Biden’s withdrawal shifts the goalposts on Jewish voters

A week ago, Republicans were riding high, coming off a successful convention whose third day focussed on the Gaza War and campus protests, hoping to increase their vote in the Jewish community.

But, with Kamala Harris now most likely replacing Biden at the head of the ticket, Republicans can no longer be bullish about their chances of increasing Jewish support. It is not so much Harris herself, although she will surely be more formidable than Biden, but the prospect of a Jewish “First Gentleman” in her husband Doug Emhoff, that will dash Republican prospects.

Emhoff on the stump will be inspiring for liberal and progressive Jews and attractive to more moderate and conservative voters. This is particularly important in swing states with a significant Jewish vote, including the massively important Pennsylvania, as well as Arizona, Virginia, Michigan, and Georgia.

Solidifying Jewish support will be a relief to the Democrats, given the shifting ethnic loyalties potentially impacting the election. Hispanic Americans, long a solid Democrat constituency, have been drifting into the Republican sphere. Even African-Americans, long the Dems’ most reliable supporters, seemed shaky although that will no longer be the case with Harris as candidate.

Hoping to bring more Jews to their cause, last week’s Republican National Convention (RNC), as described by The New York Times, featured a parade of Jewish voices, indicative of Republican belief that they might sway enough Jewish voters this year to help win a tight election.

Prominent among them, Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of an American citizen still held by Hamas in Gaza, led the crowd in a chant of “bring them home,” after recounting how Mr Trump had called them after their son was taken hostage.

“This was not merely an attack on Israel; this was and remains an attack on Americans,” Ronen Neutra said, noting that 45 of the 1,200 people murdered on October 7 were Americans, as are eight of the remaining hostages, five of them thought to be living.

Trump himself has not said much about the conflict nor indicated what his policies would be if elected. In last week’s nomination acceptance speech, he claimed that Hamas would never have attacked Israel had he been in the Oval Office and promised to bring the war between Israel and Hamas to an end “with a telephone call”.

The Jewish former NY congressman Lee Zeldin said: “We need a president treating our friends as friends and our adversaries as our adversaries, understanding they only respect strength, not weakness.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who gained national prominence in December for grilling university presidents on antisemitism, gave a fiery speech in which she tied Democrats to the anti-Israel chants so prominent at campus protests.

An Orthodox Jewish student from Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum, a one-time Bernie Sanders supporter, castigated the Democratic Party he once supported as “ideologically poisoned” by “far-left antisemitic extremism.”

But in an interview with The Forward, Kestenbaum acknowledged that the Republicans’ close ties with prominent antisemites is “absolutely frustrating. It’s inappropriate, and I wish that the president wouldn’t sit with someone as despicable as Tucker Carlson.”

And therein lies the rub.

American Jews have not forgotten Trump’s 2022 dinner with notorious antisemite Nick Fuentes. They took note last week as Holocaust denier Mark Robinson, the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, spoke at the convention. They would not have been happy as Robinson was followed by Charlie Kirk, a youthful conservative leader who defended Elon Musk’s endorsement of the Great Replacement Theory.

It is worth recalling that the 30% of American Jews who vote primarily on Israel have long supported the Republicans. The Trump campaign is gambling that the Gaza War and the tepid pressure the Biden administration has placed on Israel will pull more Jews into their tent. Trump hopes Jewish voters will overlook that, despite his claims to be “best friend that Israel has ever had”, his campaign messaging has been inconsistent, bombastic, and haphazard.

Even had Biden stayed atop the ticket, it is questionable whether the Jewish vote might change. Four years ago in these pages, I wondered what impact Trump’s Abraham Accords would have on the Jewish vote. I concluded that the probability of “a history-making swing among Jewish voters in any of [the swing] states sat right on the line separating the extremely unlikely and the impossible”. The election results bore that out.

Jewish voters are not naïve nor are they easily moved by simple sloganeering or supportive convention chants. They understand that Trump’s threats to the rule of law and to the separation of church and state, and his failure to condemn overt antisemitism represent a threat to the Jewish community.

Rabbi Jay Michaelson, writing recently in The Forward, cautioned Jewish voters about the Heritage Foundation sponsored Project 2025, the 865-page, finely detailed policy agenda for a coming Trump administration.

Michaelson’s many criticisms of the report boil down to a warning of its overall intent to establish Christian Nationalism as the dominant principal of American government. It is hard to imagine there is a Jew alive who can hear the phrase “Christian Nationalism” without a shudder.

A few days ago, Trump appeared ascendant: escaping peril in the law courts; narrowly avoiding the assassin’s bullet; riding the vibes of a well-orchestrated feel-good convention; and facing a Democratic Party in disarray.

But there is such a thing as peaking too soon. If the Democrats unite around Harris, whose strengths should not be underestimated, they can campaign successfully on fundamental values of personal autonomy, respect for diversity, the rule of law, open and fair elections, international cooperation, and policy that benefits the many rather than the few. Most Jewish voters, I predict, will stay on board for such a campaign, especially with Doug Emhoff on the stump.

Jewish voters will be confident that a President Harris, with Emhoff at her side, will not be inviting the likes of Nick Fuentes or Kanye West to dinner.