2024 Election Post-Mortem: Jews
(ANALYSIS) Not-so-fun fact among American religion and politics: It’s almost impossible to accurately describe the voting patterns of any non-Christian group before 2008.
That’s something I don’t think that the average person really understands about the kind of work that you see on this newsletter. I’ve written about this in a post a couple of months ago entitled “Why I Can't Tell You How Quakers (or Unitarians) Voted in 2024.”
To quickly summarize, 20 years ago, survey sample sizes weren’t that big. A total N of 3,000 was just gargantuan.
Here’s why that’s a problem. If a survey is doing a good job of random sampling, the share of respondents who are Jewish should be about 2%. It may wiggle up and down a bit, but that’s a pretty good benchmark.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio Visits Israel in February 2025. (Photo via U.S. Embassy Jerusalem)
Those horse race polls you see on the nightly news before an election? Their sample is almost always around 1,000. So, quick math here: 2% of 1,000 is 20 people. You can’t extrapolate anything at all from a sample of 20 people. That’s only slightly better than just asking random people on the street who they voted for and why.
Things have changed because we have the Cooperative Election Study now. The number of Jews in the sample in 2024? It was 1,319 (weighted).
Yeah, there are more Jews in the CES than there are total respondents in most of the polls you see plastered on the screen when watching CNN or MSNBC. And what’s nice is that the samples have been that large now for about five election cycles. So, let me tell the story of Jewish voters at the ballot box since 2008.
Welp, this graph is certainly not the most dramatic data visualization that I have ever produced. I was pretty stunned to see just how steady the Jewish vote has been for the last 16 years.
When Obama ran in 2008, 70% of Jews supported him. He did just a little bit worse in his reelection campaign in 2012, losing about 5 points of support.
When Clinton was at the top of the ticket, she basically got back to that 70% mark, and so did Biden in 2020. The 2024 contest between Harris and Trump looked a whole lot like what happened in 2012: The Democrat got 65%, and the Republican got about a third of the Jewish vote.
Maybe what stands out here is that no matter how much the country has changed socially, religiously and politically, none of that has really shifted the overall relationship between Jews and the Democratic Party.
It put up four different candidates during this time period — none did worse than 65%, and none managed to move above 70%.
For what it’s worth, this is why it’s hard to work in the media business. Your editor sends you a message about how <BLANK> may shift the Jewish vote in 2024, and they need 1,200 words about it tomorrow.
Reporters have to file stories that their editors assign, even if there isn’t really anything there.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.