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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're up to Thing No. 26, another election-related one for this morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve, 100 years of the Jewish vote for president. Spoiler alert. From 1924 to the present, the majority have always voted for the Democrat, but the percentages have fluctuated interestingly.

Donald Trump increased his percentage of the votes of American Jews by six points. From 2016 to 2020, he went from 24% to 29% or 30%. He's looking for more in this year after the October 7th attacks and his support for Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump also shocked many American Jews last month at an event opposing anti-Semitism of all places, when he said the Jews would largely be to blame if he loses the election. He said this.

Donald Trump: I'm not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss if I'm at 40%. Think of it. That means 60% are voting for Kamala, who, in particular, is a bad Democrat.

Brian Lehrer: He said this about the polls.

Donald Trump: The current polling has me with Jewish citizens, Jewish people, people that's supposed to love Israel after having done all of that, having been the best president, the greatest president by far. A poll just came out. I'm at 40%.

Brian Lehrer: If he actually gets 40%, that would be a remarkably strong 10-point gain among Jewish voters compared to 2020. As you hear, he's prospectively blaming the Jews if he loses even with that. The New York Times headline on those statements last month, by the way, said, Trump’s Suggestion That Jews Could Cost Him Race Creates Fear of Anti-Semitic Reprisal. It said, "Twice on Thursday," that week, "the former president said he believed 'the Jewish people would have a lot to do with" a loss if Harris defeats him." Why do Jewish Americans vote so consistently for Democrats over the last 100 years and how has that fluctuated over time?

With us for this 100 Years of 100 Things segment is Kenneth D. Wald, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida and the Bud Shorstein professor emeritus of American Jewish Society and Culture. He is the author of the book, The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. He has one coming out next month called The Ghosts on the Wall: A Grandson's Memoir of the Holocaust. Professor Wald, thanks so much for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series and a Happy New Year in advance and welcome to WNYC.

Kenneth Wald: Well, thanks very much. I'm really honored to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I have a chart here from jewishvirtuallibrary.org, showing what it calls the US presidential election's Jewish voting record. Right there at 100 years ago, the election of 1924, we see a pattern that would persist for the whole century. Republican Calvin Coolidge won that year with 54% of the national vote. Among Jewish voters, he only got half that, 27% of the vote. We'll see that kind of thing recur over and over again. Would you start 100 years ago, 1924, and talk about the context of what I guess your book calls Jewish liberalism in the 1920s?

Kenneth Wald: Well, sure, I'll be happy to do that. The ability to measure Jewish voting patterns really wasn't well-developed in the 1920s. It really wasn't until the 1930s, '32 and '36, and so on, that the development of polling in elections gave us a better estimate. Most of those early estimates are based on particular precincts. Those precincts are often not a reliable indicator of the pattern.

We're getting close to the 1930s. Yes, the pattern has been very consistent since the 1930s. Jews have been one of the most pro-Democratic constituencies in the electorate. Even today, among all the white ethnic-religious groups, they are the most reliable Democratic voters. In fact, the data you cited about Trump's vote last time in 2020 actually understates the level of Democratic support for Joe Biden.

Brian Lehrer: Why is that?

Kenneth Wald: For fairly technical reasons. Yes, Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic. It's going to be a century-long before we have that. The striking thing is there's no other religious group in the electorate that has been as stable as Jews. Even African Americans, for example, a heavily Democratic group, didn't really become Democratic until the 1960s.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's because half the country had segregationist Democrats, right? The South.

Kenneth Wald: Well, even before that, it's because Abraham Lincoln was the one who freed the slaves. That kind of dramatic event tends to forge political loyalties.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, to back up by one election of pre-100-year history, in 1920, when Republican Warren Harding won with 60% of the national vote, Jews only gave him 43% and gave nearly as much, 38% of Jewish Americans' votes, to the third-party socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs. Do you have anything to say about 1920 or the relationship between Debs and Jewish voters?

Kenneth Wald: Well, yes, it's important to know that the biggest wave of Jewish immigrants to the United States occurred from the end of the Civil War, late 1860s through 1924, when immigration was codified and made much more restrictive. The vast majority of the Jews who came over in that period, the largest cohort we've ever seen, came from Eastern Europe, and particularly the Pale of Settlement, Russia, Poland, and so forth.

A great many of them had become socialists because they felt that the Socialist Party was the only party in Europe that was going to support them and be positive about them. Many of them brought their socialist ideas with them to the United States. Debs seemed like, again, a candidate who reflected those socialist values. When you had somebody like Debs on the ticket or on the ballot, it translated into significant votes.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, when I was growing up, I used to see my grandfather listening to Yiddish news and talk on New York radio station WEVD, which stood for Eugene V. Debs. Since we're on the radio, are you familiar with that piece of Jewish media history at all in a political context?

Kenneth Wald: I'm not tremendously well-versed on it. I know the outlines, but not most of the details.

Brian Lehrer: All right.

Kenneth Wald: I do have friends who were raised as what were called "red diaper babies." Their families were very much involved in socialism. They really were in institutions, schools, youth groups, and so forth that were really permeated with those values.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and my grandparents were not in those groups, but they did listen to Yiddish news and talk on WEVD, which was named after Eugene V. Debs, that socialist candidate for president. Just an interesting connection. Moving forward then, 1928, similar results with Herbert Hoover. 58% of the nation voted for that Republican president, just 28% of the Jewish vote. Then came the four FDR elections with overwhelming Jewish support, 82%, 85%, and his last two elections with 90% of the Jewish vote in 1940 and '44, according to this chart on jewishvirtuallibrary.org, 90%, compared to winning with only 55% nationwide, FDR. Why for FDR?

Kenneth Wald: Well, again, I think you have to think about the cohort of Jews. Again, the largest cohort and the largest share of the Jewish population are being composed of people who came over from Eastern Europe and who were mostly workers in factories and often in the industrial trades, particularly the needle trades, but others as well. Like other members of the white working class, particularly those who unionized, they saw Roosevelt as clearly a champion of organized labor and somebody who they felt confident would respond to their economic needs.

That was not the only factor involved in it, but that was the most important factor. Jews just simply saw Roosevelt as not just individually as an important one, but many of the people in his administration had either come from Al Smith's gubernatorial coalition. Many of them were Jewish social reformers, lawyers, and so forth. The fact that Jews were so well-represented on the Democratic side back then sent the signal that, for Jews, the Democratic Party was kind of the natural political choice to make.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we are in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Thing No. 26, 100 years of Jewish Americans' votes for president here on this morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve and, obviously, in the context of this year's presidential election. We welcome your oral histories as we usually do in our 100-year segments. Your oral histories, in this case, maybe your Jewish grandparents or anyone else or your own votes for president and why, Jewish listeners. 212-433-WNYC.

We love to get some old past-generation stories on the air in these segments. If anyone has any family oral histories on conversations you overheard as a little kid among your grandparents, your great-grandparents about presidential elections, why your family maybe voted for Republicans even though the large majority of Jews have voted for Democrats for president over the last century.

Anything you want to add? Give us some oral history. What you got, folks, that's interesting? Ask our guest a question. Kenneth D. Wald from the University of Florida, author of The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. By the way, Professor Wald, I see that you have a chapter of your book before we move on to more modern times called Early 20th-Century Challenges to Jewish Political Culture. Briefly, what's at the heart of those challenges?

Kenneth Wald: Well, it's important to understand that American Jews, upon their arrival in the United States, and here we're going back to, essentially, the 18th century, that those Jews fell in love with the American political system. What they loved was the classic liberal design of the constitution, which meant that the United States had no official religious identity. It was a secular state and that citizenship in this new land was not conditioned on a person's religion.

Jews generally had an opportunity for citizenship. That gave them an opportunity to participate in political life. Jews were liberals in that sense before they became Democrats in the 1930s or in the 1920s. In point of fact, Jewish voting patterns tended to be very unstable from the early years until the 1930s, when they really coalesced around the Democratic Party. It was that embrace of classic liberalism that really attracted Jews to the United States. It gave them a voice and an opportunity that they simply didn't have anywhere else.

There were countries in Western Europe, let's take Britain, that certainly were open to Jews and sympathetic. Again, the United Kingdom, depending on which country you're talking about, had a state church. That state church had privileges, which were not allowed to other religions, including Jews. It's really that classic liberal foundation in our constitution that caused Jews to just absolutely adore the United States. As long as that culture was solid, Jews were fine.

Some issues then developed later on, which raised questions about that culture. Ironic, one of the major issues was Zionism. American Jews insisted that they were American Jews. While they supported the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, particularly after Britain confirmed its commitment in that direction, there were many Jews who were uncomfortable with that idea. They wanted to be recognized as American citizens and to vote and to participate and to express their political views from an American perspective.

Creating a Jewish state seemed to them to go very much against the notion that the state should be secular. When you look at the Israeli state today, you'll notice that there certainly isn't the level of separation between religion and state there that we do have in the United States. Jews eventually came to terms with Israel, but I think Zionism really was the factor that really divided the Jewish community. The leaders of the Jewish community early on were very skeptical of having an overtly Jewish state. They were among many.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. Of course, we'll get to American Jews' relationship with Zionism today and especially in this year, which happens to be an election year after the October 7th attacks, and how this may be changing even now. Let's take an oral history call. You were talking about red diaper babies before from early in the last century. I think Sheldon in Forest Hills has a story related to that. Sheldon, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Sheldon: Thank you. I've called before, so let me offer a little story about my family. My parents. One came in 1920 at the end of the year. My mother came two months later in 1921. My mother's family were very orthodox. Her father, he was ordained as a rabbi. Unusually, he was a young boy from a small shtetl in Galicia. He got a PhD from the University of Frankfurt.

How that happened, I don't know, but he ultimately migrated to this country. He had seven daughters. Some came with him, some came later, and he was ardently anti-socialist and anti-union. My parents, on the other hand, embraced unionism, embraced leftist ideology. They raised me and my siblings as red diaper babies. In fact, I went to Camp Wo-Chi-Ca. Those people who were similarly raised would recognize that.

Brian Lehrer: Progressive Jewish summer camp, right?

Sheldon: Yes, it was. It was not only progressive, it was Marxist. It was integrated in 1943. To even think about that was anathema.

Brian Lehrer: I need to move on to some other folks, but this is a great story, Sheldon. Did your parents or your grandparents ever talk explicitly about why they were voting for somebody for president?

Sheldon: The fact that Roosevelt was so ardently pro-labor was very important. The fact that he represented the fight for the little guy against the establishment was really super important. Also, I think that there was a phenomenon amongst Jewish people who embraced the Enlightenment and who went away from orthodox religion that that was a significant contribution to life in America.

Brian Lehrer: Sheldon, thank you very much for your call. We'll continue in a minute in this 100 Years of 100 Things segment, 100 years of American Jews voting for president. We'll pick up the timeline with Truman in 1948 and come all the way to the present with historian Kenneth Wald from the University of Florida and more of your calls and texts. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, number 26 today, 100 years of American Jews voting for president as we go up the timeline with Kenneth D. Wald, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, author of the book The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. Let's keep going up the timeline a bit. Jewish voters went 75% for Truman in 1948 and then voted 60% and 64% for Democrat Adlai Stevenson when President Eisenhower was elected twice in the 1950s. Professor Wald, why didn't Jewish voters go majority for Eisenhower, the World War II general who, after all, beat the Nazis, and not a right-wing firebrand, kind of a consensus-centrist candidate for many other groups?

Kenneth Wald: Right. Eisenhower was one of those rare people at a time when somebody could essentially be almost an independent and get elected. He was courted to be the presidential nominee of both the Democratic and Republican parties. I think it's not so much that they didn't support Eisenhower. It's striking how the vote dropped from Truman from the '70s down to the '60s among Jewish voters. Eisenhower did certainly cut into the Democratic pattern.

Partisanship is one of those traits, and I'm speaking here as a political scientist, that once established is quite durable, especially these days. It often takes some major trauma or development to cause people to either deviate from their partisanship in voting or end up identifying with another party. Again, the Jewish commitment to the Democratic Party. The sense among most Jews, not all, certainly, that the Democrats represent Jewish values and Jewish interests, I think, means that any Republican gain is going to be fairly limited.

There was a time, the one occasion when the Jewish support got near only 50% for a Democratic candidate was Jimmy Carter in 1980. To some extent, that was having to do with the perception that Carter was not supportive of Israel to the degree that previous Democratic presidents had been. Even then, that was a temporary dip. As soon as other subsequent elections, other Democrats emerged, that vote went back to where it has been.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting about Carter, who turned 100 years old yesterday. That was our last 100 years segment on Monday, 100 years of Jimmy Carter. Of course, he's been controversial among supporters of Israel since around 2007, when he started calling Israel an apartheid state. That's interesting about 1980 because Carter had brokered the Israel-Egypt peace accord at Camp David, and yet he was seen, you're telling us, as not as supportive of Israel as maybe Reagan was or maybe a lot of other politicians were at that time?

Kenneth Wald: Yes, it is interesting that his vote didn't go up after he grandfathered, as it were, midwifed, I guess, a better term, the peace agreement. I think there were a lot of American Jews who were very skeptical, who had a lot of trouble accepting the fact that the head of the PLO would be shaking hands with the prime minister of Israel. They were very dubious, I think, that it was going to work.

Brian Lehrer: That was the '90s. That was the '90s. Are we conflating two things? Because that was the 1990s with Clinton. I think we're talking about the Sadat, Egypt, Israel peace accords of 1978, right?

Kenneth Wald: Yes, but I was even talking more about the Clinton time when Carter brought the two leaders together at that point.

Brian Lehrer: All right, and so we'll get to that era. The Jewish voters of America went 82% for JFK in 1960, 82%. 90% for LBJ in '64. 81% as most of it held for Hubert Humphrey when he lost to Nixon in the fraud election of 1968. I think we have a caller about that. By the way, even in the Nixon landslide of 1972, Jewish voters chose McGovern 65% at the time. Steven in Edgewater, you're on WNYC, remembering one of those or both of those Nixon elections, right?

Steven: Yes, partially. My mother was a Democrat and had danced the whole line in the middle of Sixth Avenue when Israel became free. My father was a closet Republican, so he went to vote. She voted Democrat. He voted Republican for Nixon and came home and said, "Now, I can do any terrible things in the world. I've just voted for Richard Nixon."

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Brian Lehrer: Yes, and why? Why? Why for Nixon? How do you recall it?

Steven: He tells he was better for the business world. My father was a conservative guy, liked to lay down rules. I think he bonded with Richard Nixon.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Steven. Continuing the timeline, Jewish voters went 71% for Carter when he won in '76. Then we get to Ronald Reagan. Again, even in Reagan's landslide in 1984, he only got 31% of Jewish-American votes when he got around 60% of the vote nationwide. Similar with Dukakis losing to Bush in '88, but similar winning numbers among Jews. Bill Clinton got 80% of the Jewish vote, then 78%.

Al Gore held them all, getting 79%, even while losing to George W. Bush nationally. Jewish voters went 76% for John Kerry in Bush's reelection after 9/11 in 2004. That's a lot of years I covered in that little slide there. Professor Wald, consistent landslide Jewish votes for the Democratic candidates, including Clinton in the '90s when the Oslo peace process was going on.

Kenneth Wald: Yes, what we can really say is, in the post-war period, starting in '48 through as recently as 2020, Jews have generally been 30% more Democratic in their voting than the rest of the electorate. The striking thing is if you compare Jewish voters to non-Jews who resemble Jews in terms of their education, their income, whether they live in urban or rural areas, and so forth, if you control all of those factors, Jews still outpace their socially equivalent non-Jews to that remarkable degree. That Jewish support for the Democratic Party just seems to be very strong. It's hard to imagine what could alter that, given the current trends in public life.

Brian Lehrer: Some text messages coming in. Listener writes, "Born in 1956. I grew up in a Jewish family that voted Republican." The listener writes, "It wasn't until Obama ran that I switched and stayed voting Democrat. Unfortunately, most of my voting experience has been voting against the other candidate." Another listener writes, "Grew up in a not very religious Jewish family, though I was bar mitzvahed, and some of my earliest political memories are helping my father hand out leaflets for McGovern in '72, but the thing I am remembering through this conversation is how disgusted my mother was by the picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., a convert to Judaism, hugging Richard Nixon's backside."

"It really upset her as a betrayal of both Judaism and the civil rights movement," writes that listener. Then we get close to the present and some interesting trends. Jewish voters went for Obama with that same 78% in his first election that a lot of other previous Democratic presidential candidates were getting but dropped to 69% in Obama's second election. Still a big majority, but did something happen there?

Kenneth Wald: Well, it's hard to point to any particular thing. There were arguments that Obama was not really pro-Israel. There were questions because of his father's Muslim background, that there would be some issues. He took some policy positions that were not entirely consistent with the priorities at that time, and still today, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

That's been a constant problem. Netanyahu has had issues with various Democratic presidents. It's worth remembering that Jews had problems with Eisenhower back in '56 when he refused to support the Suez Canal reconquest as it were. There have been issues with individual presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. I think that was just within the normal range of variation.

Brian Lehrer: Then here's this text, which says, "Single-issue Jewish voters, whose primary concern is Israel, have been moving to the right for years as the Republican Party has allied itself with Christian evangelical Zionists. In 2004, my rabbi in Chicago said on the bema," at the altar, "during the High Holidays, 'The state of Israel has never had a better friend than George W. Bush.'"

Then we get to the Trump races, Professor Wald. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got about the same percentage as Obama in his reelection, 69% of American-Jewish votes. Trump got 24%. Then in 2020, Trump picked up six points, up to 30% of Jewish Americans' votes against still a small minority compared to the vote for Biden as we referenced at the top of the segment. The 100-year pattern held firm, but do those six more points mean anything as we head into this year's election?

Kenneth Wald: I have to be honest and say I don't trust those particular numbers. The reason for that has to do with the way Jews are identified in polls. All the data you're talking about comes out of public opinion polls. Virtually, all of the survey organizations, when they want to identify Jews, ask a straightforward question and something like, "What is your religion or what is your current religious preference?"

What we have known since the 1990s is a significant and growing proportion of American Jews, that is people who are born to a Jewish mother and haven't converted to another religion. A sizable proportion of that population does not identify themselves as Jewish by religion. They consider their Jewishness to be a matter of culture, ethnicity, heritage, not religion. The problem is people who are like that, who are Jewish according to Jewish law but do not define themselves religiously as Jewish, are not included in those surveys.

When you do include them in those surveys, it turns out that there was really no increase in Trump's vote in 2020. The two surveys that we have, which did include people like that who were asked if they were Jewish in some way other than religion, the Trump vote was only 20% in those two cases. One of the problem here and I apologize for getting into the weeds there, but you have to be careful about how you identify Jews in surveys. When you do it in a better way than we do it, you'll find some less change than you would imagine.

Brian Lehrer: Last question then and then I want to give you a minute at the end to mention your new book and what to look for with that. Any swing states who are especially watching this year for Jewish voters in this year after October 7th, where the concerns about anti-Semitism might be more focused on the left than they have been earlier in the Trump era?

Kenneth Wald: Well, it's been obviously a very difficult year. It seems like almost day-to-day, there are shocks to the system that could affect the vote one way or the other. We know particularly that young Jewish voters and many of whom are newly registered tend to be more skeptical of Israel's policies in Gaza and other places. In my mind, there's a kind of two issues that are at play here in the election this year.

The first is Jewish concern about Christian nationalism in the United States, which is heavily found within the Republican Party. That is a major concern. On the other hand, you've got Gaza, which has prompted some Jews to be more critical of Israel and less likely to support the Democratic ticket because President Biden has been so positive in his support for Israel.

My ultimate guess is I think you'll see a division of the vote very similar to what we've seen in the last two elections. That would be a 4:1 ratio of Jewish Democrats to Jewish Republicans or, at worst, I would think a 3:1 ratio in that process of 75% to 25%. I think those two factors are, to some extent, going to balance out. I want to stress, we don't really, at this point, have good data on that. Typically, we don't get Jewish voting.

Brian Lehrer: I have to wait until the only poll that actually counts, the election. Before you go, you want to take a minute, we have 45 seconds to a minute, and just preview your new book, which is coming out next month, The Ghosts on the Wall: A Grandson's Memoir of the Holocaust?

Kenneth Wald: Right. Well, unlike most American Jews, my parents were German Jews, who came of age when Hitler came to power in Germany. Both of my parents escaped from Germany in 1939. My mother was able to get her father and sister out. Her mother had died of natural causes before, but my father's parents were not able to get out. They were deported to, we believe, Sobibor, where they were murdered. I grew up knowing almost nothing about any of this. Our parents were very reluctant to talk as were the roughly dozen survivor families who were our social network in, of all places, Nebraska.

Brian Lehrer: 15 seconds.

Kenneth Wald: Okay, very quickly. It's the story of my grandparents, my parents' generation, and then what legacies have been left to us in the current period.

Brian Lehrer: The book coming out next month, The Ghosts on the Wall. That's our 100 Years of 100 Things segment for today, 100 years of Jewish Americans' votes for president of the United States with Professor Ken Wald from the University of Florida. Professor, thanks for this. Happy Rosh Hashanah. Happy New Year 5785 to you and to all our Jewish listeners. Professor Wald, thank you very, very much.

Kenneth Wald: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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