Mark Mellman, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS that “the margin of error for Jews in the Sienna poll is plus or minus 13 points on each number.”
“This poll tells us very little about how New York Jews will vote,” he said.
Mellman expects Biden, who “has been uniquely supportive of Israel,” to do well with Jews, as did Democrat Tom Suozzi, who beat Mazi Pilip earlier this month in a New York congressional election.
Sam Markstein, national political director at the Republican Jewish Coalition, sees things differently. Markstein wrote on Wednesday that the poll reflected a shift among Jewish voters.
“Jewish voters moving towards the GOP is a clear trend, long in the making,” he wrote. He cited Lee Zeldin’s comparative success attracting Jewish votes in the 2022 New York gubernatorial election.
Zeldin, who is Jewish and an RJC board member, did particularly well in New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
He won Rockland County in Upstate New York, which has the largest per capita Jewish population of any US county, by 12 points. He also garnered 88 per cent of the vote in New York City’s 48th Assembly District, which includes the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn.
That wasn’t good enough for Zeldin to win, however, as Gov. Kathleen Hochul was re-elected by a 6 per cent margin.
In the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center reported the national Jewish vote as 68 per cent for Biden and 30 per cent for Trump, which was a six point bump compared to his performance against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
