For as long as I’ve been around Washington and pro-Israel politics (over 50 years) Republicans have been predicting a mass exodus of Jewish voters from the Democratic Party to theirs. The talk is even louder this year in the wake of the war in Gaza.
Jews are mad at President Joe Biden and ready to desert him, according to the Republican narrative, for holding back the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs in an effort to pressure the Netanyahu government to call off a massive assault on Rafah, where the Hamas leadership is believed hiding in tunnels and surrounded by Israeli hostages. Republicans are hoping anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations by leftists will help drive Jews to vote Republican.
I’m reminded of a sign I see on the Belt Parkway every time I leave Brooklyn: Fuhgeddaboudit.
It isn’t going to happen for several good reasons, including the Republican policy agenda, Israel, Jewish priorities, and Donald Trump.
That doesn’t mean Democrats aren’t worried about this year’s elections. Biden is under pressure from progressives in his party to get tougher on Israel and from others complaining he’s too tough. He faces problems among core Democratic voters like Blacks, Muslims, and progressives because of the ongoing war.
Political observers say the greatest threat to Biden’s reelection is not that most of those will vote for Trump but that voters will just stay home on November 5, which is almost as bad.
Republicans hope their message of love and support for Israel, particularly its right-wing government, will appeal to Jewish voters at a time when Democrats are divided, with many progressives harshly critical of Israel’s conduct in the war. A group of 13 Senate Democrats, including two Jews, are demanding restrictions on military aid to Israel.
Israel is not a high priority for American Jewish voters
But several other factors will likely prevent any significant shift to the GOP. Years of polling have shown Israel is not high on the policy agenda for Jewish voters. Instead, key domestic issues drive Jewish voting, and on these the Republican Party is rapidly moving even further from the Jewish mainstream.
Most Jewish voters strongly oppose the Republican approach on issues like health care, social security and Medicare, education, the economy, church-state separation, guns, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, racism, foreign policy, and immigration. And on nearly all of those, the differences are so stark as to be determinative.
IT IS STILL unclear what impact the Gaza war will have on American voters. Immediately following October 7, there was a tidal wave of support for Israel, but after seven months of war, thousands of civilian Palestinian casualties, including women and children, and a humanitarian crisis, the sympathy has shrunken.
The war in all its gory detail plays out daily in the media. This week a group of Israeli settlers attacked and vandalized a Jordanian convoy of 98 trucks carrying food and relief supplies to Gaza for the third time this month.
The war has deeply divided Israel itself and strained relations with allies, from America to Europe to its new friends in the Arab world. Rebuilding that, like rebuilding Gaza, will be long, difficult, and painful.
Another factor keeping Jews who traditionally vote Democratic from making the exodus is the GOP’s Chaos Caucus. The House Republican conference is dominated by extreme conservatives whose aversion to compromise has rendered this Congress unable to legislate.
They’ve been consumed with trying to impeach Biden but have been unable to find any high crimes and misdemeanors to charge him with. Their latest is to impeach him for withholding large bombs from Israel. It’s really about avenging Trump’s impeachments for blackmailing the president of Ukraine and sparking an insurrection.
IMMIGRATION IS a top Republican issue. When the Senate produced a strong bipartisan border security proposal, Trump ordered it shelved because he wanted to use the failure to enact such legislation as a campaign issue against Democrats. Instead, they impeached Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish immigrant himself and child of Holocaust survivors, to punish the Biden administration for not meeting their border security demands. The move died in the Senate.
At the heart of this issue is the Great Replacement Theory, the racist and xenophobic view that immigration brings “others” – like Jews, Latinos, and Blacks – to replace Euro-heritage stock, register them to vote, and thus take over their white Christian country.
That was the message neo-Nazi demonstrators were chanting at Charlottesville – “Jews will not replace us” – and whom Trump called “fine people.”
This is the same former president who hosted Hitler fanboys Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, at his Florida home and then accused the Democratic Party of being “a full-blown anti-Israel, antisemitic, pro-terrorist cabal.”
The GOP consistently attracts about a quarter of Jewish voters, most of whom are Orthodox or political conservatives who prefer the low tax, small government, laissez-faire approach to business regulation. Its prime voter base is white evangelical Christians.
Trump likes to boast about all he’s done for Israel, and he questions Jewish loyalty for not showing appreciation by voting for him, but the reality is he did it to please white evangelical Christians. They are about 30% of all voters and vote overwhelmingly Republican. By comparison, Jews are about 2% of the population, although they vote in higher percentages than any ethnic group.
Republicans lately have been enthusiastic about condemning antisemitism, which they see as driven by leftists and students, but they’re “declining to condemn and punish” it within their own party, preferring to argue it’s a Democratic problem, according to Roll Call.
At the heart of today’s GOP Jewish problem is Trump himself. He has a long history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes, comments, dual loyalty accusations, and dog whistles for his followers.
His Rosh Hashanah message last year was a scathing attack on “liberal Jews,” accusing them of having “voted to destroy America” by not supporting him. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistakes.”
Spreading hate is a Trump specialty. He may have told Jewish contributors, “I love Israel,” but on his Truth Social site, he posted Biden “HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people.” Any Jew voting for Biden or Democrats needs their “head examined.”
That’s the kind of love that will keep Jews in the Democratic Party for a long time.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee legislative director.