Jews make up only about two percent of the national American population, and most of them reside in two states that have not voted for the Republican presidential nominee since the 1980s.
One might think, then, that the Jewish vote would not really be a factor in presidential races. Yet, every four years, Jewish voters find themselves in a position to play a decisive role in electing the president.
Not Really Two Percent
The first reason that the Jewish vote often is more significant than it may seem is that it cannot be judged by the size of the national Jewish community. Although Jews make up only about two percent of America’s population, the rate of Jewish participation in the electoral process is much greater than that of most of the public.
Over the past century, between 49% and 66% of Americans have voted in each presidential race. Compare that to the rate of Jewish voting—about 85%.
The numbers concerning other types of political participation are also noteworthy. A study of the 2020 presidential election campaign found that while only 12% of the public attended a campaign speech or rally, 21% of Jews attended one. And while only 23% of the public “contacted a public official” to express their views, 36% of Jews did so.
All of which adds up to a community that is highly engaged in all aspects of the American political process. The result is that Jewish voters matter much more than their sheer numbers might suggest.
Re-Electing Woodrow Wilson
As early as 1916, Jews were beginning to emerge as a potentially important voting bloc. That year saw Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes, a Supreme Court justice and former governor of New York, challenging incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson attracted strong Jewish support because he vetoed restrictions on immigration and nominated Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Returns from heavily Jewish voting districts in New York City, Boston and Chicago indicated Wilson won about 50% of Jewish votes to 38% for Hughes and 11% for Socialist Party candidate Alan Benson.
The Jewish vote was important because the race was extremely close, with Wilson capturing 277 electoral votes (266 were needed to win the election) to 254 for Hughes. Wilson won California by just 3,773 votes. If only 1,900 more Jewish voters there had backed Hughes instead of Wilson, the Republican would have won California and, with it, the election.
Jewish Votes in the 1920s
The heavily Democratic Jewish voting pattern that has prevailed in recent decades was not yet settled in the 1920s. There were no specific, major issues of Jewish concern in the presidential races of 1920 and 1924, and the Republicans scored better than the Democrats among Jews in those years.
In 1920, the GOP’s Senator Warren Harding of Ohio won 67% of the Jewish vote, as compared to just 17% for the Democratic nominee, Ohio Governor James Cox. (Socialist Eugene Debs won 16%.)
Calvin Coolidge, who became president when Harding died in office, endeared himself to Jewish voters with his strong support for Zionism, including receiving Rav Kook, the chief rabbi of Eretz Yisrael, at the White House. When Coolidge ran in 1924, he won 44% of Jewish votes, to 34% for Davis and 22% for the left-wing third-party candidate, Senator Robert M. LaFollette.
But the races in 1920 and 1924 were not close, so the Jewish vote did not make a real difference.
Jews and a Catholic
In the late 1920s, the Democratic Party began to actively reposition itself as the party of inner-city ethnic immigrants and religious minorities. The choice of New York Governor Alfred E. Smith as their candidate in 1928 marked the first time a Catholic was nominated for president.
Republican nominee Herbert Hoover had his share of Jewish supporters, especially because the humanitarian aid he organized for war-ravaged European countries during World War I helped many Jewish communities there. A Hoover campaign leaflet aimed at Jewish voters called him “the modern Moses of war-stricken Europe.” But as a New York State assemblyman years earlier, Smith had put in effort to improve working conditions and to pass legislation that aided Shabbos observers.
Historians also believe Smith’s Catholicism helped him with Jews: A member of a religious minority was seen as someone who would be concerned about the needs of all minorities.
In the end, Gov. Smith won about 63% of Jewish votes, to 33% for Hoover and four percent for the Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas. But once again, the election was not close, so the Jewish vote had no impact.
The Roosevelt Shift
The Jewish embrace of the Democrats continued and intensified in 1932. Like most Americans, Jewish voters supported New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt for president by a large margin.
Many years later, it would become clear that FDR had spurned opportunities to help European Jews escape Hitler. But at the time—in the 1930s and early 1940s—it was the Republican Party that was staunchly isolationist and more vocal about its opposition to immigration. Roosevelt’s leadership of the New Deal made him a much more attractive candidate to working-class Jewish voters.
Roosevelt’s share of the Jewish vote rose from 69% in 1932 to 85% in 1936 and 1940. Those races were not close, so Jewish votes played no role in the outcome. The 1944 race, however, proved to be something of a surprise.
President Roosevelt and his aides were not convinced he would win reelection, especially after the GOP’s strong showing in the congressional and gubernatorial races of 1942. So the White House was deeply concerned when the Republicans decided to make a play for the Jewish vote in 1944.
Jewish activists, led by Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver and Revisionist Zionist official Benzion Netanyahu (father of the future prime minister) persuaded the Republicans to put a first-ever plank in their platform supporting opening Eretz Yisrael to “millions of distressed Jewish men, women and children driven from their homes by tyranny,” and establishing a Jewish state there.
Fearing they could lose New York—where Jews represented 15-20% of the vote—the Democrats then matched the Republicans by putting a pro-Zionist plank in their platform, too. That was important, because for many years to follow, the idea of support for Israel was enshrined in American political culture.
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