'They need this to be true in order to maintain their power and influence.'

Many people are insisting that only 21 percent of U.S. Jews voted for Donald Trump and the Republicans. I dove into the data and realized that they are deliberately misleading us.

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This is a guest essay written by Karol Markowicz, a columnist and podcaster.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Why should we care how U.S. Jews voted in the presidential election a couple of weeks ago?

We are a blip. A rounding error in the polls. It doesn’t really matter how we vote.

But it does.

For me, it is: Did we put our own survival at the top of the issues pile? Did we see clearly who our friends are and who they are not? Did my people learn lessons?

But also to show the outside world: Look, we did.

I had anecdotes; liberal Jewish friends who leaned in over dinners and whispered, “I’m voting for him.” One after another made the confession.

One couple in particular, lifelong friends of mine, shocked me into silence when they said they had voted Trump. They were committed Democrats (MSNBC watchers! Howard Stern listeners!) who had spent years arguing with me. I knew they did not trust Kamala Harris on Israel and I figured they would sit it out. They live in New York; they don’t have to vote. But they did. And they voted for him.

I felt the sea change when Lizzy Savetsky, a Jewish influencer, tipped to Donald Trump. I generally do not believe that endorsements matter that much. If Oprah and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé (all of whom openly endorsed Harris) could not swing it, who could

But I took Lizzy’s endorsement seriously. She is an important figure in the Jewish world, beautiful and smart, focused on her family and very outspoken. I saw her as representative of a specific voting bloc that I saw emerging: women who are normally repelled by Trump but set that aside to do what is best for the country.

It was not just that Lizzy was voting for Trump; she was admitting to it on Sid Rosenberg’s extremely popular New York City morning radio show. Lizzy being out with her Trump support, despite the fact that it would hurt her and cost her social media followers, made me think something was moving. She was not like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé; they took the easy position. She was like American football star Travis Kelce and Jay-Z, neither of whom made endorsements. But Lizzy did.

Anecdotes are not data, of course, but data can be bad too. It is why people recoiled so hard from Ann Selzer’s flawed Iowa poll in the closing days of the presidential election. Her “gold standard” poll showed Trump losing Iowa to Harris and the Democrats by three points. It didn’t make sense. People on the ground in Iowa were dumbfounded. Trump would end up winning Iowa by 13 percentage points. Selzer’s poll was data, not anecdotes, and it was wrong.

The first exit poll to hit on Election Day caused that same recoil. Jews had allegedly voted 79 percent for Harris and the Democrats. I did not need to look into that to know it was wrong — but the number spread like wildfire and is still being used today.

First, it didn’t include California, New York, and New Jersey. It polled Jews in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. A more reliable Associated Press survey found that Trump and the Republicans had gotten 24 percent of the Jewish vote in 2016 and 30 percent in 2020.

We were expected to believe that this number had plummeted to 21 percent after the last year of pro-Hamas protestors on college campuses (and U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris both saying they had a point) — plus the Biden administration playing games with Israeli security. It was a joke.

The only state on the list with a significant Jewish population is Florida, which in particular is becoming a home for the wayward Right-leaning Jew. Florida Jews went 41 percent for Trump and the Republicans in 2020. Exit polls showed its governor, Ron DeSantis, climbing to 45 percent of the Jewish vote in his recent election. Florida was already in the forties before this election. Are we expected to believe Trump got, what, zero, in the rest of those states?

Then there were the state exit polls that told a different story. In those, Jews polled at 45 percent in New York for Trump and the Republicans, and 41 percent in Pennsylvania.

Trump and the Republicans would have had to totally collapse in the states not polled to get 21 percent. The idea that Jews in Georgia or Texas will somehow be less conservative than northeast Jews is one that simply does not hold water. The math, as the kids say, is not mathing.

The single state exit poll that’s missing is California. The one poll that has a mention of Jews in a California exit poll had them at 22 percent for Trump and the Republicans. The same exit poll had Muslims at zero percent for either Trump or Harris. That is … unlikely. And even at 22 percent, California has fewer Jews than New York. Average just the two states, using their state exit polls, and you get 33 percent. But what about all the other states where Trump and the Republicans hit into the forties?

Regardless, set aside the exit polls which require someone to tell the truth to a pollster, something a lifelong Democrat switching sides for the first time might not be ready to do. My friends voting for him were not shouting it from rooftops. They were whispering it to me, someone they knew to be a lifelong conservative who would embrace their move.

In Tablet magazine, Armin Rosen did a deep dive into some numbers of actual vote totals from heavily Jewish areas. For example, these from Jewish parts of New Jersey:

“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.”¹

Or these numbers from John Podhoretz in Commentary magazine:²

“In Palm Beach County, Florida, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 percent. Kamala Harris won this county by .74 percent … Biden won it by 13 percent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly 7 percent while Harris dropped 7 points off Biden’s number.

“Again, we cannot know what the delta was in the Jewish community, but almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 percent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 percent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 percent of the Broward population.”

“How about Nassau County, New York? Jews make up close to 20 percent of the population. Trump won Nassau by 5 percent. Biden took it by 10 in 2020.”

I live in south Florida and spend a lot of my summers in Nassau County; in both places, a “Make America Great Again” hat and a huge Jewish star is a standard beach look.

And what of California? Back to Rosen:

“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 percent 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.”

If Trump gets 40 to 50 percent of the vote in overwhelmingly Jewish areas of Los Angeles, how does he get to under 30 under in the entire state of California? Not possible.

Look, it is important to me that Jews shifted politically in this election — but I was not counting on miracles. Pre-election I was predicting an eight-point boost to 38 percent. Change takes time, I would tell anyone who asked. Since October 7th, but also since Trump’s first U.S. presidential term from 2017 to 2021 (which was the most pro-Israel of any president of my lifetime), the Jewish vote should be a Republican landslide. But an eight-percent jump would do for now.

I now think that the actual Jewish vote total was far higher. Looking at the vote totals in precincts with a high percentage of Jewish voters, as well as taking into account Trump’s under-polling in general and the state exit polls, I put the number into the mid-forties. It is a political earthquake for Democrats and it makes sense that they would want to minimize any fallout from that reality.

There are a lot of people hoping Jews have not moved. Liberal Jewish outlets continue to run the absurd 21-percent number as gospel because they need it to be true. They can not allow the Jewish electorate to shift this sharply away from them. For liberals who have long thought demographics equals destiny, the fact that Orthodox Jews are voting in such astronomical numbers for Republicans, while having a high number of babies, means that the Jewish vote being majority Republican is around the corner.

To that end, Jim Gerstein, lead pollster for the Democratic firm GBAO Strategies, said in a November 13th conference call organized by Jewish Democratic Council of America that: “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. They’re not a swing constituency, and they’re certainly not a Republican constituency. You have to look at the Jewish population as a core Democratic base constituency.”³

They need this to be true in order to maintain their power and influence.

But it is not.

Jew-haters, whether on the Left or Right, also continue to push the 21-percent number. They want to send the message to Donald Trump, and to other Republicans, that these people are not appreciative and you should not support them since they do not support you.

I don’t think Donald Trump falls for that. He stood at the grave of the Lubavitcher Rabbi in a yarmulke; he is intrinsically supportive of Israel. He gets it, but I cannot be as certain about other Republicans. It is hard to convince politicians to speak to the issues that affect a tiny sliver of the population in the first place — and if that population does not vote for them, after supporting their very survival, it is not crazy for a politician to lose interest in pursuing this demographic.

Don’t let the pushers of the 21-percent nonsense get away with it for their nefarious political ends. The number is in the forties. Nearly half of Jews voted Republican in this presidential election, a historic number.

We learned. Look, we did.

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1. “Who Won the Jewish Vote?” Tablet.

2. “Let’s Begin Talking About the Jewish Vote.” Commentary.

3. “Who Won the Jewish Vote?” Tablet.