President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was a “life-saving” victory for Jews who care about Israel, according to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.
Fleischer participated in a press briefing on Wednesday with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group that has been pivotal in raising funds for Trump and other Republican candidates, in backing pro-Israel policies within the GOP, and in turning out the Jewish vote.
The RJC said, citing Fox News exit polls, that Trump had won 32% of the Jewish vote, an historically high percentage, greater than any Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1980. (The RJC said that one exit poll conducted by other networks, which showed Trump’s Jewish support at just 21%, had skipped several states with high Jewish populations and therefore had a small sample size.)
While Jewish voters were driven by many concerns, those who cared deeply about Israel and worried most about antisemitism tended to vote Republican.
(Israelis, too, favored Trump by large margins in public polls released in the days leading up to the election.)
RJC CEO Matt Brooks told reporters that the group had targeted ads specifically at Jewish voters, driving the consistent message that it was all right to vote for Trump, even if you had traditionally voted for Democrats.
One ad featured a group of middle-aged Jewish women talking in a booth at a diner and expressing their concerns about terror in Israel and antisemitic violence on college campuses.
The RJC had also knocked on doors in swing states, notably Nevada, which flipped Republican for the GOP for the first time since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, which took place in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Brooks also noted that Trump had succeeded in attracting Arabs and Muslims, as well as Jewish voters, because of his record of advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East — not by pressuring Israel, but by supporting its security.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
