John Podhoretz
Commentary, June 29, 2024
“The decline in support for Biden among Jews is real, and if that decline is dramatic, it could make the difference in the key(stone) state.”
Here’s a potential political earthquake story that has nothing to do with the debate. Siena College, which specializes in polling in New York state, has a survey with a gobsmacking result: It finds Trump getting 46 percent of the Jewish vote vs. 52 percent for Joe Biden. In 2020, according to the Associated Press’s VoteCast, 68 percent of American Jews supported Biden, while 30 percent went for Trump. (Pew had it 70-27 for Biden.) New York’s Jews make up about 30 percent of the overall Jewish population in the United States, and the Jewish vote nationwide is thought to follow the same pattern as the Jewish vote in New York.
If this were to hold, Trump would receive the highest level of Jewish support of any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. Jonathan Sarna, the dean of American Jewish historians, notes that the Jewish vote in presidential elections became a Democratic possession as early as 1928, when Jews cast ballots overwhelmingly for their governor, Al Smith, against Herbert Hoover. Over the nine decades following, only Dwight Eisenhower (in 1956) and Ronald Reagan (in 1980) got as much as 40 percent of the Jewish vote.
This potential sea-change will likely not hand Trump a victory in New York in November, but here’s the deal: The state that may decide the election is Pennsylvania. It just so happens Pennsylvania has nearly 300,000 Jewish adults. Jews are said to vote in huge numbers, somewhere around 80 percent.
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