79% of US Jews voted for Harris, according to largest preliminary exit poll

JTA — The first rule of exit polls is to be careful about interpreting early exit polls, which aren’t always accurate.

The second rule is that, for now at least, they represent the best information we have about the question occupying Jews of all political persuasions: How many Jews voted for Donald Trump? And how many voted for Kamala Harris?

In recent decades, between 20 percent and 30% of American Jews have supported Republicans in national elections. The GOP hit a high-water mark in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won some 40% of Jewish votes, but the more typical split makes Jews among the most reliably Democratic demographics in the United States.

But this year, with some Jews feeling alienated from the left and others all-in on the right due to Israel, some speculated that Trump could post an unusually strong showing among Jewish voters.

Initial polls suggest that is not the case. The National Election Pool, which produces an exit poll for a consortium of major news organizations, found that 79% of Jews said they voted Democratic, compared to 21% who voted Republican.

Edison Research, which conducts the national pool poll, surveyed voters in 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. (It did not survey voters in New York or California, which are home to the largest Jewish populations and also reliably vote Democratic by wide margins.)

It did not immediately release details about how many voters were surveyed and cautioned that the results could change as polling continued and results were adjusted to reflect the real vote tallies, a process called weighting that is a standard component of survey methodology.

If accurate, the National Election Pool’s result would be the lowest proportion of Jewish votes for a Republican presidential candidate in 24 years.

But that’s a big if: Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, with famous examples of polls failing to reflect the real results of elections.

Some have shifted in methodology as the proportion of voters casting ballots in person on Election Day has fallen over time. And like all polls, they can also reflect the partisan bent of their pollsters.

Fox News, which is right-leaning but has a reputation for reliable polling, conducted its own Election Day “voter analysis” that it said solved some of the problems in traditional exit polling. It found that 67% of Jews voted for Harris, compared to 31% for Trump. The poll still found that Jews voted for Harris at higher rates than members of any other religion.

Both the Fox News poll and the National Election Pool asked voters about their opinions on Israel. The Fox News poll found that 56% of Trump voters strongly or somewhat support “continuing aid to Israel in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah,” while 58% of Harris voters strongly or somewhat opposed doing so.

The National Election Pool survey asked voters whether they thought US support for Israel was too strong, not strong enough, or just right. Voters were evenly split among the categories, with Democrats making up 68% of those who said US support for Israel was too strong and Republicans making up 81% of those who said it was not strong enough.

Prior to the election, a September poll by Democratic-affiliated pollsters found that 68% of American Jewish voters said they planned to vote for Harris. More recently, a similar poll found that 71% of Jews in seven competitive states said they would vote for her.

A different pre-election poll, commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute, found that Harris was on track to post the smallest margin of victory among Jews of any Democrat over a Republican in more than 40 years. The National Election Pool’s margin for Jewish voters is wider than in 2016, when it found that Hillary Clinton outperformed Trump by 47 percentage points.

That was the last time the National Election Pool reported the Jewish vote. In 2020, it sampled too few Jews to report the Jewish vote, leaving conclusions about how Jews voted to partisan pollsters. A poll commissioned by Republicans said the Jewish vote shifted Republican and a poll commissioned by Democrats said it shifted toward Democrats.