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By David Rosenberg, World Israel News
Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have underperformed with American Jewish voters nationwide in Tuesday’s presidential election, despite initial exit polling indicating she received the highest percentage of the Jewish vote of any candidate in decades.
Preliminary exit polling data, collected by Edison Research, found that among American Jews, Harris received 79% of the vote, a figure which, if true, would be the highest recorded since Al Gore’s failed 2000 bid for the White House.
However, as noted by World Israel News, the initial data was only available for 10 states considered to be in play in Tuesday’s election.
With the bulk the American Orthodox Jewish population – a subset of the American Jewish community which tends to skew to the Right – residing in states not included in the poll, the data ignored major shifts in Donald Trump’s favor in solidly Democratic states.
More expansive exit polling data, released by Fox News, found that Harris won just 66% of the Jewish vote, with Trump winning 32%.
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While Harris led the former president by a margin of greater than two-to-one among American Jewish voters, the results mark a continuation of a decline for the Democratic party in presidential contests, and the lowest level of Jewish support for a Democratic presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis’ failed 1988 presidential bid.
According to the 2020 Associated Press VoteCast polling data, Biden received 68% of the Jewish vote that year, with Fox News’ exit polling showing the president received 69% of the vote. Other sources, included a Pew Research Center study, put the figure at 70%.
The shift in the Jewish vote was largest in New York and New Jersey – both states where Orthodox Jews make up a significant part of the overall Jewish population.
In New York State, home to the largest Jewish community in North America, the Harris won just 55% of the Jewish vote, down from 63% who backed Biden in 2020, while Trump rose from 37% of the vote in 2020 to 45% in 2024.
In neighboring New Jersey, Harris won 65% of the Jewish vote compared to Trump’s 33%, a net eight-point swing in the margin from 2020, when Biden led Trump by 40 points, 70% to 30%.
California Jews also swung towards Trump, though Harris still won over three-quarters of the state’s Jewish vote, 76% to Trump’s 21%. Four years earlier, Biden won 82% of the California Jewish vote, to Trump’s 18%.
In the battleground states of Florida and Pennsylvania, however, no significant shift was observed.
Harris carried Florida’s Jewish vote by the same margin as Biden did in 2020, 56% to 43%.
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic standard-bearer’s vote share slipped by one point compared to 2020, falling from 72% to 71%, while Trump’s rose from 26% to 28%.
