How will “Israel” play in the presidential election?

A handful of swing voters in a handful of swing states will decide the next president. Will pro-Israel voters make the difference? How about pro-Palestinian voters?

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The US presidential election is the ultimate "winner take all" slugfest. Only one side can win, the other side will lose. Looking at the bitter state of partisanship today, it’s hard to imagine that President Abraham Lincoln, when running for reelection in 1864 as a Republican, picked a Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his vice presidential running mate. That’s inconceivable now. If Lincoln could do that to broaden his coalition in the middle of a bloody civil war, that’s an alarming measure of just how deep and bitter is the current national divide.

When it comes to winner-take-all campaigning, the broad strategy has long been “divide and conquer.” In a presidential contest, a handful of battleground states – some longstanding such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, along with a few newcomers like Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – will decide the winner. What is supposed to be a national election to pick the country’s chief executive will boil down to a half a dozen states with a combined population of about 50 million out of a total US population of 330 million.

However, only about two-thirds of those eligible actually voted in the 2020 presidential election, and within each swing state the winning candidate only needs support from half those voters. So the number of Americans with an effective vote that actually decides who will become president is vanishingly small – no more than 17 million voters, or a mere 5% of the nation’s population. In midterm elections, when turnout is even lower than in presidential years, the number of effective voters is even smaller, about 3% of the nation. This formula of “swing voters in swing states” deciding our national elections has increasingly become a dismal failure.

Will the farce of history repeat itself?

If we drill down deeper, we see the farcical depths that this winner-take-all board game can reach. The calculus of winning dictates that there is one overriding strategic axiom:  whatever group of swing voters can help a candidate win one or more of those six battleground states becomes a very influential voter constituency. In this zero-sum contest, all voters are equal, but a handful of (swing) voters are way more equal than others.

What groups of swing voters are most important? That has changed historically. Recall that, in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Florida was a key battleground state and politicians of both major parties fell all over each other trying to court Floridians. This resulted in one of the strangest political carnivals in modern political history.

Remember the Cuban boy Elian? This started as a remarkable, even miraculous story in 2000, of a six-year-old boy who survived a nightmarish ordeal at sea when he was rescued by two fishermen who found him floating in an inner tube three miles from Florida's coast. The miracle quickly turned into a circus when this small frail boy got caught up in the nets of outdated Cold War confrontation amidst a partisan presidential election.

The US was faced with a dilemma that played out in daily headlines: the boy’s mother had died at sea, so should the boy be sent back to his father in Cuba? Or allowed to stay in Florida with relatives? At that moment, the primitive mathematics of our fossilized Electoral College system of presidential elections kicked in. The US method, which no other country in the world has emulated, allows a candidate to win the presidency by gaining the most votes in the twelve most populous states. Florida, in 2000 our fourth largest state with 25 electoral votes, was a big prize in the presidential sweepstakes. In a close race, Florida’s winner could be decided by a particular group of swing voters: Cuban Americans. They were a cohesive, well-financed and vocal minority that had much greater impact than a group their size typically warrants.

Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general, ordered the boy to be returned to Cuba, but his Miami relatives refused to give him up. And so the political football game began, with six-year-old Elian as the football. He was courted like a visiting dignitary, given the golden key to Disney World and everything else a child from a poor country could want. The craven media erected a permanent camp outside his Cuban relatives’ Miami home. Vice president Al Gore, running to succeed Clinton, weighed in on one side of the dispute -- saying Elian should stay in the US -- and then quickly backtracked to his attorney general’s position. Florida governor Jeb Bush -- brother of George W. who was running against Gore -- tried to carefully position the usual anti-immigrant “send them back” Republican response.

Gore’s pandering to both sides likely cost him the election. In an election decided by 537 votes out of six million cast, polls later found that Bush captured 80 percent of the Florida Cuban-American vote, 50,000 more votes compared to the previous Republican nominee Bob Dole's 65 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote. Americans following Elian’s story day after day saw a child's plight turned into presidential spectacle, heated up like Cold War leftovers.

Make no mistake: if Elian’s plight had unfolded in Wyoming, a solid GOP state with only a handful of electoral votes, he would have been shipped back to his Havana school in record time. If Elian had been Haitian, he would have been given a one-way ticket back to Port-au-Prince. But Elian was Cuban, Florida was a big prize, the election was close and the peculiar winner-take-all method of electing our president allowed a small group of Cuban-American voters to circumvent immigration law, defy the attorney general and grab national headlines.

The lesson of Elian was obvious: in the right situation, given the winner-take-all realities of the US political system, a small group of swing voters can have outsized impact.

Other groups of swing voters

In previous presidential elections, other groups of swing voters have played critical roles. Voters in favor of extreme gun rights are very influential in battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Led by their well-funded advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, extreme gun rights supporters have been able to take advantage of these winner-take-all dynamics of the US political system to prevent meaningful gun control laws from being passed. Winner-take-all calculations are the major reason why the US lags other civilized democracies in enacting sensible gun laws.

Like other recent Democratic presidential candidates, don’t expect Kamala Harris to go near this issue because it will hurt her chances among gun rights voters – including what has been called Blue Dog Democrats – in these key swing, often rural and suburban, states and districts. The gun issue is particularly touchy among a significant minority of labor union members, such as auto workers in Michigan, and blue collar workers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Pro-Israel voters gonna swing?

Many frustrated Americans have asked why President Joe Biden hasn’t taken a firmer stand against the right-wing extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal bombardment in the Gaza Strip, to which the US is the principal arms supplier. An estimated 40,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, women and children, have been killed since the Hamas invasion of Oct 7. Whenever something inexplicable happens in US politics, that’s when you know that you are bumping up against the five harmful gremlins of winner-take-all elections.

Israel supporters have enormous influence in US politics because of the antiquated design of the American political system. As we have seen, some states – and some groups of voters -- count more than others. Like Cuban-American voters in Florida in 2000, another important group of swing voters is American Jewish and pro-Israel supporters.

Despite their small numbers in the US population – about 2.4% – Jewish voters turn out in high numbers and are concentrated in a few influential areas. Those include Washington DC (8.5% Jewish population), New York (9.1%), New Jersey (6.8%), Pennsylvania (3.3%), California (3.2%) and Nevada (2.5%). A couple of these, Pennsylvania and Nevada, are battleground states and others, like New York, California and New Jersey, are important motherlodes for raising campaign cash.

Pennsylvania, the swing state with the largest Jewish population, has about 300,000 voting-age Jews in a state Joe Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020. Biden won Arizona by about 10,500 votes, Georgia by 12,000 votes and Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes, with Jewish populations of 124,000, 141,000 and 33,000 respectively.

But Jewish influence is not just about counting votes, it’s also about counting cash. Since US candidates must privately finance their elections, large campaign contributions from Jewish donors to both Democratic and Republican candidates allows them to play a disproportionately influential role.

It was estimated in 2016 that Jewish donors contributed a whopping 50% of funds received by the Democratic Party, and 25% received by the Republican Party. In those elections, the 50 largest individual donors contributed an aggregate of $240 million, and 20 of those donors were Jewish; Democrats received large contribution from 11 of those Jewish donors, while the GOP scooped up contributions from nine of them.  

Significantly, 82% of Jewish voters feel emotional attachment to Israel. While hyper-loyalty to Israel is not the only issue that inspires these enormous contributions, candidates who are perceived as hostile — or even indifferent — to Israel run the risk of seeing much of these funds go to their opponents. So in close races, both Jewish voters and donors can tip the balance in key battleground and fundraising states. That’s a double winner-take-all whammy.

In addition, Jewish voters over time have positioned themselves between the two major parties, increasingly exhibiting classic swing voter behavior. Historically, Jewish voters and organizations have favored the Democratic Party, but that support has fluctuated, depending on the intensity of the issues. John F. Kennedy received 82 percent of the Jewish vote (despite being Catholic) in 1960, but George McGovern received only 65 percent in 1972. Jimmy Carter, the chief architect of the Camp David accords which brought together Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a historic peace agreement for which the two leaders shared a Nobel Peace Prize, was rewarded by Jewish voters for his momentous diplomacy with a mere 45 percent support in 1980.

Most Jewish voters later returned to the Democratic fold, voting 78% for Barack Obama in 2008, but then declining to 68% for Joe Biden in 2020. The notable exception has been Orthodox Jews (roughly one-in-ten Jewish adults), with 75% identifying as or leaning Republican, and 81% approving of Donald Trump’s performance as president.

More recently, the Biden administration’s blank check support for Israel and its war on Gaza-based Palestinians has divided Jewish Americans, especially along generational lines. Kamala Harris currently maintains only a narrow lead among Jewish voters, with 53% favoring her compared to 46% for Trump. AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israel groups went to war against two young rising star Black Democrats, Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who were deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, spending a combined $25 million on ads to defeat them in their Democratic primaries.

Different Democratic factions are at war over Israel, and among many Jewish voters there is a growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party. Ironically, the more Jewish voters can swing between the partisan poles the more influence they are able to wield like a giant club, courtesy of the zero-sum winner-take-all dynamic.

Certainly Joe Biden has long supported Israel because he has strongly believed in its right to self-determination in a violent part of the world, but these other factors are also major contributors to the US support for this ongoing tragic debacle. Through pro-Israel voters’ disproportionately high campaign donations and their concentration as pro-Israel swing voters in several key states, they have long been able to flex their political muscle. Presidential candidates go to considerable lengths to court their support. Highlighting this factor should not be viewed as a version of the anti-Semitic trope that “the Jews own everything.” Rather, it’s another example within our winner-take-all system of how a well-organized, well-funded group of voters, united by a core issue and identity, can play an outsized role in close elections in which so much is on the line.

Muslim swing voters in key states pushing back?

A newer horizon among groups of religious-based swing voters is the growing presence of Muslim-American voters in several key battleground states. As the merciless bombing of Palestinian homes and lives has continued, funded and largely unrestrained by the Biden administration, Muslim-American voters are considering withholding their votes from Democrats in key battleground states. Their numbers are small but mighty and could certainly make a difference. It’s easy to forget that Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in Florida by a mere 537 votes out of 6 million cast — .009%.

In Arizona, which Biden won by a squeaker of 10,500 votes, the US Religion Census estimates there are 110,00 Muslim adherents. Biden’s 12,000 vote margin in Georgia may have evaporated without support from most of the 123,000 Muslim adherents there. Similarly in Wisconsin (21,000 vote margin and 69,000 Muslim adherents) and Michigan (150,000 vote margin and 242,000 Muslim adherents). Muslim-Americans voted overwhelmingly (69%) for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, but now community leaders, Muslim get-out-the vote groups and even some of Biden’s biggest Arab American allies are threatening to withhold their votes and contributions in 2024.

Alarmingly for Democrats, a recent survey conducted just before Biden dropped out of the presidential race found that only 12 percent of Muslim-Americans would vote for him. So the looming question is: with the election this November looking to be exceedingly close, will these voters now turn out for Kamala Harris? Or, if Harris does more to woo Palestinian-sympathetic voters, will that cause her support to drop among Israel-sympathetic voters? Harris is going to have to juggle these balls between the twin horns of her dilemma.

Such is the roller coaster of winner-take-all elections, where if you are in the right state or district, and the right group of swing voters, and the election is close enough, you can bring powerful politicians to their knees.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776