More than double the number of Jewish likely New York voters, 78%, say that Oct. 7 and its aftermath have affected them a lot more than do their non-Jewish peers, 32%.
That’s according to a survey that Honan Strategy Group conducted between Oct. 2 and 6 of 1,167 likely general election voters.
The firm, which has worked for former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Orthodox Union, shared its findings about Jewish voters exclusively with JNS.
The survey oversampled those with Jewish-sounding names and polled 503 people who self-identified as Jews. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.87 percentage points.
It suggests that Israel and the Hamas attack and its aftermath have deeply affected a majority of Jewish New Yorkers and taken a personal toll.
Just 11% of Jewish respondents said that Oct. 7 and the ensuing war didn’t impact them very much or at all. Among non-Jewish voters, 42% said that Oct. 7 and its aftermath either didn’t affect them very much or at all.
More than two-thirds of Jewish likely voters, 68%, said that they believe that the world has moved on from the victims of Oct. 7. Just 28% of Jewish respondents said that the world remembers the victims.
Non-Jewish voters split the other way. Some 45% said that the world remembers the Oct. 7 victims, and 42% said that people have moved on.
“We are trying to open up the eyes of policymakers to what the vox populi, the voice of the public, thinks,” Bradley Honan, president and CEO of Honan Strategy Group, told JNS.
“We want to raise issues that are in the public domain to civic and business organizations, to discuss them and enact policies that will make the city, the state and the world a better place to live,” he said.
The survey “shows that unfortunately the city is fairly divided right now, which is very troubling,” Honan told JNS. “It also says that this is very personal, that the world has moved on and perhaps forgotten victims.”
“It has created this very bad divide we see in the city which everybody agrees exists,” he said.
Two thirds (66%) of Jewish respondents said that disagreements about Israel have strained relationships with family, friends or coworkers, including 23% who said that it has strained such relationships “a great deal.”
Among non-Jewish respondents, 34% reported strained relationships and 66% reported no such tensions.
Almost half of each group—45% of Jewish and 48% of non-Jewish likely voters—saw a more divided New York City today than before Oct. 7. Almost no Jewish voters (1%) and 23% of non-Jewish voters see a more united city today.
A slight majority of Jewish voters (51%) said New York City is about the same.
Nearly all Jewish New Yorkers, 99%, said that they watched the war against Hamas closely or very closely, while 34% of non-Jewish voters said the same.
