What American Jews want from the midterms
Vox · L · trust 57/100
Though a small electorate, Jewish voters are being pushed to the center of political debates this midterm cycle.
Gift Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander holds a Muslim-Jewish unity campaign rally with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Palestinian activist Moshen Mahdaw as Lander campaigned for the New York 10th Congressional District on June 14, 2026, in New York City. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images Christian Paz is a correspondent at Vox, where he covers national politics and American religion. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic’s politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election. There’s a lot of discussion about Jewish voters in politics this cycle.
With Democrats embroiled in loud arguments over Israel and Gaza, Republicans have been hoping to capture more of the Jewish vote by linking criticism of Israel to antisemitism. “How a Jewish person can vote for a Democrat is beyond me,” President Donald Trump said last month. His administration has made cracking down on anti-Israel campus activists — a top early priority — and has called Democrats “ Palestinian ” or “ jihadists .”
Meanwhile, Democrats have pointed to the rise of openly antisemitic influencers within the conservative movement, which has become a divisive topic on the right that also runs into debates over Israel , as a pressing threat to Jews.
But what do Jewish voters themselves actually want? That’s a nuanced question, and one that we have fresh polling and voting data on to help us dissect this cycle.
American Jews aren’t a large voting bloc — just over 2 percent of the population — but there are also significant communities in some key swing states and competitive districts. As a matter of partisan politics, Jews have historically voted Democratic by wide margins, but Republicans have long hoped to peel them off, often by emphasizing their support for Israel. Though it’s been a common refrain from pro-Israel and Republican activists for decades that a GOP realignment was just around the corner , it wasn’t until the 2024 presidential election that these voices got a firm boost. Nationally, and in local communities, Jewish support for the Democratic Party seemed to drop slightly .
Elections since then have been difficult to parse. In last year’s New York City mayoral election, for example, Zohran Mamdani won about 33 percent of Jewish voters , compared to the 63 percent that went for Andrew Cuomo in a race where divisions over Israel and antisemitism featured strongly. In the primary, many Cuomo voters also backed Mamdani ally Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive who was sharply critical of Israel — and who went on to easily defeat Rep. Dan Goldman in a congressional primary in a heavily Jewish district this year while running to his left on Israel issues. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, left-wing Democrat Analilia Mejia won a special election for a House seat while harshly criticizing Israel. But her candidacy led some Jewish strongholds to swing massively toward Republicans .
So, what happens to the Jewish vote in the 2026 midterms? This segment of voters is no monolith, experts say, and finding the “right” way to talk about Israel is no guarantor of electoral success. Polls show Jewish voters hold competing priorities in their minds: They’re increasingly concerned about antisemitism and their personal safety in America, and they hold complex and divergent views on Israel, which often is not a defining voting issue, even as it seems to be the dominant way strategists and pundits talk about this electorate.
Here’s what the latest data has to say about what Jewish voters want and how their politics are changing this cycle.
Aside from Black voters, there have traditionally been no more loyal Democratic voters than Jewish Americans. Since 2008, between 60 and 80 percent of these voters picked the Democratic candidate, while about 60 percent have consistently identified with the party over the last two decades.
That changed slightly after 2024, when exit polls suggested a six-point swing toward Donald Trump compared to 2020. Jewish communities in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, meanwhile, shifted more dramatically — which analysts for the election data site Split Ticket argued last year represented a 5 to 10 percentage-point swing against Democrats.
There are plenty of arguments over how and why this happened — pollsters and experts I spoke with told me that, despite the majority of Jewish American voters still siding with Democrats, the voting group mirrored other traditionally Democratic voting groups’ swing against the incumbent.
“Biden won the election, Harris lost the election,” Tali deGroot, the national political director of J Street, told Vox. “That means that every single community likely saw shifts with fewer people voting for the Democrat.”
Others argue it was a return to more of a baseline of voter behavior. 2020 was the aberration, with remarkably high support for Biden because of pandemic conditions.
But what still stands out beyond these trendlines is the steady support Democrats receive from these voters — whether because of the high level of college education among these constituents (a blue-coded trait in the Trump era), the geographic location of these voters (primarily in Democratic states like New York and California), or the socially liberal beliefs many of these voters hold (Jews historically support abortion rights , for example).
Even heading into 2026, Democrats still hold overwhelmingly strong support from these voters, Jim Gerstein, a founding partner of the polling firm GBAO, told me.
“What’s remarkable is actually how consistent Jewish voting behavior and political beliefs and values have been for years and still through today,” Gerstein said. “You have these massive developments in domestic, international, political events, actual things that happen in the real…
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