But even taking this higher turnout into account, and while recognizing that the Jewish vote may be important in some specific areas of some states in more localized elections, it's apparent that the Jewish vote is not going to make a huge difference in the coming presidential election unless there is an extremely close popular vote in specific swing states.
The clear majority of Jewish Americans identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, and we find no evidence that this has changed significantly during the Trump administration so far.
Similarly high percentages of Jews have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in all presidential elections going back to and have favored Democratic candidates by at least a plurality in elections going back much further than that.
Trump's assertion that "any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty" thus covers a very large percentage of the U.
Jewish population. In terms of "total lack of knowledge," Jews in America have by far the highest average education level of any religious group we measure, as noted earlier. These estimates are based on relatively small samples of Jews, meaning there will be some fluctuation from year to year based on sampling error -- but overall, I see no sign that Trump approval this year is higher than it was when Trump first took office.
Most of Trump's discussion of what he assumes should be Jewish support for his party and for his presidency revolves around his administration's policies toward Israel. He has followed through on a campaign promise to move the U. Presumably, American Jews are aware of Trump's actions, and the data clearly show that Jews have strongly positive views of Israel. Nevertheless, Trump's actions in support of Israel to date have done little to shift Jews' political allegiance. My recent review of the available data shows that about nine in 10 American Jews are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians.
That compares to about six in 10 of all Americans. In addition, almost half said that caring about Israel is an essential part of being Jewish with most of the rest saying it is important although not essential and nearly half reported that they had personally traveled to Israel. Trump's assertion that Jews should in essence be single-issue voters whose presidential vote is directly swayed by his statements about and policies toward Israel is apparently much too simplistic.
The majority of American Jews have voted for Democratic presidential candidates for decades and are politically liberal in their views of many domestic issues.
Those facts of political life are not going to change overnight. The consequences of Jews' majority-level disapproval of President Trump and Jews' underlying Democratic political orientation is evident in an interesting recent finding reported by Pew Research. We are welcoming, open and forward-looking. We engage with society as we find it, and lead from the front. We play an active role in building collaboration across the Jewish community and with other faiths and causes. Effective collaboration is about finding common ground and embracing, accepting or working through differences.
Working together, we can produce a result which no one person or organization could have achieved alone. As a national movement, we plan to keep growing, attract new members and support. We develop communities who wish to join us, reach people that other Jewish communities cannot or do not, and engage with all who are open, sincere and progressive in their Judaism.
The synagogue is at the heart of the community. We run more activities for more people in more places and in a greater variety of formats than ever before.
We put special value on Jewish learning, appreciating different perspectives and ways of relating to Judaism, whether it is through study, prayer, worship and other forms of social, cultural and communal activity. We affirm a love for the Land of Israel and a strong commitment to the State of Israel. We pray for her people, care about her security and wish to enact the vision of her founders of a Jewish state for all its inhabitants, at peace with its neighbours, democratic and prosperous.
We promote a two-state solution, and oppose all boycotts. Kenneth Wald: People forget that the Democratic party was, for many years, the party of the South, the party of slaveholders, and Republicans were generally more progressive in that period of time.
Jeremy Shere: But Jewish support for Republicans was not monolithic. Depending on where Jews lived, they voted for candidates whose policies appeared to be good for Jews. Beth Wenger: So Jews voted across the political spectrum, and sometimes not consistently. So you might vote one party for governor, because you liked that governor, and you might vote for another party for mayor. Jews voted Socialist, they voted Democratic, they voted Republican. Jeremy Shere: A major turning point in American Jewish political affiliation came with the nomination of Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for president in Kenneth Wald: Smith had been governor of New York.
And if you ever heard a recording of Al Smith, he did not sound like a high-status, mainline Protestant. He sounded like the Irish Catholic kid from the streets of New York who he was. And in general, he helped make the Democratic party more open to other immigrants with similar cultures. Jeremy Shere: The late s was the height of Prohibition, a policy championed by many of the mainline Protestants who ran the Republican party. But Smith came out of a saloon culture, and, like many of the immigrants who came to the United States after the Civil War, including Jews, he was not hostile to alcohol.
And as Wald notes, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were generally poor and lived in tenement slums, also liked that Smith had many Jewish advisors who promoted programs to help those in need. Kenneth Wald: The Eastern European Jews who came over later, a sizable portion were working class, factory workers, industrial workers and the like, and they were in real economic distress. And the Democrats seemed to believe that it was the job of the state, the government, to address that distress, to remedy it.
And Smith really was the first one who did that. And almost immediately, Jews began to shift in a Democratic direction. Jeremy Shere: The shift continued and intensified in the s, with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Many American Jews were active on the Socialist left, and Roosevelt's New Deal programs aimed at helping the working class and the poor attracted not only Democrats, but also Socialists. Beth Wenger: The American Labor Party endorsed Roosevelt and, in time, came to function almost as if it were an arm of the Democratic party in some ways.
And it led many Socialists to the Roosevelt vote, to the point where the Forverts, the Socialist paper, endorsed Roosevelt, which would have been unheard of, for the socialist paper to endorse the Democratic candidate. Jeremy Shere: Jews supported Roosevelt in large numbers and more generally became staunch supporters of the Democratic party.
Jeremy Shere: Wald notes that even though the Democrats were still the party of segregation, Jews were willing to overlook that dark detail, especially since they came to see the Republicans as increasingly hostile to Jewish concerns and interests. Support for Democrats remained strong throughout the next several decades, but began to soften during the late s. As we covered in the episode on Black-Jewish relations from Season Two, at least some American Jewish leaders supported Great Society programs such as affirmative action, or at least saw them as an opportunity to focus on specifically Jewish interests, such as establishing Jewish day schools.
But as Wald notes, overall, American Jews were split roughly on affirmative action and other programs that afforded special entitlements to groups based on race and other designations. Kenneth Wald: Jews did so because they, as classical liberals supported equality of opportunity, and they saw affirmative action as a different kind of equality by results, which seemed to them to violate, again, the principles of classic liberalism. Kenneth Wald: Many people active in labor unions moved away from the Democratic party, white southerners who still had been in the party moved away from the Democratic party, and Jews, in a sense, were part of that shift.
But at the same time, it's important, when we talk about Jews moving away from the Democratic party, to note that in most of the elections in that period, at the national level, Jews still voted two-to-one Democratic over Republican. Jeremy Shere: By the mid s, a solid majority of American Jews still supported Democrats over Republicans, but that support was not as overwhelming as it had been. They looked at what had happened to the civil rights movement and to the apparent support for the Vietnamese communists among many of the young, and they just didn't like what they saw.
Kenneth Wald: And also they argued that the Republicans were more supportive of the military and the use of the military, which would be helpful to the State of Israel. So they made a very strong argument that Jews should be voting Republican.
Jeremy Shere: But the neoconservative movement never succeeded in convincing anything close to a majority of American Jews to switch teams and join the Republican side. Whatever pull the neoconservative argument had was effectively dashed by the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, which cost the Republicans control of the House and Senate in the elections.
The Republicans cast about for a way to regain power and they found it in the writing of conservative journalist Kevin Phillips.
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