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.