78pc Jewish voters cast ballots for Harris

NEW YORK: Exit polls from the 2024 US presidential election indicate that 78 percent of Jewish voters cast ballots for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, the current vice president who suffered a sweeping defeat to Donald Trump, the Republican candidate and former president. The exit polls by CNN and NBC found that traditional voting preferences among the Jewish community remained largely unchanged, foreign media reported.

Of those surveyed, 78 percent supported Harris, while 22 percent chose Donald Trump.

An exit poll by Fox News also found that 66 percent of Jewish voters backed Harris, and 32 percent voted for Trump.

On the campaign trail, Trump had criticised Jews who did not vote for him, and suggested that if he ended up losing the election, it would be their fault.

In CNN’s exit poll in the 2016 race, in which Trump won the election (through the Electoral College) but not the popular vote, 71 percent of Jewish voters supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, while 23 percent voted for Trump.

In the current 2024 popular vote count, Trump has some five million more votes than Kamala Harris.

The latest surveys also showed that among Christian voters, 63 percent supported Trump, and 36 percent backed Harris.

According to the exit poll by Fox News, Muslim voters’ general trend still leans towards the Democratic Party.

In Fox’s exit poll, 63 percent of Muslim voters supported Harris, while 32 percent backed Trump.

In Fox’s 2020 exit poll, Democratic candidate Joe Biden got support from 64 percent of Muslim American voters, versus 35 percent for Trump.

This indicates a one-point loss for the Democrats and a three-point loss for the Republicans compared to the previous election.

In Fox’s exit poll, 83 percent of Black voters backed Harris, while 16 percent supported Trump. Among White voters, 56 percent voted for Trump, and 43 percent for Harris.

According to CNN and NBC exit polls, 52 percent of Latino voters supported Harris, while 46 percent backed Trump.

Latino voters have traditionally supported Democrats, but that advantage has been shrinking in recent races. Black voters’ preference for Democrats has also been eroding, even with Harris – a biracial Black Asian candidate – running.

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, and during his campaign, Trump promised to send all undocumented immigrants back to their home countries, and even said immigrants admitted through government programs he disagreed with could be sent back.

Republican Donald Trump will be the 47th president after winning more than the required 270 Electoral Votes in the presidential election.

Trump won a majority of the vote among evangelical Christians, Catholics and Mormons.

Throughout the campaign, Harris tried to walk a tightrope between both sides as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza dragged on and spilled into Lebanon.

She refused to differentiate herself from Biden’s Middle East policy and emphasised that she was committed to Israel’s right to defend itself.

Harris has called for a cease-fire for many months and refused to preside over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in April.

The Trump team, meanwhile, worked to capitalise on Arab American disillusionment with the Biden administration.

“We have to get this whole thing over with,” Trump said in Dearborn, Michigan, speaking of the continuing conflict in the Middle East. “We want to have peace. We want to have peace on earth.”

On the other hand, Trump has said that for a Jewish American not to vote for him “shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

In April, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt “Israel is absolutely losing the PR war” and criticised the images being shown of Gaza in ruins.

“You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory,” Trump said, without directly answering whether he was “100 percent with Israel.”

In Las Vegas, Muslims snubbed Kamala Harris on Election Day over her stance on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, with about 80 percent rejecting her at the ballot box, an exit poll reveals.

Despite pre-election polling that put the veep at 41 percent support among Muslim voters, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ exit survey shows she only garnered 20.3 percent — a precipitous drop from the 69 percent President Biden captured in 2020.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein elbowed Harris out of first place, winning 53 percent of Muslim voters, and President-elect Donald Trump even trumped Harris in the demo with 21.4 percent of those votes.

That’s an improvement from his performance four years ago, when he won just 17 percent of Muslims.

Stein and Trump both outperformed pre-election polling, which indicated they’d earn 42 percent and 10 percent support, respectively.

Harris, on the other hand, underperformed the 41% support she was projected to receive pre-election. Haris fared even worse in Michigan, where Muslims form a crucial voting bloc. A slim 14.3 percent of Muslims there said she was their pick versus 59.1 percent for Stein and 22.4 percent for Trump.

“Our final exit poll of American Muslim voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza played a crucial role, leading to a sharp drop in support for Vice President Harris compared to the support President Biden received from Muslim voters in 2020,” said Robert S. McCaw, who heads government affairs for the group.

Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan shifted away from the Democratic Party and toward President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. Trump won the state by more than 80,000 votes after losing it to outgoing President Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes in 2020.

Trump won in Dearborn city, where more than half the population is of Middle Eastern or North African descent, by capturing 42 percent of votes to Harris’s 36 percent; the Green Party’s Jill Stein also took a substantial 18 percent of the vote in the city.