Does the electoral college strengthen or weaken Jewish influence on the election?

By Louis Keene
November 4, 2024

About 7.5 million Jews live in the United States, according to a 2020 Pew study, a number that exceeds the popular vote margin in each of the last three presidential elections. But the presidency isn’t decided by a national voting majority — it’s determined by the electoral college system, which apportions winner-take-all electoral votes to each state based on their representation in Congress.

The electoral college system is often criticized for making some voters more valuable than others, both because even the smallest state gets three electoral votes and because swing state voters have more power to decide an election than those in states like Texas and California that have voted the same way for decades. But does it make the Jewish vote matter more, or less?

The answer, as you might have guessed, is that it depends where you live. About a third of the country’s Jewish voters live in the reliably blue states of New York, New Jersey or California. It’s more than half if you include Florida, which has voted Republican in each of the last two elections and is no longer considered a swing state. But in swing states like Arizona, Georgia and especially Pennsylvania, the Jewish vote could be pivotal. Pennsylvania — home to 300,000 Jewish voters — was decided by 80,000 votes in 2020. With 19 electoral votes, it’s the biggest prize of the swing states.