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.