The Republican Jewish Coalition touted its success in convincing Jewish voters to elect Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States through microtargeted ads directed at key swing states.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Matt Brooks, the group’s CEO, described the $15 million effort as “the largest campaign ever targeting the Jewish community in history.”
“We spent a lot of money because we knew who our voters were,” Brooks said. He noted that the RJC was able to reach Jewish voters directly in their homes via their smart televisions or streaming platforms.
“We could micro-target to the lowest level precisely who we want to see our ads based on our modeling and our data,” he added. “So not only was this the biggest campaign ever, it was also the most sophisticated and technologically advanced.”
Brooks pointed to one ad titled “Deli Talk,” which features three Jewish women talking about antisemitism and Israel, as being particularly effective.
“We were referring to it internally as ‘the permission ad,’” Brooks said. “This ad showed everybody that it’s OK to vote Trump, even if you don’t particularly want to go have a beer with him or you don’t care for him. It gives you permission, especially among Jewish women.”
The ad, which was filmed at Hymie’s Deli in Philadelphia, has 700,000 views on YouTube.
A Jewish reporter on the call, who said that she saw the ad playing “relentlessly” while visiting her parents in Arizona, asked Brooks if RJC had the data to know that her parents were Jewish voters and to target their household for ads.
“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
It’s not yet clear from available data whether there was a substantial national shift among Jewish voters to Trump, compared to the 2020 election.
RJC pointed to the Fox News voter analysis, which had Trump winning 32% of the Jewish vote, as proof of a swing to Trump. If accurate, that would be the best showing for a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush was elected in 1988, but it is also only a two percentage point improvement for Trump since the 2020 election.
How Jews voted at the local level is unlikely to be clear until states release more precinct-level voting data.
If there was a significant swing to Trump among Jewish voters, the strongest evidence, at present, is that it occurred among Orthodox Jews in the New York area. Trump performed significantly better among Jewish voters in New York than he did in 2020, according to the Fox data, and he also observably improved his voting performance in counties with large Orthodox communities like Rockland County, N.Y., and Passaic County, N.J.
In key swing states like Pennsylvania, conflicting data exists about how Jews voted from polls and surveys. According to the Fox data, Trump performed no better in the Keystone State among Jews than he did in 2020, winning 26% of the vote in the past two elections. But in an exit poll of Jewish voters in Pennsylvania commissioned by the Orthodox Union, Trump won 41% of the Jewish vote.
Ari Fleischer, an RJC board member and former White House spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, argued that more Jewish voters chose Trump because of his support for Israel.
“For those who care a lot about Israel, this has been a life-saving election,” Fleischer said. “That’s why a lot of people, who traditionally would have voted more on the basis of American domestic issues, voted for Trump, because they understand the stakes for Israel.”
