The evening started slowly at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. A trickle of Donald Trump supporters, the majority clad in red Make America Great Again hats, dotted the large event hall.
There seemed to be an air of apprehension for hours, with nearly all major polls showing a statistical tie in all seven battleground states.
As the night progressed, each wave of arrivals seemingly ushered in a piece of good news, as it became clearer that the pollsters got this election dead wrong.
Trump finally appeared on stage at around 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time, with no clear explanation why he delayed his speech, as many attendees filtered out ahead of time, some with eyes glazed over from exhaustion, and a few with eyes watering from tears of joy.
While there was no spotting of Israeli flags, by the time Trump clinched Pennsylvania, and with it put the proverbial nail in Kamala Harris’s presidential hopes, there was no shortage of kippah-clad heads. A couple of dozen yellow ribbon pins, symbolizing support for the hostages held in Gaza, were visible on the suit lapels of attendees, several of whom told JNS they aren’t Jewish, but felt the issue was of personal importance to them.
There is much to make of the exit polls. One from Fox News showed Trump captured 43% of the New York Jewish vote. Another from NBC News projected that Trump took only 21% of the nationwide Jewish vote, a seeming impossibility. He registered around 30% four years ago.
Ryan Mermer, a former Jewish engagement director for the Republican National Committee, told JNS that he felt there would be a surge for Trump among Jews in this cycle.
“I do feel that. The polling data, statistics, the Jewish community in Rockland [County in New York] has come out in force, the Lakewood [New Jersey] community, Miami, where now I reside,” said Mermer. “It’s just a storm for Trump, a force for good, and just the optimism speaking amongst my friends, my family, my colleagues—there’s most certainly a shift. And I’m very excited tonight.”
Antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas war
Adel Nyer, another Floridian, told JNS she felt issues like antisemitism, religious freedom and the Israel-Hamas war were critical drivers of Trump’s voting base.
“I think that it’s one of the driving forces of this race. I think that the Jewish community has spoken up about who they believe that the right president is and who will support Israel and the Jewish people correctly,” said Nyer.
“The antisemitism that we’ve seen in the Biden-Kamala Harris presidency is just a clear picture of what it will look like if we have her as president for the next four years,” Nyer added, before the result of the race was clear.
Yehuda Kaploun, who has become Trump’s de facto liaison to the Orthodox Jewish world, told JNS the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort to the Jewish community was a “resounding success.”
He said the results dictate that “the Jewish community that we’re not going to be taken for granted by the Democratic Party, and that we have tremendous respect for President Trump for what he’s done for the Jewish community.”
Kaploun said the focus of the campaign’s messaging to Jews was “very simple,” pointing to “the Jewish people’s need to be safe and secure in religious liberty, which is guaranteed in America’s constitution. It needs to be enforced. And you can’t just shoot a Jew and yell Allahu Akbar and it’s not a hate crime. You can’t just walk down the street in Brooklyn, hit a Jew and it’s not a hate crime and be released on a desk appearance ticket. Antisemitism is antisemitism.”
Kaploun pointed to what he thought was another winning message.
“The Democratic Party seems to have forgotten that when people chant ‘Death to Israel, the second verse is Death to America’.”
But despite what appeared to be a further shift toward the Republican Party by American Jews, the large majority stuck it out with Democrats.
Trump repeatedly said during the campaign that any American Jews who did so “need to have their head examined.”
Nyer told JNS that, from her standpoint, “Jews that are voting liberal, it has a lot to do with social issues. The abortion topic sways a lot of people to vote liberal versus conservative and we may need to reevaluate abortion in the conservative movement.”
Bad things for Iran
As the results started to become clearer, and Trump appeared to be on a path to victory, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), whose name has been bandied about as a potential secretary of state, told JNS a Trump victory would mean “a lot of good things for Israel and the United States, and a lot of bad things for Iran.”
Rubio said he would “absolutely hope so” when asked if the newly Republican-controlled Senate would look at defunding the United Nations, “particularly those agencies at the U.N. that are basically infiltrated by supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah.”
Corey Lewandowski, a close adviser to Trump, told JNS that while domestic policy generally overshadows foreign affairs in presidential elections, he doesn’t discount the impact the Israel-Hamas war and its consequences had on this election.
“Is it something that a lot of people went out and voted on? That issue of foreign policy isn’t historically the issue that drives a campaign, but it clearly played a role in this election,” said Lewandowski.
He called Israel “our greatest ally in the Middle East” and said, “Donald Trump is very clear. We’re going to support Israel and her endeavors. And listen, if Donald Trump had been the president, we wouldn’t have seen the attack on Israel.”
Lewandowski, who once served as an election campaign adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked by JNS what advice he might dispense to Netanyahu these days.
“I’d say, ‘Be strong,’ right? Israel has a right to defend herself, and she should do that, and we should make sure that if people are attacking Israel, she defends herself,” said Lewandowski. “But more than that, she has to take care of her people, just like the United States has to do.”
A victory in Pennsylvania essentially sealed the election for Trump, and it marked the first time the crowd in West Palm Beach truly erupted, sensing a return to the White House for the Republican was close at hand.
Harris had the opportunity to select as her running mate Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro. But, many analysts say Harris caved in to the far-left, antisemitic wing of the party, who objected to Shapiro’s support of Israel, and, more fundamentally, his Jewish identity.
Instead, Harris selected Minnesota’s more progressive governor, Tim Walz, who seemingly brought little electoral value to the ticket in the end.
Kaploun, using the Yiddish word for “shame,” said that the Harris campaign’s “shonda actions are our blessings.”
