Statistics Demonstrating Jewish Community Increasingly Voting Republican

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2014 election survey by the Teach Coalition, affiliated with the Orthodox Union, found that 40% of Jews in congressional swing districts in Pennsylvania and the New York suburbs voted Republican.

Donald Trump improved his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. From Lakewood, New Jersey, to New York’s Upper West Side; from Persian Los Angeles to Miami; from the Detroit suburbs to the Lubavitch neighborhood 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.

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 Chsidic, Litvish, Syrian, Russian, Bucharian, Conservative, Reform or Modern Orthodox, voted heavily Republican or saw a rise in Trump’s performance. In Brooklyn, the Midwood precincts voted 62% for Trump, a notable rise over the already-impressive 41% he received in 2020. Trump also improved in the areas to the south, east, and west of the Midwood precincts. (Note that a significant portion of the Harris voters in the neighborhood were from non-Jewish residents.)

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 received less than 10% of the vote in six 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 the eight. In one typical Boro Park precinct, Trump beat Harris by a count of 770-44.

In 2020, 770 Eastern Parkway, headquarters of Lubavitch, 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. (Keep in mind there’s a heavier non-Jewish bloc than in some other Jewish neighborhoods, that can account for the Harris voters.) 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”/pro-abortion 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 Modern Orthodoxy, despite barely cracking 25% of the vote in the area in 2020. YU is in a heavily Dominican neighborhood, 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.

The Upper West Side, a traditional secular 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 much of the Harris vote 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, which better explains the gains Donald Trump made compared to the previous elections.

New York City is the center of Jewish life in America, home to nearly 1 million Jews of the estimated 7 million Jews in the United States. It is a diverse Jewish community, with members ranging from the Bobov community to well known secular need, and one where Jews have been made acutely and often painfully aware of issues facing them as Jews. Visible Jews, notably Orthodox 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 Charedi 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.

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. 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 has become more Republican all the way 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. (With the non-Jewish voters in these Jewish neighborhoods accounting for a portion of the Harris vote.)

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, and with its gubernatorial race next year 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.

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