“This poll tells us very little about how N.Y. Jews will vote,” Mark Mellman, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS.
A poll of registered New York voters suggests that a majority of Jews in the state intend to vote for former President Donald Trump in the presidential election in November.
New York Jews now favor Trump over U.S. President Joe Biden 53% to 44%, according to the Siena College poll, released on Tuesday. Jews in the state said that they intend to continue to back Democrats over Republicans 54% to 39% in congressional elections.
The poll has an overall margin of error of 4.2 percentage points in either direction, which means that a gap of 8.4 percentage points could potentially be dead even.
Jews made up just 8% of the large sample size: 806 people. That means the margin of error for the 65 Jewish respondents would be potentially much larger than 4.2 percentage points.
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 Philip 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 U.S. county, by 12 points. He also garnered 88% 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% margin.
The Siena poll does not suggest that even an increasingly Republican-friendly Jewish community could flip the state red, as the poll has Biden beating Trump overall 48% to 36%.
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