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RJC DELIVERED!

RJC Delivered the Jewish Vote for Trump

Donald J. Trump has accomplished the greatest political comeback in US history and will be our 47th President.

 

The Republican Jewish Coalition's efforts contributed to his victory. As RJC National Chairman Senator Norm Coleman and CEO Matt Brooks said after the election was called, early yesterday morning:

The RJC is gratified to be part of this winning coalition, having played a significant role in support of President Trump's victory, particularly in the key battleground states. RJC raised and spent over $15MM in support of President Trump, turning out Jewish voters with an unprecedented paid media campaign and grassroots engagement deploying thousands of volunteers on the ground in key Jewish communities.

 

As we’ve said from the beginning: the Jewish vote matters, and it played a major role in delivering the Presidency for President Trump. Jewish voters from coast to coast rejected Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party due to their failure to keep the Jewish community safe, and for undermining our ally Israel as it continues to fight an existential war against Iran and its terrorist proxies.

Let's look at the numbers.

 

As the graphic above shows, President Trump received a greater share of the Jewish vote in 2024 nationally than he did in 2016 or 2020, and he won historic levels of Jewish support in key states.

 

Nationally, Trump's share of the Jewish vote rose to 32% in 2024, according to the AP/Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll, the highest number for a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

 

The RJC tracked down the most reliable sources for data about the Jewish vote in specific states* that helped decide the 2024 election - Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania - as well as in Florida and New York. The AP/Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll has updated some of its numbers since yesterday, showing even better results than we quoted in the graphic above:

  • In Arizona, Trump won 38% of the Jewish vote.

  • In Nevada, he won 42% of the Jewish vote.

  • In Florida, he won 44% of the Jewish vote.

  • In New York he won 46% of the Jewish vote.

  • In Pennsylvania, where the Honan Group did a specific, state-wide exit poll, President Trump won 41% of the Jewish vote.

*Many polls (including CNN) don't have a large enough sample of Jewish voters to be reliable. The AP/Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll is a national poll with a much larger sample size, making it possible to extrapolate data about some specific states.

What did the Republican Jewish Coalition do to deliver the Jewish vote for President Trump?

 

The RJC began its efforts two years ago by identifying that in 2024, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia that would be the top battleground states, not Ohio and Florida as we had seen in previous election cycles. The RJC began hiring staff and deploying them to do grassroots organizing and build the infrastructure for our get-out-the-vote effort.

 

We also continued to build on the most sophisticated and accurate Jewish voter file ever assembled, with reliable data on Jewish voters in those key states. We identified Jewish voters, how likely they were to vote for President Trump, and which issues were most important to them. We crafted informative email, text, and direct mail materials for persuadable voters. We deployed well-tested ads on cable and broadcast TV, on digital, streaming services, and on social media, targeted specifically to the voters we were trying to reach. We had thousands of volunteers who phone banked and door knocked.

 

Then we pivoted to a get-out-the-vote program, using that same data and those same methods to encourage our targeted voters to get to the polls. Our field staff held events, including a "Bring Your Own Ballot" barbeque in Nevada, to boost early voting. We even used an interactive texting program to get information to voters about requesting mail-in ballots or getting to their polling places.

Did the media cover RJC's efforts?

 

Yes, they did! In addition to the many media hits we've linked to in previous enewsletters, about our ads and our grassroots efforts, President Trump's strong numbers in the Jewish community and the RJC's work got considerable coverage.

 

• Breitbart's Joel Pollak reports:

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was a "life-saving" victory for Jews who care about Israel, according to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

 

Fleischer participated in a press briefing on Wednesday with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group that has been pivotal in raising funds for Trump and other Republican candidates, in backing pro-Israel policies within the GOP, and in turning out the Jewish vote.

 

The RJC said, citing Fox News exit polls, that Trump had won 32% of the Jewish vote, an historically high percentage, greater than any Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1980. (The RJC said that one exit poll conducted by other networks, which showed Trump’s Jewish support at just 21%, had skipped several states with high Jewish populations and therefore had a small sample size.)

 

...RJC CEO Matt Brooks told reporters that the group had targeted ads specifically at Jewish voters, driving the consistent message that it was all right to vote for Trump, even if you had traditionally voted for Democrats.

 

One ad featured a group of middle-aged Jewish women talking in a booth at a diner and expressing their concerns about terror in Israel and antisemitic violence on college campuses.

 

The RJC had also knocked on doors in swing states, notably Nevada, which flipped Republican for the GOP for the first time since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, which took place in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

• RJC Political Director Sam Markstein appeared today on the Varney & Co. show on the Fox Business Network to discuss the Jewish vote. (See the video here.) Sam told Stuart Varney:

Yes, those numbers you just showed [32% of the Jewish vote nationally going for Trump] represent a historic number for the Republican nominee and actually represent a historic hemorrhage of support - you have to go all the way back to the 1980s to find a Democratic nominee for President who did as poorly as Kamala Harris did in this election. You have to go all the way back to Michael Dukakis.

 

If you look at the actual battleground states as well, President Trump did even better in places like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona that delivered the presidency for him in this election.

Andrew Bernard at JNS reports:

The Republican Jewish Coalition touted its success in convincing Jewish voters to elect Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States through microtargeted ads directed at key swing states.

 

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Matt Brooks, the group’s CEO, described the $15 million effort as “the largest campaign ever targeting the Jewish community in history."

 

"We spent a lot of money because we knew who our voters were," Brooks said. He noted that the RJC was able to reach Jewish voters directly in their homes via their smart televisions or streaming platforms.

 

"We could micro-target to the lowest level precisely who we want to see our ads based on our modeling and our data," he added. "So not only was this the biggest campaign ever, it was also the most sophisticated and technologically advanced."

 

Brooks pointed to one ad titled "Deli Talk," which features three Jewish women talking about antisemitism and Israel, as being particularly effective.

 

"We were referring to it internally as 'the permission ad,'" Brooks said. "This ad showed everybody that it’s OK to vote Trump even if you don’t particularly want to go have a beer with him or you don’t care for him. It gives you permission, especially among Jewish women."

 

The ad, which was filmed at Hymie’s Deli in Philadelphia, has 700,000 views on YouTube.

• CNN hosts and guests have discussed the RJC Victory Fund's "Deli Talk" ad on several occasions over the last two weeks. See clips here.

Republicans Take the Hill

Republicans have flipped control of the Senate and ousted Sen. Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader in the upcoming Congress.This afternoon, the AP called the Pennsylvania Senate race for Republican Dave McCormick, giving Republicans 53 seats in the Senate.

 

On the House side, Republicans are currently ahead of Democrats with 210 seats to the Democrats' 198. Although there are still many races to be called, Republicans are projected to have a majority in the House as well.

 

We are delighted to note that Jewish Republican Craig Goldman of Texas won in the 12th Congressional District. He will take the seat of Republican Rep. Kay Granger, who chose not to run for reelection after serving 14 terms. Goldman will become the third Jewish Republican member of Congress when he is sworn in in January 2025, joining Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH).

RJC in the News

Jerusalem Post: Republican Jewish Coalition congratulates Trump, says victory helped by Jewish vote

Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks and Norm Coleman, its national chairman and a former senator released a statement congratulating President-elect Donald Trump more than 30 minutes before Trump took the stage in Palm Beach, declaring his victory over Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

"President Donald Trump’s decisive victory tonight is a victory for American strength, American leadership, American prosperity, and the American dream," Brooks and Coleman said.

The Jewish Chronicle: Why Jews swung away from Democrats

According to voter data analysis by Fox News, Harris won 66 per cent of Jewish voters, with Trump taking 32 per cent. Sam Markstein, spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition, told me this would make 2024 the "worst presidential performance for a Democrat since [Michael] Dukakis" in 1988. Noting that numbers could move overnight, Markstein noted a "shift of 16 per cent to [Donald] Trump from 2020," in Arizona, a "shift of 42 per cent to Trump from 2020" in Nevada, and a "shift of 4 per cent to Trump from 2020" in Pennsylvania.

 

Add to that, the "shy Trump voter" phenomenon that messed up polls in 2016 still exists in the non-Orthodox Jewish community (about 90 per cent of American Jews). I wouldn't be surprised if there are actually fewer Harris voters than what Jews report to pollsters.

 

In populous New York, home to the nation’s largest Jewish community and the largest Orthodox Jewish community, Fox News reported that 45 per cent of New York's Jews voted for Trump. That figure, Markstein told me, "is historic, on pace with [Lee] Zeldin from 2022." Zeldin is the Jewish Republican who ran for governor of New York two years ago.

By Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Election Analysis

Donald J. Trump will return to the White House. Here are some thoughtful analyses of the election and its results.

 

MARK PENN: Trump's triumph sends major message. It's the working class and middle America that run our country

The American people have spoken and spoken clearly that Donald Trump is their choice for president. They sent a clear message to the coastal elites that it’s the working class and middle America that runs this country.

 

...Americans were unhappy with the course of the country. The voters believed that they were worse off under Joe Biden, whom they blamed for inflation. They wanted a border that was closed and a leader who would again project strength not weakness.

KARL ROVE: Trump’s Comeback and What’s to Come

President-elect Trump achieved his victory by assembling a new coalition. He added to the GOP’s traditional base working-class noncollege voters of all races; young voters, especially young men; the biggest share of the Hispanic vote since at least 2004; and the largest black percentage for Republicans in decades. He expanded his majorities in rural counties and small towns while building his numbers in cities and suburbs. His percentage of the vote ballooned in blue states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

 

Mr. Trump created this coalition by opposing Biden-Harris policies on the economy, inflation, the border and wokeness while promising to restore America’s greatness. He was aided by the sense that the economy was better and more prosperous when he was in office. And with two-thirds of Americans believing our country was on the wrong course, he became the change candidate.

ELI LAKE: How Trump Won

How did he do it? Trump led an insurgency of oddball outsiders against an insular band of out-of-touch elites. Kamala Harris had Beyoncé, Harvard economists, The New York Times, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. Trump had Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr., Joe Rogan, and the Teamster rank and file. In a year when Americans were angry, this misfit coalition was a tribune for their rage.

 

Why were Americans so angry?

 

The reasons were clear if you were willing to tune out cable news.

 

For starters, their president, Joe Biden, had misinterpreted a narrow victory in 2020 as a mandate to make sweeping policy changes to everything from the border—some 10 million people crossed over illegally during Biden’s administration—to the national debt, which is more than $35 trillion. All the while, his Democratic Party advanced outlandish and radical social policies, such as support for biological men to compete in women’s sports, taxing unrealized capital gains, and colluding with social media companies to ban alleged health misinformation. He also insisted for most of his presidency that the very real inflation consumers experienced was fleeting and not serious.

 

...Meanwhile, Trump—the king of the meme—demonstrated a mastery of the political image, creating iconic visuals that defined him as a champion for half the country. Four iconic photographs help explain his improbable journey to victory on November 6, 2024.

 

The first is his mug shot from August 24, 2023, taken inside an Atlanta jail... The second photo shows Trump punching the air triumphantly, ear and face bloodied, after a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, nearly assassinated him on July 13... In an October 20 photo, where he donned a McDonald’s apron and served customers at a drive-through, Trump ... conveyed his fidelity to working-class Americans... And the fourth photo? It was taken on October 30, less than a week before Election Day. Dressed in a bright orange work vest, Trump leaned out of the passenger side of a garbage truck while addressing a media scrum.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 10 Reasons You Didn't See This Coming

For my British and European friends who are "shocked" and "surprised", here are 10 reasons you didn't see this coming. Read this short post and then read the replies from our American friends who will confirm what I'm saying.

 

1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.

 

2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don't have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.

 

3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people's lives are not the same... [Continue reading here.]

Did you see the TRUMP KIPPAH that Matt held up during his GOP Convention speech?

GET YOURS HERE!

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Short Takes

BDE: Passing of Bernie Marcus

The RJC notes with deep sadness the passing this week of RJC Board of Directors member Bernie Marcus of Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Bernie was truly one of the greats of his generation. He came from poverty to build a company that today employs over 500,000 people. He was an extraordinary leader whose warmth and caring were evident to everyone he met. With his wife, Billi, he gave away billions of dollars to causes that directly improved the lives of his fellow Americans: children with autism; veterans fighting post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and substance abuse; cancer patients, and others. He built the Georgia Aquarium and supported many Israeli and Jewish causes, including the Israel Democracy Institute.

 

Bernie was a patriot who generously shared his resources, his wisdom, and his eloquence to defend capitalism, freedom, and our Republic. The RJC was proud to feature Bernie in an ad we ran in battleground states in the 2012 election, in which he shared his concerns for America's future under President Barack Obama.

 

For nearly thirty years, Bernie was a passionate RJC Leader and a valued member of the Board of Directors. His friendship and wise counsel will be sorely missed.

 

Our thoughts are with Bernie's family in this difficult time. May they be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Policy not Politics: A Statement by The Jewish Policy Center

At The Jewish Policy Center, our motto is "Policy not Politics," and so today is a good day to outline the policies the next President, the next Senate, and next House of Representatives should consider as their priorities for the American people and our American future.

 

First are the issues people across the country consistently told pollsters and anyone else listening: The economy and inflation, the border and crime. These are related and related to foreign policy issues that need to be addressed quickly.

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Contact information for our offices can be found on our website. Please visit us online for the latest RJC news, to see details of upcoming events, and to donate to the RJC. Read past editions of this newsletter here.

Republican Jewish Coalition
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202.638.6688 | [email protected]