Raising Jewish voters’ eyebrows still isn’t working for Trump

President Trump claimed that President Biden had “completely lost control of the situation in Israel.” “He has abandoned Israel. He has completely abandoned Israel. And, frankly, he is a man with a low IQ. He has no idea where he is or who he is supporting. No. He doesn’t know if he supports the Palestinians. But he does know one thing: he doesn’t support Israel. He has abandoned Israel. It was.”

This is familiar territory: wild, hyperbolic, and inconsistent attacks on political opponents. (Why does Biden both know who he supports and who he doesn’t?) From debates about Israel to complaints against Jewish Americans, Trump’s axis also It was similar.

President Trump continued: “Jews who vote for Democrats or Jews who vote for Biden should have their heads searched.”

This idea that Jewish American politics necessarily depends on Israel is a long-standing idea for President Trump. His disdain for Jewish Democrats is nothing new, even this week. On Monday, he told an interviewer: “Jews who vote for Biden don’t love Israel. Frankly, they should be talked to.”

Comments like this run the risk of causing an avalanche of overthinking. does he mean it? Is he exaggerating? Is Biden playing the long game of trying to appeal to non-Jewish supporters by exaggerating how he is allegedly abandoning Israel?

Let’s put that aside. But President Trump’s assumptions about how Jewish Americans view Israel prove overly simplistic. A Pew Research Center poll conducted several years before the Gaza war found that Jewish Americans were divided along party lines in their view of Israel as an important part of Jewish identity. . Jewish Democrats were more likely to say the United States supports Israel too much than they are to say it doesn’t support Israel enough. The opposite was true for Jewish Republicans.

To be sure, things may have changed since October 7th. But data released this week by Pew shows that the Trump era has not caused Jewish Americans to leave the Democratic Party. In 2015, when he first announced his candidacy for president, 66% of Jewish Americans identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, compared to Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. There were twice as many.

Last year, that gap widened to 40 points, with 69% of Jewish Americans identifying as Democrats or Democratic-leaning.

There were some ups and downs in between. In 2020, when Trump was seeking re-election, it was just 24 points, the lowest on record. However, the image shown above does not indicate a radical change for either party, and shows that President Trump’s repeated demands for Jewish Americans to abandon the left have not been very successful. . That’s not what we expect from them.

Pew data shows variation across religious groups. For example, white evangelical Protestants have shifted dramatically to the right since 2000. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also tended to lean toward the Republican Party, which peaked around the time member Mitt Romney took office. He became the Republican presidential candidate. The shift in partisan identity among Jewish Americans is more subtle and predates Trump.

Then again, President Trump may simply be trying to portray Jewish Democrats negatively in the eyes of his supporters. But it is certainly possible that he is justifiably furious that Jewish Americans do not broadly support his candidacy.

Disciplining them again might do the trick.