This article was originally published Tuesday night and updated Wednesday morning.
Exit poll results showed 79% of Jewish voters backing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, compared with 21% who said they’d voted for the Republican, former President Donald Trump. More responses are still being added to the poll, which was conducted by a consortium of national media outlets, and the results could change.
If the current split holds, it would represent yet another election cycle in which Republican claims that Jews would flock to their candidate because of Israel or antisemitism did not pan out.
Edison Research, which conducts the poll for the consortium, surveyed voters in 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin — and not the two states that are home to the most Jews, New York and California. Results released Tuesday night and Wednesday morning did not break down responses by religion in individual states like Pennsylvania or Michigan, battlegrounds where both campaigns had heavily appealed to Jewish voters and where some had told pollsters and journalists they were considering switching parties to vote for Trump.
Fox News conducted a separate exit poll that showed 67% of Jews voting for Harris and 31% for Trump. Another poll focused on Jews and done for the liberal pro-Israel group J Street is slated for release on Thursday.
Voters in the national poll were also asked about U.S. support for Israel and divided almost evenly into three groups: 32% said the support is too strong, 30% not strong enough and 31% about right. But there were stark partisan differences on that question. For those who thought the U.S. was too supportive of Israel, 68% said they’d voted for Harris, while 81% of those who thought support was lacking had backed Trump.
The question about Israel came after more than a year of war in the Middle East that has eroded its support around the world, including among leftists in the United States. It is what some analysts predicted would drive some Jewish Democrats away from Harris this year. Conservative groups pushed hard to draw more Jews toward Trump, with the Republican Jewish Coalition spending more than $15 million on television advertisements backing the former president.
Trump and his supporters argued that he was a supporter of Israel and would take a firmer stance against the pro-Palestinian protests that many Jews see as antisemitic. In contrast, Harris and Democratic surrogates — including Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband — pointed to Trump’s association with antisemitic figures and offensive comments, including his suggestion that Jews who did not support him were “disloyal” and should be blamed if he loses.
In a separate exit poll question about which issues had most motivated their choice for president, 4% of voters overall named foreign policy, which ranked fifth behind the state of democracy (34%), the state of the economy (31%), abortion (14%) and immigration (11%). Of those who chose foreign policy, 54% said they’d voted for Trump and 39% for Harris.
Experts use exit polls to analyze elections by demographic groups and understand how different voters made their choices. But the horserace questions are not always accurate, as some respondents do not tell the truth about who they chose.
If Harris indeed earns 77% of the Jewish vote, her support would come close to matching the past high-water mark of 80% who backed Bill Clinton in 1992.
Between 1996 and 2008, the Democratic candidates for the White House got between 74% to 79% of the Jewish vote. In 2012, when President Barack Obama was up for reelection, he lost ground among Jews, and 30% supported his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
In 2016, 71% of Jewish voters supported Hillary Clinton over Trump; in 2020, the national exit poll did not gather enough responses from Jews to report their voting breakdown, though an alternative measure created by Brandeis University, using different methodology, estimated it as 70% for Joe Biden and 30% for Trump.
Exit polls generally miss the roughly 25% of American Jews who identify as both agnostic or atheist and also Jewish, a group that tends to be more politically liberal, meaning they may undercount support for Democrats.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
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