2024 Election Post-Mortem: Jews

Is the alliance between Jewish voters and the Democrats weakening?

Not-so-fun fact among American religion and politics - it’s almost impossible to accurately describe the voting patterns of any non-Christian group before 2008. That’s something that I don’t think that the average person really understands about the kind of work that you see on this newsletter. I’ve written about this in a post a couple of months ago entitled, Why I Can't Tell You How Quakers (or Unitarians) Voted in 2024. To quickly summarize - twenty years ago, survey sample sizes weren’t that big. A total N of 3,000 was just gargantuan.

Here’s why that’s a problem. If a survey is doing a good job of random sampling, the share of respondents who are Jewish should be about 2%. It may wiggle up and down a bit, but that’s a pretty good benchmark. Those horse race polls you see on the nightly news before an election? Their sample is almost always around 1000. So, quick math here: 2% of 1,000 is 20 people. You can’t extrapolate anything at all from a sample of 20 people. That’s only slightly better than just asking random people on the street who they voted for and why.

Things have changed because we have the Cooperative Election Study now. The number of Jews in the sample in 2024? It was 1,319 (weighted). Yeah, there are more Jews in the CES than there are total respondents in most of the polls you see plastered on the screen when watching CNN or MSNBC. And what’s nice is that the samples have been that large now for about five election cycles. So, let me tell the story of Jewish voters at the ballot box since 2008.

Welp, this graph is certainly not the most dramatic data visualization that I have ever produced. I was pretty stunned to see just how steady the Jewish vote has been for the last sixteen years. When Obama ran in 2008, 70% of Jews supported him. He did just a little bit worse in his reelection campaign in 2012, losing about five points of support. When Clinton was at the top of the ticket, she basically got back to that 70% mark and so did Biden in 2020. The 2024 contest between Harris and Trump looked a whole lot like what happened in 2012 - the Democrat got 65% and the Republican got about a third of the Jewish vote.

Maybe what stands out here is no matter how much the country has changed socially, religiously, and politically - none of that has really shifted the overall relationship between Jews and the Democratic party. They put up four different candidates during this time period - none did worse than 65% and none managed to move above 70%. For what it’s worth, this is why it’s hard to work in the media business. Your editor sends you a message about how <BLANK> may shift the Jewish vote in 2024 and they need 1200 words about it tomorrow. Reporters have to file stories that their editors assign, even if there isn’t really anything there.

Let me even go a layer beyond the Jewish vote and look at specific Jewish traditions. I can only provide estimates for three groups: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews because of smaller sample sizes. But I feel pretty good about these calculations because the sample sizes are almost always at least 100 respondents and oftentimes several hundred in a subgroup.

Argh, well that’s not super compelling either. Reform Jews are typically seen as the most left-leaning flavor of American Judaism and that is certainly confirmed by looking at their voting patterns in recent years. About 75% of them voted for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016. Biden and Harris have both done slightly better at 80% of the Reform vote. Conservative Jews are clearly less Democratic than their Reform cousins. And I do think that there’s a bit of a story forming here, but it’s pretty subtle - Trump received 42% of their votes in 2024, which was six points higher than in 2020 and up 11 points from 2016. It’s still important to point out that Harris bested Trump by fourteen points among conservative Jews, but that gap narrowed.

The Orthodox numbers are harder to parse because there’s just a lot of noise in the results. This is likely due to a smaller sample size. For instance, in a total sample of 60,000 there were just 100 Orthodox Jews. I mean, I think it’s very fair to say that this group leans toward the GOP but it’s just hard to know for sure how big that margin is because of so much variation from election to election.

Of course, there’s always this looming problem when talking about Jews in the United States. Is it an ethnic group or a religious group? Or is it both? There are clearly lots of Jews who don’t go to synagogue that much. In the 2024 data, just over half of all people who identify as Jewish say that they attend religious services less than once a year while just 13% are going to synagogue on a weekly basis. This could lead to some real differences at the ballot box. I’ve been writing about the fact that American religion is almost conservative by default now, but is that true for Jews as well?

My first look at this graph didn’t lead to any really strong conclusions, if I were being honest. For instance, the voting pattern for Jews who never go to a house of worship is pretty boring. Somewhere between 20 and 25% of them vote for the Republican. There’s no trend line moving in either direction there. That’s also pretty evident when you look at the “seldom attenders.” Republicans tend to get about a quarter of their votes. That was true for Romney and Trump. You see this with yearly attenders and monthly attenders, as well. These four categories make up about 85% of Jews and their voting behavior hasn’t changed in any meaningful way.

But look at the weekly attenders, though! Now we have a little story emerging that is worth keeping an eye on in the future. Both McCain and Romney managed to get about half the votes of the most religiously active Jews. That’s twice the share of those who are less active. But then Trump got on the ballot and weekly attending Jews were not too pleased. About a third of them voted for him in 2016 and 2020. In 2024 that changed and we returned to the norms from 2008 and 2012 - about half of the most observant Jews voted for the Republican again. Whatever turned them off to Trump earlier has now dissipated.

Another thread that I wanted to pull on is in the area of age. There’s a narrative bouncing around out there that Trump has made some big gains with young adults and that seems like it could be a possibility for young Jews, too.

What really struck me here was just how little age impacts the vote choice of Jews. If you compare the voting patterns of Jews who were 18-34 years old to those who were at least 65, the gaps are incredibly small. This is definitely not a situation in which ‘old people are more conservative.’ The difference is maybe five percentage points across the last five election cycles. What I do want to call to your attention though is that Trump’s support is clearly curvilinear with Jews - he did best with the 35-49 and 50-64 age groups. He did worse with the oldest and the youngest. That’s worth thinking about a bit more.

One other thing that I didn’t notice at first glance, but emerged as I stared at this graph - Trump clearly made some significant gains between 2020 and 2024. In every single age group he improved his vote share in a statistically significant way. He was up seven points with the youngest Jews, 12 points among Jews 35-49, 9 points among those 50-64 and seven points among the oldest Jews. There were a significant number of Jews who got over their aversion to Trump in the last couple of years.

I would be remiss not to mention the fact that the conflict between Israel and Hamas was certainly in the background of the 2024 election. How much it shifted votes among Jews is pretty hard to parse, but as mentioned previously - the aggregate totals didn’t move that much. But the CES did ask a question about the conflict specifically. It gave folks a list of potential ways that the United States could intervene and they could select all that they agreed with. I am going to show you how four groups were thinking about the conflict - the entire sample, Democrats, Republicans, and Jews.

One thing needs to be made clear: the average American is not okay with the United States taking an isolationist position on the conflict. Just 22% said that we shouldn’t get involved and 96% of Jews think that the U.S. should do something. There were a couple of options that were clearly not popular with the public. Almost no one believes that supplying arms to Hamas is a good idea. But then that was also the case with the United States trying to negotiate peace between the two groups.

Okay, so the public does want the U.S. to get involved somehow but not in those ways. What are some avenues that we should pursue? There’s support for two paths forward: sending humanitarian aid and helping the region rebuild after the conflict is over. In both cases 46% of the entire sample were in favor. Note how little variation there is between those two options, too. Democrats tend to be about 15 points more likely to favor intervention compared to Republicans.

Where do the opinions of Jews stand in stark opposition to the rest of the country? Providing arms to Israel. In the entire sample just 26% supported this path forward compared to 59% of Jews. Jews were also 27 points more likely to say that the U.S. should provide non-combat support than the average American. The last scenario with a huge gap was putting American soldiers in the conflict zone - 40% of Jews supported this idea, which was about double the rate of the entire population.

So, what do I make of all of this? The Jewish vote is a Democratic vote. That was true in 2008 and it was also the case in 2024. The level of support has not materially changed, either. I do see some possible evidence that the most religiously engaged Jews warmed up to Donald Trump in 2024 but that just meant that they returned to their voting patterns in both 2008 and 2012. I just don’t see any way you can look at these graphs and think that the Republicans have managed to crack the code of the Jewish vote, though.

Code for this post can be found here.

---

One more thing!

Over the last several months,

Tony Jones

and I have been working on a new project—a website that brings together our research on the religious “nones.” We’re soft launching right now and we’d love your help.

Here’s the link:

https://www.thenonesproject.com/

We’ve put together a short survey that asks for just a few minutes of your time clicking around the site and then sharing your impressions. What worked, what didn’t, what was confusing or compelling? It’s meant to help us catch anything we missed before opening it to the wider world.

Here’s the survey link

If you leave your email at the end, you’ll be entered to win signed copies of both my and Ryan’s most recent books. (You're still free to give feedback anonymously if you’d prefer.)

You can expect a lot more content based on this new dataset coming out over the next 12 months. Tony and I have planned webinars and I will be doing a regular series based on The Nones Project on this Substack, as well.

Thanks for your time and thoughtful eyes. We really appreciate it.