According to the largest preliminary exit poll, 79% of Jews voted for Kamala Harris.

The first rule of exit polling is to be careful when interpreting early exit polls, which are not always accurate.

The second rule is that, at least for now, they represent the best information we have on a question that concerns Jews of all political persuasions: How many Jews voted for Donald Trump? How many voted for Kamala Harris?

In recent decades, between 20% and 30% of American Jews have supported Republicans in national elections. The Republican Party reached a high point in 1980, when Ronald Reagan received about 40% of the Jewish vote, but the more typical split makes Jews one of the most reliable Democratic demographics in the United States.

But this year, with some Jews feeling alienated from the left and others moving completely to the right over Israel, some have suggested Trump could perform unusually well among Jewish voters.

Initial polls suggest that this is not the case, at least in general. The National Election Pool, which produces exit polls 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, conducted for Fox News by a nonpartisan polling company using data from the Associated Press, found less but still significant support for Harris. He concluded that 66% of Jews voted for her.

Edison Research, which conducts the national poll, polled voters in 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin. He did not poll voters in New York or California, which have the largest Jewish populations and who also reliably vote Democratic by wide margins.

He did not immediately release details of how many voters were surveyed and cautioned that results could change as voting continues and results are adjusted to reflect actual vote counts. This process is called weighting and is a standard component of survey methodology.

If true, the National Election Pool result would be the lowest share of the Jewish vote for a Republican presidential candidate in 24 years.

But that’s a big if: exit polls are notoriously unreliable. famous examples polls that do not reflect the actual election results.

Some have changed their methodology as the share of voters voting in person on Election Day has declined over time. And like all polls, they too can reflect the partisan leanings of their pollsters.

Fox News, which leans right but has a reputation as a reliable pollster, conducted its own “voter analysis” on Election Day that it said solved some of the problems with traditional exit polls. It was found that 66% of Jews voted for Harris, compared to 31% for Trump.. The poll still found that Jews voted for Harris more often than any other religion.

The Fox News analysis, conducted by the nonpartisan firm NORC using data compiled by The Associated Press, covered more states and also broke down the results by state, allowing the Jewish vote to be analyzed by state. It found that 55% of New York Jews and 56% of Florida Jews voted for Harris, likely reflecting the influence 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 state-level reports to be published.

Both the Fox News poll and the National Election Pool asked voters about their opinions of Israel. A Fox News poll found that 56% of Trump voters strongly or somewhat support “continuing aid to Israel in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah,” while 58% of Harris voters strongly or somewhat oppose it.

The National Election Pool poll asked voters whether they thought U.S. support for Israel was too strong, not strong enough or right. Voters were evenly split across categories, with Democrats making up 68% of those who said U.S. support for Israel is too strong and Republicans making up 81% of those who said it wasn’t strong enough.

Before the election, a September poll conducted by Democratic-affiliated pollsters. found that 68% of American Jewish voters said they planned to vote for Harris.. More recently similar poll found 71% Jewish in seven rival states They said they would vote for her.

Another pre-election poll commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institutefound that Harris was on track to have the smallest Jewish margin among Democrats over Republicans in more than 40 years. The National Poll’s advantage for Jewish voters is wider than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was found to beat Trump by 47 percentage points.

This was the last time the National Voting Pool reported Jewish voting. In 2020, too few Jews were sampled to report Jewish voting. leaving conclusions about how Jews voted to partisan pollsters. A poll commissioned by Republicans showed that the Jewish vote had shifted toward Republicans, while a poll commissioned by Democrats showed that the vote had shifted toward Democrats.

This article has been updated since publication to reflect new information about the surveys and their results.