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In the run-up to the 2024 elections, we at Moment took stock of our 20 Jewish Political Voices Project (JPVP) participants—a cross-sample of the Jewish electorate by gender, geography and religiosity (or lack thereof). We had followed their political leanings through the entirety of the 2024 cycle, so we wondered aloud: “Is the roller coaster ride nearing an end? Will the wild campaign loop-de-loops come to a halt on Election Day,” we queried, “or are we in for more twists and turns?”
For our JPVP minyan and everybody else (regardless of who you voted for), the answer post-election is clear: “Let’s Twist Again”!
“It was actually pretty shocking,” says Chesky Blau, who voted for President-elect Donald Trump along with a majority of his fellow Hasidim in Brooklyn, NY. “I never believed this would be the result.”
On the other side—for the Kamala Harris voters—that result yielded despair laced with an indefatigable determination to persevere. “I was upset, confused and surprised,” said Diana Leygerman of Bucks County, PA, northeast of Philadelphia—a swing region in a swing state. “I thought she was going to win the whole time. I had very little doubt.”
But even though Leygerman would love nothing better than to check out of politics and political activism in the new Trump era, “that’s not how my brain works, unfortunately.”
Among 19 JPVP participants (we had one dropout), four voted for Trump. That works out to be 21 percent, in line with the national breakdown of the Jewish electorate.
According to a poll of 1,000-plus Jewish voters by the DC-based Mellman Group for the non-partisan Jewish Electorate Institute, Harris won 71 percent against Trump’s 26 percent.
Polls are inexact, of course, and results vary organization by organization. But the broad brushstrokes of polling concluded that Jews voted more decisively for Joe Biden in 2020 than for Harris in 2024.
For instance, a poll for the liberal Jewish organization J Street put the Harris margin at 45 percentage points—71 percent to 26 percent. The result was the same as that of the Mellman Group. But the same J Street poll found Biden winning 77 percent of the Jewish vote against Trump’s 21 percent—a whopping 56-percentage-point margin for Biden.
“There’s no question that the Harris-Walz ticket got the overwhelming majority of Jewish voters,” said Mark Mellman, a prominent Democratic pollster and strategist who is the CEO of the Mellman Group. “There’s also a lot of evidence to suggest there was some erosion in that support over historic highs.”
Why?
“The erosion was, importantly, around the issue of Israel,” Mellman says.
For Jews who ranked Israel as a top issue, President Biden had a 50-year-plus record of support. Harris, on the other hand, walked a tightrope between defense of Israel’s “right to defend itself” and calls for a cease-fire, as well as pleas for Israel to do more to aid war-stricken Gaza. The Harris campaign believed her marriage to Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, would give her a measure of added support among Jewish voters.
Trump, on the other hand, said Israel would cease to exist if Harris won the White House and that any American Jew who voted for Harris “should have their head examined.” He also said Jewish voters would bear responsibility if he lost the election.
In the end, the Mellman survey showed Harris won Jews who identified as Reform, Conservative or unaffiliated by large margins. But she lost the Orthodox vote by more than 50 percentage points (74 percent for Trump and 22 percent for Harris). “Orthodox” in the Mellman poll encompasses modern Orthodox as well as ultra-Orthodox “Haredim.”
Mellman did not conduct a similar poll in 2020, so comparisons are inexact. But a Fox News exit poll in New York state found 45 percent of Jewish voters picked Trump in 2024, compared to 30 percent in 2020.
“All the Orthodox in Brooklyn went for Trump, not that it made a difference (in the statewide vote, which favored Harris),” said Blau, for whom Israel was the main issue. “They say it was even more than last time [2020].”
Among Jews who support Israel and are not critical of its policies, Trump won 65 percent compared to 28 percent for Harris, the Mellman survey found. But among those who support Israel while remaining critical of some policies, 77 percent were for Harris, and Trump won 21 percent.
About 8 percent of America’s 7.5 million Jews consider themselves Orthodox. But several studies suggest that with high birthrates, Orthodox Jews could become dominant in 40 to 50 years. Yale researcher Edieal Pinker in 2021 concluded that within 50 years, the share of the Orthodox population would rise to 29 percent, while the Reform and Conservative populations would drop to 39 percent.
So, what now? What does a second Trump presidency portend for the country, for Americans and for Jewish Americans in particular?
Our JPVP participants had stark differences of opinion over what the 2024 election was about, and what the path forward should look like. Most Harris voters observed that her main virtue was that she was “not Trump” and that she would uphold American democracy. Those views dovetail with Mellman’s findings. Now, above all else, these voters plan to resist “normalization”—treating Trump as a normal opposition president rather than as a convicted felon who faced jail time had he been convicted of charges related to the 2020 election. (Those cases evaporated with Trump’s electoral victory.)
The JPVP Trump voters see Trump as the guarantor-in-chief of Israel.
“What I want is for Israel to be encouraged to win, period,” says Abby Schachter, a modern Orthodox conservative writer who lives in Pittsburgh.
“We understand that our strategic allies have to be allowed to win, and we’re not going to tell them how to do it because we think we know better.”
For disappointed Harris voters, Schachter says: “Take a deep breath! I simply don’t believe that America is that fragile. A little bit of calm is required, because hyperventilating about a presidential race does not help anyone.”
But the new normal is something JPVP Harris voters will oppose—as much as possible.
“I’m going to continue to be as active as I can in my community,” says Leygerman of Bucks County, PA. “Anything that the Trump administration throws at us, hopefully there’ll be enough pushback.” But based on his four previous years in office, Leygerman says her expectation this time is “pure chaos.”