Sixty-four percent. That's the share of Jewish American voters who now favor Republicans heading into the midterms, according to a new McLaughlin & Associates survey of 1,000 likely voters nationwide. Democrats pulled 33 percent. A 31-point Republican advantage among a voter bloc that backed Democrats by double digits for the better part of a century.
Five years ago, that number would've gotten you laughed out of a polling seminar.
The survey, conducted by pollsters John McLaughlin and Jim McLaughlin, broke down the midterm electorate by religious affiliation. Jewish voters made up 4 percent of the sample — small but consistent with their share of the national electorate. And the direction wasn't subtle. The 64-33 split represents one of the largest Republican advantages among Jewish voters in modern polling history.
CNN's own chief data analyst, Harry Enten, flagged the same trendline among New York Jewish voters earlier this cycle. Democrats' House ballot lead among Jewish voters in New York collapsed from 49 points in 2022 to just 13 points this year. A 36-point swing in a single cycle, in one of the most reliably blue states in the country.
The broader religious breakdown tells its own story. Evangelical Christians favored Republicans 56 percent to 37 percent. Protestants went 51-43 Republican. Catholics split 48-46 for the GOP — building on Trump's 20-point Catholic margin in 2024 and his 27-point Protestant margin that same year. The only religious demographic that broke for Democrats: secular, atheist, agnostic, and unaffiliated voters, at 51 percent to 43 percent. Muslim voters favored Democrats 63-37, comprising 2 percent of the sample.
So the party that spent the last two years hedging on Israel, slow-walking antisemitism resolutions, and letting its activist base wave Hamas flags on college quads managed to lose the Jewish vote by 31 points. The party whose members couldn't bring themselves to condemn campus encampments calling for intifada. The party that treated "from the river to the sea" as protected political speech while Jewish students needed security escorts to class.
Democrats will point to the small subsample size. Polling 4 percent of 1,000 voters means roughly 40 Jewish respondents in this particular survey — a legitimate methodological note. But when CNN's own analyst is flagging a 36-point collapse in New York, and a national poll independently shows a 31-point Republican lead, the sample-size objection starts sounding less like statistical rigor and more like a preferred excuse.
What makes this realignment stick is that it isn't about one candidate or one election. Jewish voters didn't leave the Democratic Party over a policy disagreement. They left because the party made a choice about which coalition partners mattered more. When progressive activists demanded solidarity with movements that explicitly called for the elimination of Israel, Democratic leadership calculated that the activist energy was worth more than the donors and voters in the synagogues.
That calculation has a price tag, and the McLaughlin poll just printed the receipt.
