As Americans head to the polls to elect either U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump to the nation’s highest office, pollsters predict that 2024 will be one of the closest races in American history.
JNS spoke with Mark Mellman, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, and Sam Markstein, national political director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, about how they see the 2024 election unfolding.
“I thought for years, plural, that this was gonna be a very close election,” Mellman told JNS. “I think it’s moving ever so slightly from exactly 50/50 odds to more like 51-49 for Harris.”
Markstein said he didn’t know how the election would turn out but thought that the closing days favored Trump. “I do think that we do have momentum,” he said. “I think we’re closing strong.”
If the presidential election comes down to Pennsylvania, as many polls predict, then it’s unlikely that it will be possible to declare a winner on Tuesday night. In 2020, it took four days to declare Joe Biden the winner of the Keystone State.
But Republicans and Democrats will also be closely watching down-ballot races to see who wins the House and Senate, including in states that are otherwise safe at the top of the ticket for Harris or Trump, like Montana’s race between Democratic Sen. John Tester and GOP candidate Tim Sheehy.
“The real issue in the down-ballot races is control,” Mellman said. “Are Democrats going to retain control of the Senate? Are they going to take control of the House? And that’s very much up in the air in both cases as well.”
“There’s an assumption that the Democrats are going to lose the Senate,” he added. “It’s more likely than not. But there’s a poll out in Montana that has Senator Tester even with his opponent. If Tester were to hang on and Harris wins, you’d have a Democratic Senate.”
Democrats currently hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate, and Republicans are most likely to pick up seats in West Virginia and Montana, if polling averages hold true.
In the House, Republicans hold a similarly narrow 220-212 seat majority, with Democrats eyeing seats Republicans eked out in 2022 in districts that voted for Biden in 2020, like New York’s 4th Congressional District.
Markstein told JNS that Virginia’s 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts could be early bellwethers of how the race is going on Tuesday night.
“Those should be called fairly early, and they’re very competitive,” Markstein said. “If the Republicans win both, that should be a very good indication for a good night. And if Democrats win both, it could be a long night for Republicans.”
All eyes on the Jewish vote
The intense focus on Pennsylvania and some of the New York City-area House seats has put an unusual amount of attention on Jewish voters in this cycle.
In September, Trump said that Jewish voters would be partly to blame if he lost and failed two-fifths of the Jewish vote, a level that Republicans haven’t achieved in decades.
“I’m not going to call this a prediction, but, in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40%,” Trump said at an event on fighting antisemitism.
Harris, meanwhile, has tried to find the sweet spot in her messaging between supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and recognizing the concerns of Arab and Muslim Americans who want a unilateral ceasefire and an end to U.S. support for the Jewish state.
“This year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon. It is devastating,” Harris said at a rally on Sunday in Michigan. “As president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”
Markstein predicted that Trump would do better with Jewish voters in 2024 than in 2020 in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent explosion of antisemitic incidents across the United States.
“These are issues that are front of mind for many Jewish voters,” Markstein said. “We’re not just hearing it anecdotally. We’re seeing it in the polling. We’re seeing it in the modeling. We’re seeing it on the ground as canvassers go door-to-door and phone bank and send text messages.”
One of the biggest questions about the Jewish vote in 2024 is whether Trump can make inroads beyond the Orthodox Jewish community, which has voted increasingly Republican in recent years.
“Media loves the national number, but the national number really doesn’t tell you a whole lot because Jewish voters who are voting on the Upper East Side or Chicago or L.A. don’t matter at all for the presidential election,” Markstein said. “The ones that do matter are the Jewish voters in the suburbs of Philly, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta and Las Vegas.”
He said that constituency “is going to make or break the presidency. It could make or break a lot of these really tight Senate races as well.”
DMFI’s Mellman told JNS that he expected that Jewish voters would ultimately back Harris by a large margin.
“Could there be some erosion from the past? There could be, but there might not be,” he said. “But anybody that thinks they’re going to get something other than overwhelming support for the Democrats I think is not connected closely with reality.”
