Despite rhetoric and a track record that would suggest a strong preference for Israel over the Palestinian cause, President-elect Donald Trump lost the Jewish vote by a larger margin than he lost the Muslim vote.
Thirty-four percentage points separated Trump from Vice President Kamala Harris among Jewish voters, according to Fox News Voter Analysis. Harris won their support 66% to 32%.
Despite Republican attempts to paint Democrats as inconsistent on Israel, Jewish voters only narrowly shifted toward Trump. In 2020, 69% voted for President Biden, 30% voted for Trump.
Muslim voters favored Harris by 32 percentage points. Trump won 32% of their vote, while Harris won 63%. In 2020, Biden had won 64% of the Muslim vote, and Trump had won 35%.
Trump won a majority of the vote among evangelical Christians, Catholics and Mormons.
Some Democrats had worried that third-party candidate Jill Stein could pull the vote of Muslims and others disaffected with Biden’s Middle East policy away from Harris. Four percent of Muslims voted for a third-party candidate.
Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump. (AP Images)
Throughout the campaign, Harris tried to walk a tightrope between both sides as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza dragged on and spilled into Lebanon.
She refused to differentiate herself from Biden’s Middle East policy and emphasized that she was committed to Israel’s right to defend itself.
Harris has called for a cease-fire for many months and refused to preside over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in April.
“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” Harris said last month when Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
Anti-Israel demonstrators protest in support of the Palestinians who have died in Gaza outside the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, on Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
She said the war “must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
“It is time for the day after to begin,” she said.
To Palestinian supporters in the U.S., Biden’s criticisms of Israel’s offensive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon ring hollow when the U.S. continues to provide aid without conditions to the war effort.
The Biden team threatened to withhold military aid in October if Israel did not allow more food aid into Gaza but largely continued to provide weapons packages to Israel as the war dragged past the one-year mark last month.
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In May, Netanyahu accused the Biden administration of slow-walking delivery of 2,000-pound bombs due to concerns over their destructive capabilities. “One of the things that we’ve done that I’m entirely supportive of is the pause that we put on the 2000-lb. bombs,” Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists in September.
Anti-Israel protesters chant and wave a Palestinian flag as people gather to watch on a screen as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on The Ellipse, just south of the White House, in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 29, 2024. (AMID FARAHI/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump team, meanwhile, worked to capitalize on Arab American disillusionment with the Biden administration.
“We have to get this whole thing over with,” Trump said in Dearborn, Michigan, last week, speaking of the continuing conflict in the Middle East. “We want to have peace. We want to have peace on earth.”
On the other hand, Trump has said that for a Jewish American not to vote for him “shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
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During his first term, Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and helped broker peace deals between Israel and four Arab countries.
His campaign frequently suggested that Harris favors the Palestinian cause over the Israelis.
However, in April, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt “Israel is absolutely losing the PR war” and criticized the images being shown of Gaza in ruins.
“You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory,” Trump said, without directly answering whether he was “100 percent with Israel.”
