degrees and live in more tasteful but more modest neighborhoods.

The Jewish Republican Coalition’s report goes on:

In the San Fernando Valley, the Encino-Tarzana area, with a considerable number of Jews across a variety of levels of religiosity, as well as significant Persian, ex-Soviet, and Israeli populations, also went from entirely blue to having several red precincts.

There were big swings toward Trump in parts of New York City, especially in the neighborhoods with the more unusual types of Jews, like ultra-Orthodox and ex-Soviets, rather than the more conventional Seinfeld-type Jews on the Upper West Side. (On the other hand, most voters in the New York area are concerned about crime, and the rise in public disorder in 2020 egged on by progressives is not terribly popular anywhere in the New York Tri-State area, which swung more right in 2022 than just about anywhere else in the country.)

And what about a metro area like Detroit with a more traditional (i.e., liberal) Ashkenazi population?

…Swing State Case Study:

Oakland County, MI In the key state of Michigan, precinct results are already available, as are municipal totals. The strongest Jewish populations in Michigan are in Oakland County, including Oak Park, Southfield, and Bloomfield. Unlike some of the heavily Jewish areas we have looked at elsewhere, these areas are less religious overall, much more liberal, and have a much smaller density of Jewish voters. While Harris still won these towns, these shifts were significant. Oak Park moved a net 7 points towards Trump since 2020, Bloomfield 5 points, West Bloomfield 8 points, Southfield 5 points, and Southfield Township 1 point.

So, the New Jews (Hasidim, Persians, Moroccans, Soviets, Israelis, etc.) tend to like Trump and the Old Jews (Ashkenazis whose ancestors have been here for 100 to 175 years) tend to like Kamala.

Why the difference in estimates between exit polls and precinct analysis?

In this memo, as we examine key concentrations of Jewish voters, we will demonstrate a pattern in which heavily-Jewish precincts and counties moved significantly to the right nearly across the board. If anything, not only do the large drops in the Edison and J Street polls seem implausible, but this 2 point increase in Trump support from 2020 could easily be an underestimate.

It is quite possible that the very efforts to make these national surveys representative can underestimate the highly-concentrated Jewish populations where Trump gained most, while still being fairly representative of the most lightly-attached Jews, who are spread around the country. If so, Trump’s true numbers likely met or exceeded G.H.W. Bush’s 1988 total.

In other words, Jews who live in highly Jewish neighborhoods and are more likely to have a strongly Jewish identity and to talk to other Jews a lot tend to like Trump, while Jews who live in, say, primarily Episcopalian neighborhoods (to use Himmelfarb’s classic formulation) and behave like their genteel WASP neighbors tend to find him deplorable.

There are also, due to intermarriage, an increasing number of Americans who are kind of Jewish. My guess is that they tend to be anti-Trump. For instance,

And while a J-Street sponsored poll indicated stronger support for Harris at 26%, this message testing poll paid for by a left-wing advocacy organization was produced by the same pollster who released, shortly before the election, a poll claiming their client Colin Allred was tied with Ted Cruz 46-46. Cruz won by 9 points. It also counted as “Jewish voters” those who acknowledge some Jewish ethnic background, but do not consider Judaism to be their religion. In this regard, Only 76% of respondents in the J-Street poll self-identified as being Jewish.

Determining who is a Jew is getting less clear-cut with each generation.

I suspect that what’s going on is an inversion of the Coalition of the Fringes: Trump tended to appeal more to fringier individuals, while Kamala appealed more to the now-dominant Establishment, the type of people who put up In This House We Believe signs on their nice lawns in their nice neighborhoods.

At this point, people who are part Jewish by ancestry but not really into Judaism as a religion tend to be pretty close to being the typical Establishmentarian, the kind of people who freaked out over George Floyd in 2020.

A Twitter account named @SidKhurana3607 has been publishing electoral breakdowns of interesting places, running from 2012 (the last conventional GOP candidate) through the quite strange election of 2024. I haven’t done a systematic analysis, but, generally, it looks like the more white bread the locale, the better Kamala did relative to Obama in 2012. In contrast, the more the place has some kind of distinctive and unusual ethnic tilt (e.g., it’s 35% Portuguese), the better Trump did relative to 2012.

It’s hard to describe the pattern precisely, but it’s kind of like as if the more voters get their worldview from NPR, the more they voted for Kamala relative to Obama in 2012. But the more they get their worldview from talking to their Uncle Anton and Cousin Maria (to pick some ethnic-sounding but non-Jewish names) at mama’s house on weekends, the more they voted for Trump.

Hence, the electoral division into Nice Conventional Old-Fashioned Progressive Jews for Kamala vs. Ornery Weird New-Fangled Reactionary Jews for Trump.

Hence, one reason Democrats have been so quiescent since the election: they are depressed because they’ve started to sense that their strategy of importing The Diverse to be The Great Replacement has backfired because … The Diverse tend to like Donald Trump.

Whether future Republicans will be able to reproduce the so far sui generis appeal of Trump to people who feel overlooked by the respectable mainstream media’s obsession with promoting, say, black women and transgenders is a tough question.

Campaign donations are different than votes, but they are pretty interesting. They represent the skin-in-the-game opinions of motivated, competitive, effective rich people.

The Open Secrets website posts the names of everybody who contributed even a moderate amount of money to candidates or political action committees going back through 2004.

This allows trends over time to be compared.

One way to track Jewish donors over the years would be to take the list of 29 largely Ashkenazi surnames that market researchers use to identify Jewish neighborhoods:

and look at to whom people with those surnames have donated to over the years.

I haven’t done this, but somebody better at manipulating large amounts of data could take a crack at it.

What I have done is look up the ethnic backgrounds of the top 50 donors for 2018 and 2024. (Updated: #25 Jan Koum has been corrected to Jewish and #21 Barbara Ryan to gentile, or at least I hope they have been corrected. Anyway, this exchange didn’t affect the summary results much.)

I first did this for the 2018 midterm election cycle and found that Jews played a striking role among the campaign contributor whales:

Of the $675 million the top 50 contributors gave, according to OpenSecrets 53 percent of the money went to Democratic candidates or to liberal causes, 44 percent to Republicans or conservatives, and 3 percent to independent or bipartisan concerns. …

Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.

Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34 percent from gentiles.

Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50 donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.

Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from Jewish givers.

However, Open Secrets’ data for 2024 is only updated through October 26. For example, the New York Times has reported that Elon Musk donated, in total, a quarter of a billion dollars, but Open Secrets currently reports him as giving $133 million. I’d been waiting around for final numbers to be posted, but I’ve gotten tired of it, so I’ll summarize the incomplete numbers for the top 50 political donors (all federal offices, not just for President). I no doubt got the ethnicity of several of the Top 50 wrong, but it’s not that hard to look up most of them:

I’m not sure what to make of these numbers. We know Kamala Harris did fine at fundraising overall. But here it looks like among Top 50 donors, that Republican candidates and causes did far better than did Democrats, which would be a big change from 2018, when the biggest donors tended slightly to favor Democrats and Jews contributed nearly two-thirds of the money given by the Top 50.

Comparing this list to 2018, it looks like extremely rich Democrats, especially extremely rich Jewish Democrats, were kind of down in the dumps in 2024 compared to the lower stakes 2018. (On the other hand, it appears that Kamala must have got a lot of money from the affluent if not from hyper-rich. As I said, I’m waiting for the full data to come to final conclusions.)

In contrast, rich Republicans were fired up to give.

Among the top 50 donors in 2018, Jews gave 66% of the total money, but only 39% so far in the 2024 count. (Keep in mind that these are preliminary figures and the final count for 2024 could look different.)

In 2018, Jewish Top 50 donors contributed 76% of the money given to Democrats by Top 50 Donors and 56% contributed to Republicans. In 2024, the Top 50 were more gentile, with 63% of a small level of Democratic money coming from Jews and only 9% of the large amount of Top 50 donations to Republicans coming from Jews.

I’m thinking that this sounds related to October 7. Jews seemed Self-made rich guys are immensely competitive, and rich Jews tend to be highly pro-Israel and rather ethnically loyal. As I’ve often suggested, the richest Jews tend to be from parts of the country, such as New York and Massachusetts, that have less of a college football booster tradition, so they tend to be boosters for Israel as their version of a college football team.

A number of rich Jews were extremely upset by campus protests against Israel, and did here-to-fore unexpected things like getting the black lady DEI president of Harvard fired.

When Open Secrets finally updates their data, I will track the big donors over recent election cycles and see if my theory that October 7 depressed traditional Jewish Democratic major donors holds up.