By Ron Kampeas
Current Vice President and 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks to several thousand attendees at her presidential campaign rally at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Romulus, Michigan, Aug. 7, 2024. (Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — American Jews plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris by a wide margin, according to a new survey by a Jewish Democratic group.
The survey also found that 87% of American Jewish voters support the Biden administration’s efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war that would release the Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
The survey, released Monday (Sept. 9) by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, shows 68% of Jewish voters planning to vote for Harris, the Democratic nominee, and 25% planning to vote for Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee.
The survey indicates that a volatile season of campaigning, including heated exchanges over which party is worse for American Jews, has hardly budged the Jewish electorate. It also suggests that extensive Republican efforts to draw greater numbers of Jewish voters after Oct. 7 have not significantly moved the needle.
The survey shows Jewish voters favoring the Democratic candidate in slightly greater numbers than they did in April, when President Joe Biden was the presumptive nominee. That poll, conducted by the JDCA-affiliated Jewish Electorate Institute, working with the same company, GBAO, showed Biden besting Trump 64%-24% among Jewish voters. Harris’ 4% advantage over Biden is barely outside the 3.5 percentage-point margin of error for both polls.
Democrats have for decades commanded majorities among Jewish voters in at least the mid-60s, in many instances topping 70%. In 2020, one poll by the Republican Jewish Coalition found that Jews voted for Biden over Trump by about 60% to 30%. A poll the same year by the liberal J Street found a notably different breakdown: 77% to 21%.
Monday’s poll found that Harris also does better than Biden did when respondents are asked to choose between her and Trump, with third-party candidates such as Jill Stein and Cornel West removed from the equation. She scores 72% to Trump’s 25% while Biden scored 67% to Trump’s 26%. The highest-profile third-party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Nationally, polls indicate that the race is neck-and-neck with less than two months to go until Election Day.
Both parties have launched Jewish outreach operations and both have ramped up attacks on the other party as beholden to antisemites as the Nov. 5 election nears. A JDCA ad last week linked Trump to Adolf Hitler. Trump, addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition last week, told his audience that they “will never survive” if Harris is elected.
The back and forth was part of a season of intensely fraught rhetoric; Democrats during their convention in August said outright that Trump is an antisemite, an escalation from their previous claim that he enables antisemitism. Trump’s claims that any Jew voting for Democrats is mentally unstable have become a frequent occurrence.
Republicans saw an opening this year to make gains among Jews, long a goal of the party, as many Jews who identified as progressives have found themselves alienated by the reaction to Oct. 7 and the Israel-Hamas war among people they thought were their ideological allies. And as pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests have swept across university campuses, cast by Republicans as progressive redoubts, the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives launched multiple investigations into allegations of antisemitism at universities.
The war Hamas launched against Israel last Oct. 7 has shaped how both parties campaign among Jews. Democrats have tried to mollify their traditional Jewish constituents with reassurances that the party is not drifting away from Israel, as well as progressives and Arab Americans who want the party to reduce its support for Israel.
At their respective conventions, both parties featured families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Democrats resisted calls from some progressives to also include a pro-Palestinian voice.
The survey found that Israel ranked ninth when respondents were presented with a number of issues and asked to pick their top two — a placing typical of surveys going back decades, and seemingly unchanged by the war. Nonetheless, 75% of respondents said they were attached to Israel, with 43% saying they are very attached and 32% saying they were somewhat attached.
The top-ranked issue respondents listed in this poll was the future of democracy. The second-ranked issue was abortion rights, following the 2022 repeal of federal abortion projections by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
Antisemitism was ranked fifth among respondents, tied with national security and foreign policy. Asked if they were concerned about antisemitism, 91% said they were, within the margin of error of the 93% who said they were concerned in April. Of the 91%, 66% said they were very concerned and 25% said they were somewhat concerned.
The survey also shows Jews are highly motivated to vote — 82% of respondents rated themselves 10 on a one to 10 motivational scale, substantially higher than the 66% overall turnout in 2020, which itself was relatively high for U.S. voters. That factor, and the presence of substantial Jewish communities in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina, have spurred both parties to lavish campaign attention on Jewish voters.
The poll by GBAO, a company that polls for liberal and Democratic-affiliated groups, reached 800 voters between Aug. 27 and Sept. 1 via text-to-web, a system in which potential respondents are reached via text message and then directed to an internet poll.