Nov. 15: The Dems Need to Change Course. Can They?

Liberal influencers decamp to BlueSky; Harris' "unethical" Oprah payment; Is fluoride making us dumb?

---

---

The Big Story

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” — Ronald Reagan

The Financial Times has had a good run of data-based analyses of political trends, and on Thursday, the paper published another one. In an article titled, “Trump broke the Democrats’ thermostat,” author John Burn-Murdoch depicts a Democratic Party that has spent the past decade actively running away from the median voter on social issues: 

“Notably, the shift began in 2016,” Burn-Murdoch writes. “This suggests that Trump’s election radicalised the left, not the right.”

That statement appears to be contradicted by the article’s very own depiction of U.S. General Social Survey data. In the chart on affirmative action, for instance, we can see that, in the early 2000s, “strong Democrats” were roughly in total alignment with the median voter in being fairly unsupportive of such hiring practices. Around 2012, when social media started to hit critical mass and the “Great Awokening” was underway, “strong Democrats” started to massively shift in favor of the practice. FT depicts a similar trend for “increasing immigration,” only the strong Democrat leftward lurch begins even earlier, during Barack Obama’s first term. Burn-Murdoch notes that the shift appears have originated with, and been more extreme among, the party’s “activists and non-profit staffers,” citing Data for Progress research showing that Democratic “political elites and influencers” have shifted much further left than Democratic voters as a whole. This research gives a hint as to how the party found itself regularly taking positions on cultural issues opposed by the vast majority of American voters.

So: What lessons will be learned? What concessions, if any, will be made to voters who feel culturally alienated? 

It’s early days, but so far it seems that the party’s mandarins are in denial. One common form of “cope” advanced by legacy journalists is that the Democrats’ only real problem was inflation, which has unseated many incumbent governments around the world. In this reading, the Democrats were doomed by macro events and might have even overperformed in the recent election. Others have attempted to deny that the party really did shift left. Shortly after Trump’s victory, Jon Stewart played a reel of Democratic candidates signaling moderation on immigration and trans issues. Unmentioned was the fact that the candidates who openly bucked their party on these issues performed better than Kamala Harris. 

Of course, the people making the “it’s just the economy” argument were, almost to a person, quick to cite the Dobbs decision as important in helping Democrats overperform in the 2022 midterms cycle. Obviously, “cultural issues” matter in elections. There’s a reason why the ad of the cycle happened to be “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you." Rather than focus on the substance of Democratic overreach regarding trans policy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interpreted the success of the ad as downstream of Republicans focusing on “you,” versus a Democratic party that has forgotten how to message. 

Leading pro-Democratic voices currently do not want the party to moderate socially, even on a 70/30 issue like, “Should males be disallowed from playing in women’s sports?” John Oliver, for instance, spent some of his Thursday show imploring Democrats to improve their messaging on that issue by emphasizing that “there are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere.” 

Fair enough, but then the natural response to that is, “If this is such a minor issue, then why is it worth losing an election over?” 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Were Jews really Kamala Harris’ most loyal voters? Armin Rosen investigates, and concludes that there’s plenty of reason to be suspicious

The Rest

→One reason Democrat influencers might have difficulty moderating is that so many are fleeing to a new social media bubble, as the BBC’s North American division reports. BlueSky, a microblogging platform launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is gaining some traction as a blue world answer to Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, so much so that the swamped platform has suffered an outage on Thursday. This exodus of journalists and influencers has picked up considerably since the election: “In the week since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election,” the BBC reports, “2.25 million users have signed up for BlueSky.” For a point of comparison, according to Elon Musk Twitter/X claims over 600 million active monthly users. 

→“You would have thought Oprah would have gotten to the point in her life where she would have stopped Hitler for free, being a billionaire and everything.” That quote comes courtesy of the writer Walter Kirn, in reaction to reports about how Oprah’s production company charged the Kamala Harris campaign $1 million fee to host a town hall for the vice president. Oprah eventually explained, [M]y production company Harpo was asked to bring in set design, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers, and every other item necessary (including the benches and chairs we sat on) to put on a live production.'” But as the conservative commentator Megyn Kelly observed on Friday, Oprah’s reasoning doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. “This is highly irregular,” Kelly wrote on X. “The subject of the interview does not pay for the set/production costs (the interviewer does) & even more shocking when said costs are $1Mil. Esp shady when it’s a presidential candidate. This is grossly unethical.”

→A bizarre story is unfolding in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Democratic county commissioners are continuing to count deficient provisional ballots in defiance of a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” the Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said as she voted to keep counting. Republican Dave McCormick appears to have edged out Democrat Bob Casey by a narrow margin of under 30,000 votes, but Pennsylvania officials declared on Wednesday that there would be a recount, and Democratic lawyers are suing to count tens of thousands of deficient ballots that they say could swing the outcome of the election. 

→The media has reacted with shock and horror to Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services, pointing to his controversial stances on vaccines, autism, and fluoride in the water. A Friday Vox article on RFK’s “conspiracy-laden ideas” on fluoride, however, contained the following alarming nugget: 

“Most of the fluoride and US tap water is added by water utility companies, but some tap water contains naturally occurring fluoride it absorbs from the local water table. The resulting high-fluoride tap water, which about 2 million Americans drink, contains about twice the amount of fluoride the US government recommends. According to a recent report from the US National Toxicology Program, drinking high-fluoride water might be linked to slightly lower IQ scores — by 2 to 5 points in some children — though IQ scores are an uncertain measure of intelligence.”

Don’t worry: Only 2-5 points in some children, and IQ is an “uncertain” measure anyway. For some reason, that’s not as reassuring as we suspect Vox meant it to be. 

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Who Won the Jewish Vote?

The answer depends in part on what you mean by ‘Jewish’

by Armin Rosen

American Jews are a hard-to-define religious and ethnic group spread across multiple U.S. Census categories, possessing last names from at least a dozen different languages and clustered in places that are often overwhelmingly non-Jewish. It takes a team of demographers and sociologists from the Pew Foundation years to determine a plausible American Jewish population figure, something they only attempt once per decade (even then there’s often dissension over the results). Anything less than a carefully designed, agenda-free national survey, or an exhaustive study of vote totals in areas where the Jewish population can be systematically isolated or estimated, produces a smattering of implausible, contradictory, or politically convenient results. Such is the case with the various difficult-to-reconcile polls of Jewish voters published since Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Kamala Harris last week.

Because it’s basically impossible to responsibly determine, the partisan split of “the Jewish vote” is a natural battleground for sectarian political operatives who are eager to make their patrons look like winners and marginalize their rivals. Per the National Election Pool’s exit poll, which was publicized by major news organizations, Kamala Harris captured 79% of the Jewish vote, a historically high margin. Fox News pollsters, on the other hand, tagged Jewish support for Harris at 66%, a number low enough for the Republican Jewish Committee to brag about it. Earlier this week, a survey sponsored by the Teach Coalition, the Orthodox Union-affiliated group that advocates on behalf of religious schools, found that 40% of Jews in congressional swing districts in Pennsylvania and the New York suburbs voted Republican, meaning that Jews, like a number of other historically Democratic-voting constituencies, tacked right in unprecedented numbers in the places where their votes mattered the most.

If Jews supported Harris at a similar rate to previous Democratic candidates, it would mean that Jews are one of the only unfailingly loyal members of the party’s coalition, perhaps improving their intraparty standing. An uneroded Jewish vote amid a nationwide right turn would delay or even quash any hard conversations about the future of the Democratic Party. And it would mean that if the party does have serious problems, Jews aren’t responsible for them. A poll conducted by the Democratic firm GBAO Strategies, sponsored by the partisan organization J Street and widely touted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America—which used the same pollster for an October poll that reported a similar outcome—brought the reassuring news that only 25% of Jewish voters in Pennsylvania went for Trump, comparable to the reported 26% of Jews that voted for him nationally. Granted, that represents a 5-point improvement from what the firm found in a similar study amid the 2020 vote, although in the view of Halie Soifer, CEO of the JDCA, “increasing one’s share of the Jewish vote by 5% when the margin of error is 3.5% is not meaningful.”

Jews swinging toward Trump in significant numbers would mark a potential turning point in the relationship between Jewish Americans and both major political parties. Based on Tablet’s own comparison of precinct-level numbers from the 2020 and 2024 election, Donald Trump did improve his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. From the yeshivas of Lakewood, New Jersey, to the bagel shops of New York's Upper West Side; from Persian Los Angeles to Venezuelan Miami; from the Detroit suburbs to the Chabadnik shchuna in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, Jewish areas voted in higher percentages for the Republican candidate than they did in 2020, which in turn was better for Republicans than 2016. The oft-cited exit poll pushed by CNN, NBC and others asserting that the Jewish vote went 79% to Harris did not include New York, New Jersey and California, which have some of the largest Jewish populations in the country. Claims that the numbers are holding steady for Democrats become more difficult to sustain after a close look at vote totals in the places where Jews actually live.

***

In New York, which has more Jews than any city on earth, Jewish neighborhoods were a darkening shade of red or a paler haze of blue in 2024 when compared to 2020. Nearly every neighborhood with a notable density of Jewish-specific businesses and institutions, be they Hasidic, Litvish, Syrian, Russian, Bukharan, Conservative, Reform or modern Orthodox, voted heavily Republican or saw a rise in Trump’s performance. In Brooklyn, the Midwood precincts containing Yeshiva of Flatbush, the flagship high school that has in recent years attracted large numbers of students from the Syrian community, voted 62% for Trump, a notable rise over the already-impressive 41% he received in 2020. Changes in the precinct boundaries account for some of this gain, but Trump also improved in the areas to the south, east, and west of the school.

Midwood was typical of the city’s Jewish neighborhoods. In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s main post-Soviet Jewish enclave, Trump’s support was consistently in the 75%-90% range, compared with support in the low 60s in 2020. In Boro Park, Harris had a double-digit share of the vote in only two of the eight precincts adjoining 13th Avenue between 39th and 64th streets. In 2020, Biden had registered at least 12% support in all but two of them. In the precinct where the Boro Park Shtiebel is located, Trump beat Harris by a count of 770-44.

In 2020, 770 Eastern Parkway, headquarters of the Chabad Hasidic movement, was in the middle of some of the most evenly split territory in all of New York City, with Trump claiming 52% of the vote in the three precincts along Kingston Avenue between Eastern Parkway and Crown Street. It’s not so close anymore: Trump got 62% of the vote this time around, likely on the strength of higher turnout among Chabadniks. Yaacov Behrman, a leading Crown Heights community activist and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance, estimated a 35% increase in the Jewish vote in the neighborhood compared to 2020, based on local numbers of votes for Republican candidates and against New York ballot Proposal 1, an “equal rights” measure partly aimed at closing off religious liberty-based exemptions to state civil rights law. “I think people are scared of the Democratic Party because of elements of the left that have gone radical, and the party hasn’t done enough to distance themselves from them,” Behrman explained.

In the Bronx, Trump received 30% of the vote in the precinct containing the Riverdale Jewish Center, and 38% in the precinct with the neighborhood’s Chabad house, which is located on the other side of the Henry Hudson Parkway. Four years ago, Trump got roughly 25% of the area’s votes. Across Long Island Sound, a great New York rarity, a true 50-50 precinct, could be found just between the Horace Harding Expressway and Queens Boulevard, a little west of the heart of the Forest Hills Bukharan and Georgian communities. This year Trump topped 57% in all but two of the seven precincts on 108th Street between Harding and 65th Road, the stretch where many of the area’s synagogues and kosher grocery stores are located. Trump reached this mark in only three of eight precincts in the area in 2020.

In Manhattan, a few of borough’s lightest-blue precincts have the Yeshiva University campus at their center—Trump received 37% of the vote in and around the intellectual seat of American Orthodoxy, despite barely cracking 25% of the vote in the area in 2020. YU is in a heavily Dominican neighborhood, and Hispanics in general swung toward Trump, but the pattern of Jewish areas voting in greater numbers for the former president repeats in the Upper East Side, too. Three precincts within an easy walk of Park East Synagogue voted 30%, 28%, and 24% for Trump in 2024, compared to 24%, 25%, and 18% in 2020, respectively. Trump received between 24% and 28% of the vote in the seven precincts along Lexington Avenue between the fancy kosher restaurant Rothschild TLV on 79th, and the newly founded Altneu Synagogue a half-mile south. On election day in 2020, when the neighborhood voted for Trump in the high teens and low 20s, Rothschild TLV had been open for less than six months and the Altneu didn’t yet exist. To say that the Upper East Side Jewish vote went for Trump would be a stretch based on the available data, but it may not be that far off.

The Upper West Side, a traditional liberal Jewish political and cultural bastion, remains dark blue. But even there it’s possible to see a shift. Trump earned a double-digit percentage of the vote in all but 18 of the roughly 120 precincts between 59th and 110th streets—a marked improvement over 2020, when he languished in single figures in over 85 area precincts. This year, Trump got 17% of the vote in the precinct across the street from Barney Greengrass, the famous smoked fish restaurant. It is of course possible that non-Jewish voters are responsible for the Trump bump on both sides of the park. But these neighborhoods do not have significant numbers of Hispanics, Asians, or other groups in which the Republicans made apparent gains. They do have a lot of Jews, though.

New York City is the center of Jewish life in America, home to 960,000 of the estimated 7 million Jews in the United States. It is not just a diverse Jewish community, with members ranging from the Bobover Rav to Cynthia Nixon, but one where Jews have been made acutely and often painfully aware of issues facing them as Jews. Visible Jews, including children, are subjected to frequent verbal and physical harassment on the streets of New York. Elected officials and The New York Times have led public campaigns against the city’s Haredi education system, while pro-Hamas protesters have occupied major college campuses and frequently rampaged through Times Square, Grand Central Station, and Washington Square Park since the Oct. 7 attacks. Running as Democrats, loyalists of the anti-Zionist Democratic Socialists of America represent New Yorkers in the City Council, the state Senate, and in Congress. Large segments of Jews view the COVID lockdowns and the federal prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams as concerted efforts to undercut the Jewish community. As a result, many New York Jews have a strong and perhaps strengthening sense of there being such a thing as Jewish communal issues and interests, even if Jews, like many other groups of Americans, also treat their own well-being as an indicator of broader civic and national health.

Ranging a bit further afield, at least one plausible study pegs overall Jewish support for Trump in the New York suburbs at 40%. The Teach Coalition poll, conducted by the Honan Strategy Group, surveyed over 600 Jewish voters who live in congressional swing districts in the New York suburbs, nearly all of which flipped from Republican to Democratic control. The Teach Coalition represents the interests of religious schools across the country—a leading priority for Orthodox Jews—and the vast majority of these schools are in blue states like New York, California, and Pennsylvania. The group needs an accurate sense of Jewish political behavior in order to effectively advocate on behalf of the schools and families it represents.

“Their task to us was to go out and understand whether sentiment in the Jewish community was moving in the direction that we were hearing about in the media,” explained Bradley Honan, head of the Honan Strategy Group, referring to the perception that Oct. 7 and its aftermath had driven the Jewish community rightward. The Teach Coalition also “wanted to understand what impact the Oct. 7 attacks and the rise of antisemitism had on engagement in the Jewish community.” Honan, who has conducted polls for Eliot Engel, Hillary Clinton, and other leading Democrats, said it wasn’t just the Orthodox who were voting Republican in greater numbers in the New York area. “The more liberal branches of Judaism saw really significant movement towards Trump.”

The returns from other major American Jewish population centers are telling a similar story. The Miami area is home to over 500,000 Jews. Aventura is one of the community’s bellwethers, and the Dade County town hosts a dense cluster of Jews from across the religious, national, and linguistic spectrum. Trump leaped from 46.6% of the Aventura vote in 2020 to 59.7% this year, winning all but one of the town’s seven precincts. An almost identical shift happened in the much smaller Miami Beach community of Surfside, where Trump went from 48% of the vote in 2020 to 61% in 2024. The Shul, the sprawling Chabad complex in North Miami Beach, marks the border between Surfside and Bal Harbour, another Jewish enclave where Trump gained in vote share, from 62% to 72%.

In Los Angeles, where 560,000 Jews live, the presence of a Chabad house turns out to be a reliable predictor of ideological diversity. Precinct 090002A, home to Chabad of Beverly Grove, might be the most evenly split district in the entire country, with Trump winning a razor-thin 1,100-1,090 majority. Biden won the area by 7 points in 2020. It isn’t just the familiar Chabad house mix of observant Jews, post-Soviet immigrants, and recent college grads that seems to correlate with higher Trump margins. Trump also got 40% of the vote in the North Hollywood precinct where Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic and Em Habanim Sephardic are located, a 5-point improvement since 2020. In 2020, Pico-Robertson was an area of heavy Biden support with light-red islands surrounding the area’s Orthodox institutions. The red areas are darker and larger now, and the neighborhood is essentially purple until the Santa Monica Freeway.

Los Angeles in turn mirrors the general trend in the rest of the country. West Bloomfield, center of the Detroit-area Jewish community, went from 40% to 43.7% support for Trump. Though there is no precinctwide information available for 2020, making it difficult to isolate more Jewish areas, the modern Orthodox stronghold of Teaneck, New Jersey, went from 27% to 35% support for Trump. This year, Trump won 70% of the vote across districts 10, 11, and 12, which is where most of the town’s synagogues are located.

In Jewish New Jersey, the absolute and percentage-term shift toward Trump happened in places where it seemed as if Republican support could get no higher. In 2020, Joe Biden received 17.2% of the vote in Lakewood, a fast-growing city where nearly every strain of Orthodox Judaism is represented. Harris got just 11.2%. Some of the precinct results are eye-watering. Trump earned a 366-0 shutout in district 27, and was one vote shy of perfection in district 36, which he won 560-1. Trump prevailed in district 15 by a count of 3,168 to 177. Turnout dropped nationally in 2024, but Lakewood produced 35,000 votes for Trump this year, a 5,000 increase from 2020.

Over 600,000 Jews live in New Jersey. Kamala Harris won the state by 229,000 votes, a 5.5-point margin of victory compared to Biden’s 15.9 points. With New Jersey poised to become a swing state in 2028, its gubernatorial race next year will be an early sign of whether Americans are having regrets about the Trump restoration. It is entirely possible that a handful of precincts in Lakewood could decide a nationally consequential election some time soon—a vote the Democrat would almost certainly lose.

An estimated 70% of Lakewooders are observant Jews. They vote based on many of the same priorities as everyone else, filtered through the particularities of their community and their daily lives. For many Lakewood Jews, good education policy equates with support for the maximal funding and autonomy for religious schools, as well as for policies that make it less costly and nerve-racking for parents to send their children to study in Israel. In more traditionally minded communities, social policies in support of large families might be more urgent than abortion rights.

In other sectors of the Jewish community, the desire for opportunity, freedom, and social peace expresses itself through concern toward a totally different set of issues. According to Halie Soifer, the GBAO-conducted poll showed that “the number-one issue for Jewish voters in this election was the future of our democracy followed by abortion access.” Incipient Trumpist fascism and the specter of national bans on abortion, contraception, and fertility treatments happened to be two of the leading themes of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

The poll that Soifer’s organization touted effectively vindicates a losing strategy while also exculpating Jews for the strategy’s failure: Jews turn out to be good Democrats even amid a post-Oct. 7, Republican-funded vortex of alleged scaremongering and misinformation. Perhaps Jews are the best of all Democrats, a reliable constituency in a time when even Black and Hispanic voters are either drifting rightward or staying home altogether. “The biggest problem Democrats have with Jewish voters is there aren’t more of them, because if there were there’d be very different outcomes,” Jim Gerstein, lead pollster for GBAO, said in a Nov. 13 conference call organized by JDCA. “They’re not a swing constituency, and they’re certainly not a Republican constituency,” Gerstein added later in the event. “You have to look at the Jewish population as a core Democratic base constituency.”

***

Interpreting the Jewish vote depends on what one means by “Jewish voter.” Fears of a Trump dictatorship, however imaginary or justified, belong to a broader and more notional category of voting priority than worries about whether the government will close the local yeshiva, or whether mobs of Hamas supporters will trash your child’s college campus, or perhaps the local kosher restaurant, with no real consequences. There are Jewish voters whose outlook is essentially national, and others who view the national interest through issues that are explicitly Jewish, or else related to their daily experience of the country as Jews.

The roughly 15-point gap in Jewish support for Trump reported by the Teach Coalition and JDCA-promoted surveys reflects a significant philosophical difference between the pollsters, who disagree about which kinds of voters are in fact representative of the American Jewish community. As Honan explained, “We asked people if they were Jewish or not and if not we said thanks very much, we’re going to move on.” In contrast, Gerstein’s team counted people who said they were Jewish but did not consider Judaism to be their religion. “There's a difference between a poll of Jewish voters and those with a little crosstab who say their religion is Jewish,” Gerstein explained during the JDCA call. “Those polls exclude 25% of the Jewish population because of the way they do their screening.”

The decision to count Jews who do not identify their religion as Judaism had a profound effect on the findings of the J Street poll. As Soifer explained, GBAO weighted their results based on the 2020 Pew population survey, which found that 27% of the U.S. Jewish population were “Jews of no religion.” An answer from someone who doesn’t consider themselves religiously Jewish will therefore have a greater impact on the poll’s outcome than a response from an Orthodox voter, who comes from a community that accounts for 9% of the Pew-estimated U.S. Jewish population. Conversely, an Orthodox voter will have a relatively greater impact on the outcome of a poll where nonreligiously Jewish Jews are screened out.

The polls also hint at the diverging political consequences of this definitional split. In the GBAO-conducted polls, Haredim and people with no religious conception of their Judaism are assumed to share the politically meaningful demographic category of “Jewish voter.” In the Teach Coalition poll, Jewish voters are defined as people who reach a belief-based threshold of self-identity.

It is possible there is no discrepancy between the two polls, and that people who see Judaism as their religion are less likely to be unshakable Democrats than those who believe it’s possible to be a Jew without any belief in Judaism—in which case Jews might indeed have been the only major demographic group that didn’t lurch rightward in 2024. But in the anxious and violent year after the Oct. 7 attacks, enough Jews may have recalibrated their own notions of identity, and of what being Jewish required of them as democratic political actors, to turn much of South Brooklyn deep red, flip places like Aventura, and transform Jewish neighborhoods into some of the only real purple territory in urban America.