Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is named the winner of the 2024 presidential election, there’s one consequence of the contest about which we can already be sure. America’s two major political parties have largely exchanged identities, and this year’s race not only confirmed a trend that has been in motion since 2016 but accelerated it. Yet one of the interesting sidebars to this momentous shift concerns one group that has, for the most part, stood still. Most Jews are staying exactly where they’ve always been inside the tent of the Democratic Party. The interesting question: How can a group that claims to be largely motivated by what it considers to be the quest for social justice rationalize being on the other side of the political aisle from most working-class Americans?
While there’s a chance that there will be a real shift in the Jewish vote in 2024, the odds are that when the various exit polls claiming to break down the numbers are published, they will show that the overwhelming majority of them once again voted for the Democrats. While all those polls should be taken with more than a shovel-full of salt, especially those commissioned by either the Democrats or Republicans, there’s little reason to believe that Jewish voters are going to change the habits of a lifetime just at the moment when the party to which most of them feel loyalty has become such a perfect sociological fit.
One of the most under-reported and least-understood stories of the last decade is the realignment of the Democrats and Republicans largely along class lines. The word “realignment” has usually only been used in the past by political historians to describe monumental changes in which one party or another seized an overwhelming majority over their opponents. One example was in 1932 when Democrats under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt exploited the pain of the Great Depression to discredit the GOP and gain a stranglehold on Washington for generations, winning the White House for six of the next eight contests and controlling the House of Representatives for all but four of the next 60 years.
Realigning along class lines
The bifurcated nature of American politics in the 21st century won’t allow either party to gain landslide victories. However, realignment also can describe what happens when the parties change in terms of who they represent. That’s what’s been going on in recent years as the two parties gave up attempting to hold onto some of their old supporters while gaining new ones who used to identify with their opponents.
In this case, the Democrats stopped being the so-called party of the people. Eschewing the interests of their old base of support, they have developed new sources of votes and campaign contributions. The same is true for Republicans in the era of Donald Trump.
As the pollsters continually tell us, those Americans with college degrees have become a reliable Democratic demographic. Meanwhile, the same polls reveal that working-class voters have become the base of the Republicans. The Democrats are now the party of the credentialed elites and the very poor. And this will likely hold no matter whether Trump or Harris wins.
This is a significant change from the recent past.
For generations, Republicans were better positioned to get the votes and contributions of the college-educated, in addition to the subset of that group that works on Wall Street and in big business. That doesn’t ring true anymore. The Democrats have seized a stranglehold on the credentialed elites once assumed to be natural Republican voters. Meanwhile, those Americans who didn’t graduate from college and labor in blue-collar jobs—and who were long assumed to be more inclined to vote for Democrats from the era of FDR’s New Deal through the turn of the 21st century—have largely deserted them. Now the polls show us that they are very much a stronghold for the Trump-era GOP.
The mainstream legacy media that always tilted liberal but which now leans hard to the left has represented this sea change as a sort of populist magic trick, by which a charlatan like Trump has bewitched America’s working class into joining a personality cult. They consider the shift of the credentialed elites to the Democratic column to be merely the natural consequence of smart people voting for intelligent policies and politicians.
But this, like so many of the assumptions of a partisan press that has dropped journalism in favor of left-wing activism, misunderstands what’s been happening in this country and why the partisan divide has become so embittered.
Working-class Americans prefer Trump for the same reason that elites despise him. His trolling of the political and cultural establishment of this country delights them specifically because they rightly understand the contempt in which the credentialed elites hold them. From former President Barack Obama’s 2008 line about Americans who “cling to their guns and religion” to Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump voters being “deplorables” to President Joe Biden’s line about them being “garbage”—words that have been echoed countless times by those who dominate popular culture—people living in red America know what their alleged betters think of them.
They also know that the consequence of policies like open borders and unfettered illegal immigration that were enabled by liberals in the name of humanitarianism has been an economic disaster for them, as it depressed wages and made housing more expensive. They feel the same about globalist economics in which American jobs, primarily manufacturing ones, have been exported abroad—a policy that was championed just as much by the Republican establishment that dominated the GOP until Trump—to lower the price of consumer goods and increase corporate profits.
These problems, along with the devastating epidemic of opioid addiction, have left the lives of the university-educated elites largely untouched. Hence, they are quick to denounce worries about illegal immigration as evidence of racism while also welcoming or acquiescing to the takeover of the education system (K-12 schools as well as higher academic institutions) by woke ideologues who seek to irrevocably divide Americans along racial lines.
These are differences that cut across traditional ideological splits about economics and that can best be seen by the way the difference between the small minority of Never Trump Republicans and the GOP base is largely defined by class more than anything else.
This is also compounded by the gender gap between the two parties; Republicans win the male vote easily while Democrats are way ahead among women, with the issue of abortion being cited as explaining why the latter has ditched the GOP. While no one should underestimate the way that issue has helped to gin up so much support for Democrats, class remains the most significant dividing line between the parties.
Trump’s willingness to speak frankly about the way illegal immigration and free trade have hurt the country has fueled the belief that he fights for the working class. All liberals see is a man who has coarsened political discourse and taps into what they are wrongly convinced is latent racism—a belief that only reinforces Trump’s hold on nearly half of the electorate.
A bastion of the credentialed elites
Where do Jews fit into this political equation?
Few groups are so easily pigeonholed by education level and economic class as American Jewry. While all generalizations can be problematic, the Jews are among the most educated people in the country and generally economically well-off. That’s not true of all Jews; for example, the poverty rate among ultra-Orthodox Jews remains troubling. But if you want to explain why Democrats are likely to get more than 60% of the Jewish vote, the answer lies in their education and economic status more than anything else.
There is some evidence of movement towards the GOP as a result of concerns about Israel and the way the political left—in particular, elements of the Democrat’s intersectional base—embraced antisemitism after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7.
It’s possible that most pundits and pollsters underestimate the way the explosion of Jew-hatred has affected the sensibilities of Jews who feel abandoned both by former allies and institutions where they once felt at home. But for the bulk of American Jewry that remains secular and politically liberal, not even the shock of the last year is probably enough to shake them out of their conviction that the Democrats best represent their views. While Israel’s security and worries about antisemitism are litmus-test issues for the minority of Jews who are Orthodox and politically conservative, the majority who are liberal are more likely to speak of social justice issues and abortion as their priorities even if many of them are also concerned about the Jewish state.
But when probing which elements of the community share a visceral hatred of Trump and a willingness to stick with the Democrats, the class divide remains the most likely explanation.
There’s a certain irony to this because most Jewish Democrats continue to claim that their politics are defined by their concern for those less fortunate than themselves. Yet their utter indifference to the plight of working-class Americans gives the lie to their claims, as well as to the belief that the struggles of past generations of similarly hard-working Jews explain their views.
What this means is that scholar Milton Himmelfarb’s famous quip that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” has now been turned on its head. The WASPs who once were the ruling elites may no longer be in charge economically or politically. And a not insignificant number of Jews do work in jobs that can be characterized as blue-collar. Yet most Jews now earn and vote like the rest of the credentialed elites, and they, like their non-Jewish counterparts, tend to think the people who work with their hands and cling to traditional ideas about American values or faith should defer to the views of the people who went to college.
So, while much of the American electorate has changed their political affiliations based on the way the parties now appeal to their interests, the majority of Jews are essentially standing still for the same reasons of economics, class and educational achievement. While the surge in antisemitism may break this pattern, to date, there’s little evidence that concerns about Israel or even growing hatred in the United States are stronger than the pull of class to shift many Jews from the Democrats to the Republicans.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
