The Jewish Voter: Evidence for Congressional Responsiveness from the 10/7 War

• In Event: Electoral Shifts among Key Constituencies

Abstract

Jews are a small minority in the United States comprising roughly 2.5% of the population, concentrated in a small number of mostly blue states. While the Jewish community has organized itself to have significant sway in American politics through various lobbying efforts, it has hitherto been assumed they do not have a significant impact as voters. However, in this research, based on statements made by members of Congress regarding the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, we show that Jew voters have had a significant impact in shaping the conversation about the war.
Due to their relative geographic concentration, there are some congressional districts where Jews make up as much as 25% of the voting population. Though data on the exact share of Jews in each of the 435 congressional district is not available, using demographic surveys we can classify 51 congressional districts where Jews make up a significant part of the electorate in three classes: between 2.5-5%, 5-10% and 10-25% of the population. Most of the districts with significant proportions of Jews are in, and have historically been, Democratic strongholds. As a result of the long, uninterrupted history of Democrat incumbency in those districts, many of the representatives representing them are in leadership positions in the House Democratic caucus, including Hakeem Jeffries, the current minority leader. Influence of Jewish voters on their representatives would therefore have an outside magnitude due to the leadership roles some of these representatives assume.
Opinion polls show that as the war progresses, public opinion in the party base, particularly its left flank, has grown more critical towards Israel. Jewish voters, however, have remained much more supportive of Israel than the rest of the progressive coalition, creating a fracture in the electorate for Democratic representatives from heavily Jewish districts. The issue of the war, therefore, creates a perfect test case for isolating the impact of Jewish voters apart from the rest of the Democratic coalition.
In this study, we analyze the universe of tweets from all members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the months following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7th, we deploy several methods of Natural Language Processing tools, including state of the art Generative AI models, to isolate tweets discussing the war and related subjects; discern their sentiment towards Israel and the Palestinians and the specific subjects they discuss.
We show that on three key dimensions - the volume of discussion of the war, its tone and the specific subjects discussed - The share of Jewish voters in the district has a statistically significant effect, even controlling for ideology, donations from AIPAC, other demographic and economic variables and more. Considering the predominance of representatives representing heavily Jewish districts in the Democratic caucus, these results reveal an unexpected source of strength for the Jewish voter. More broadly, our results shed light on how to quantify the positions of members of Congress on issues which divide their base of support.

Authors

• Or Rappel-Kroyzer, Tel Aviv University

• Noah Slepkov, Jewish Public Policy Institute