(JTA) — The first rule of exit polls is to be careful about interpreting early exit polls, which aren’t always accurate.
The second rule is that, for now at least, they represent the best information we have about the question occupying Jews of all political persuasions: How many Jews voted for Donald Trump? And how many voted for Kamala Harris?
In recent decades, between 20% and 30% of American Jews have supported Republicans in national elections. The GOP hit a high-water mark in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won some 40% of Jewish votes, but the more typical split makes Jews among the most reliably Democratic demographics in the United States.
But this year, with some Jews feeling alienated from the left and others all-in on the right due to Israel, some speculated that Trump could post an unusually strong showing among Jewish voters.
Initial polls suggest that was not the case, at least in the aggregate. The National Election Pool, which produces an exit poll for a consortium of major news organizations, found that 79% of Jews said they voted Democratic, compared to 21% who voted Republican.
A second major analysis, for Fox News by a nonpartisan polling firm using data from the Associated Press, found lower but still substantial support for Harris. It concluded that 66% of Jews voted for her.
Edison Research, which conducts the national pool poll, surveyed voters in 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin. It did not survey voters in New York or California, which are home to the largest Jewish populations and reliably vote Democratic by wide margins.
It did not immediately release details about how many voters were surveyed and cautioned that the results could change as polling continued and results were adjusted to reflect the real vote tallies, a process called weighting that is a standard component of survey methodology.
If accurate, the National Election Pool’s result would be the lowest proportion of Jewish votes for a Republican presidential candidate in 24 years.
But that’s a big if: Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, with famous examples of polls failing to reflect the real results of elections.
Some have shifted in methodology as the proportion of voters casting ballots in person on Election Day has fallen over time. And like all polls, they can also reflect the partisan bent of their pollsters.
Fox News, which is right-leaning but has a reputation for reliable polling, conducted its own Election Day “voter analysis” that it said solved for some of the problems in traditional exit polling. It found that 66% of Jews voted for Harris, compared to 31% for Trump. The poll still found that Jews voted for Harris at higher rates than members of any other religion.
The Fox News analysis, which was conducted by the nonpartisan firm NORC using data collected by the Associated Press, covered more states and broke down the results by state, enabling an analysis of the Jewish vote by state. It found that 55% of Jews in New York and 56% of Jews in Florida voted for Harris, likely reflecting the impact of the states’ significant Orthodox populations.
In contrast, the poll found that 76% of Jews in California voted for Harris. The number of Jews in most states was too small to allow for state-level reporting.