Election 2024 live blog: Where does the Jewish vote matter most?

The first time I was old enough to vote in a presidential election, in 2012, my mail-in Colorado ballot got sent to the wrong address in my college town — twice. I spent so much time calling the state secretary of state’s office, trying to get a ballot that I could actually use, that I had their hold music memorized.

Election Day is a complicated thing. It’s unbelievably exciting: Each of us — especially those who live in swing states — get the chance to change our country’s future. And it is unbelievably aggravating. Your ballot gets lost. You hate every candidate. The language outlining important propositions is unparsable bureaucratic mush. The airless elementary school gym in which you vote is, randomly, so, so hot.

We can’t solve the problem of the roasting polling place. But we can help make sense of the rest. Through the coming days, we’ll be using this live blog to help illustrate the Jewish voting landscape in this most uncertain election — to bring you clarity and context, and with them, possibly, comfort.

In 2020, our archivist and I dug through the Forward‘s history of election coverage to help make sense of the woes of our current political age. In 1900, we published a Yiddish poem that encapsulated the warring truths of democratic existence. Yes, electoral politics can seem like a bastion of “horrible double crossing and lies.” But if you “go vote for that true one” — whomever, in your eyes, it is — “you can make out quite well.”

– Talya Zax