Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
The New York City mayoral race and the New Jersey’s governor’s race is one of those times when the Jewish vote actually matters and the skew of the Jewish vote looks nothing like the stereotypes.
President Trump personally reached out to the Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey, urging, “I need all of my supporters in the orthodox community in Lakewood and its surrounding towns to vote in huge numbers for Jack Ciattarelli. Jack needs every single Vote in the community, including all the Yeshiva students who turned out to vote for me last year.” Conservative activists and personalities posed with some of those students from the area with the largest number of high schools and rabbinical schools in the country while they waited on line to cast their ballots for the Republican candidate.
Meanwhile in the New York City’s mayoral race, despite false claims and fake polls by Mamdani supporters, the Quinnipiac poll showed Cuomo taking 60% of the Jewish vote, Sliwa taking 12% and Mamdani having to make do with 16%. Some might argue that 16% is still too many and they have a point, but there is something obviously wrong with the way that Quinnipiac, an otherwise reliable pollster, measures and then reports the Jewish vote. It’s the same problem as the previous Siena poll which showed that 75% of Jews had an unfavorable view of Mamdani and only 20% backed him.
There are very few mainstream polls that actually separate out Jews as a group. That means that on a national level the gap is filled by fake polls from left-wing groups that produce the worthless numbers of 70% of Jews voting for Kamala, Biden or Hillary that are bandied about as if they were facts. The only legitimate polls of Jews are local polls in which Jews are sampled as part of a larger population.
But even these have a basic problem that pops up when you compare the only 28% of Catholics voting for Mamdani and the 36% of Protestants voting for Mamdani with the 43% of Hispanics and 48% of black voters backing the radical candidate. Even though Hispanics are a significant percentage of New York City’s Catholic population, there’s obviously a sizable gap between the religious Hispanic vote and the secular Hispanic vote. Likewise the city’s sizable number of black protestants and black voters.
We take it for granted that it makes sense to separate the religious and the race/ethnic components in those cases, but in the cases of Jewish voters, polls, like those above, group Jews together with other religious groups, Catholics and Protestants, but poll Jews as if they were an ethnic group or race, rather than asking them about their religious beliefs, they include anyone under the loosest possible definition.
The Quinnipiac and Siena polls, in typical fashion, allow people to ‘self-identify’ as Jews. That’s the same philosophy that led men to enter women’s locker rooms and allowed an anti-Israel Latino leftist, Sen. Julia Salazar, to suddenly start falsely claiming that she was Jewish. No less a figure than AOC has claimed to have Jewish origins. Like male athletes who one day start claiming they’re women, ‘self-identification’ with no criteria or standards is at best meaningless and at worst a formula for fraud.
Jews, unlike black people or Hispanics, can’t be as easily identified based on appearance (although there have been individuals, including Zohran Mamdani, who also falsely claimed to be black for gain) and a policy of self-identification makes Jewish polling meaningless and also tilts it far leftward.
Pollsters have an alternative way of meaningfully measuring the Jewish vote which is to ask about synagogue affiliation and attendance.
Every time this has been done, the Jewish vote becomes significantly more conservative.
During the heyday of the Iran Deal, Gallup broke down its polling of the Jewish vote by asking about synagogue attendance and found that 60% of Jews who attended synagogue services on a weekly basis disapproved of Obama while 58% of those who went to synagogue seldom or never approved of him.
Even the fake poll being advanced by a front group for the Jewish Democratic Council of America found a 20 point drop in support for Kamala based on synagogue attendance.
Polls of Jewish voters would look dramatically different if pollsters asked about synagogue attendance.
There are people who feel very ‘Jewish’ despite not being religious or going to synagogue and a recent Washington Post poll provides a demonstration of another question that pollsters could ask. The Post had looked to create a poll of American Jews that would show that they are turning against Israel. And unintentionally revealed the poll’s agenda by disclosing its methodology and definition of ‘Jews.’
“The sample includes adults who identify as Jewish by religion as well as those who identify as adults with no religious affiliation but Jewish ethnically, culturally or through their family background — and either were raised Jewish or have a parent who is Jewish.” The Post cast the loosest possible net, watering down the definition of a Jewish respondent to the point of absurdity to get its results.
Among those who said that being Jewish is “very important” to them, 63% supported Israel’s campaign against Hamas, while in perfect proportion, 63% of those who answered that being Jewish is not important to then, opposed Israel.
There is a term for people to whom being Jewish is not at all important: non-Jewish people.
A poll that includes large numbers of people to whom the entire criteria that the poll is based on doesn’t matter is a contradiction in terms. Pollsters could ask those they insist on polling as if they were Jewish about their meaningful religious affiliation or identification. Instead, like the Washington Post, they poll people who are not in any way affiliated with the Jewish community and who happily tell the pollster that they have no sense of being Jewish, and yet pollsters include them to water down the results.
And that is how you get polls that paint Jews as being far more left-wing than they actually are.
The question of ‘Who is a Jew’ can be answered in different ways by different people, but the answer has to be based on some kind of standard while in political polls there are no standards at all.
The issue isn’t that Jews are very liberal, it’s that the definition of being Jewish is so liberal that it’s meaningless. When we actually look at precinct level data for Jewish neighborhoods and communities, virtually every dense Jewish neighborhood from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Miami went to Trump. Neighborhoods reflect a very basic form of identification. Much more so than polls.
That’s why President Trump is trying to get out the vote in one of the densest Jewish areas in New Jersey and why there are lines of Chassidic Jews waiting in line to vote against Mamdani.
The stereotype of Jews voting liberal is, like most stereotypes, impossible to eradicate but it’s not reality, it’s just another of the big lies that a liberal media keeps telling us. And that we want to believe.
