Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Nov. 5, 2024
“… if you want to explain why Democrats are likely to get more than 60% of the Jewish vote, the answer lies in their education and economic status more than anything else.”
Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is named the winner of the 2024 presidential election, there’s one consequence of the contest about which we can already be sure. America’s two major political parties have largely exchanged identities, and this year’s race not only confirmed a trend that has been in motion since 2016 but accelerated it. Yet one of the interesting sidebars to this momentous shift concerns one group that has, for the most part, stood still. Most Jews are staying exactly where they’ve always been inside the tent of the Democratic Party. The interesting question: How can a group that claims to be largely motivated by what it considers to be the quest for social justice rationalize being on the other side of the political aisle from most working-class Americans?
While there’s a chance that there will be a real shift in the Jewish vote in 2024, the odds are that when the various exit polls claiming to break down the numbers are published, they will show that the overwhelming majority of them once again voted for the Democrats. While all those polls should be taken with more than a shovel-full of salt, especially those commissioned by either the Democrats or Republicans, there’s little reason to believe that Jewish voters are going to change the habits of a lifetime just at the moment when the party to which most of them feel loyalty has become such a perfect sociological fit.
One of the most under-reported and least-understood stories of the last decade is the realignment of the Democrats and Republicans largely along class lines.
The word “realignment” has usually only been used in the past by political historians to describe monumental changes in which one party or another seized an overwhelming majority over their opponents. One example was in 1932 when Democrats under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt exploited the pain of the Great Depression to discredit the GOP and gain a stranglehold on Washington for generations, winning the White House for six of the next eight contests and controlling the House of Representatives for all but four of the next 60 years. … [To read the full article, click here]
