The success and growth of Republican fundraising and activism among American Jews suggest a significant crack in the traditional Jewish-Democratic alliance, writes David Drucker in the conservative online magazine, The Dispatch (July 23). In a lengthy article on the growing fortunes and influence of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), Drucker writes that the second administration of President Trump has been a boon for the 40-year old organization. Started under President Reagan, the group was first named the National Jewish Coalition out of fear of discouraging Jews from affiliating with a consortium for a minority within a minority. Today the RJC “occupies rarefied air within the GOP hierarchy that few other party-aligned organizations can claim.” “A powerful organization in politics delivers one of two things: You either deliver money or you deliver votes—and super powerful organizations deliver both…We figured out the secret sauce,” said Matt Brooks, the RJC’s long-tenured chief executive officer. The goal of RJC’s first foray into the election cycle in 2000 was to donate more than $100,000 to the Republican presidential nominee and GOP congressional candidates. Nearly a quarter century later, the RJC’s political action committee and super PAC spent $20 million to elect Trump and Republicans running for Senate in key states—double the $10 million invested by the group in 2020.
One sign of the RJC’s growing influence in the party is reflected in its annual leadership summit, which most recently drew 1,500 political hopefuls compared to about 250 in 2010. “The demand from Republicans running for office…has been so high that Brooks has had to stagger invitations to the annual conference,” Drucker notes. It has been the increasingly pro-Israel stance of Republicans and the reversal of that support among Democrats that have mainly driven the burgeoning alliance. While the RJC has taken stands against populist Republicans, “whose opinions on Israel, and U.S. aid to the Jewish state, range from insufficiently supportive to outright antagonistic,” the organization has prospered in the current administration, viewing Trump as the most pro-Israel president in American history. But Trump’s comments made during his campaign, where he laid blame on the Jewish community for voting Democratic and purportedly going against their own interests, concerned some Jewish leaders. “Trump during the 2024 campaign did not single out any other religious bloc for similar scolding—just Jews,” Drucker writes. Today, new threats to this coalition are coming from the new right, with anti-Semitism rising among popular podcasters, online influencers, and other media personalities.
At the same time, the RJC has developed close ties to the evangelical community. It was on Brooks’s recommendation that Trump nominated Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and Arkansas governor, to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel. “Although even conservative Jews sometimes view American evangelicals who enthusiastically support Israel warily, Brooks is convinced it’s all upside—for Jews in the U.S. and the Jewish state. So the RJC long ago made engagement with American evangelicals a strategic priority,” Drucker writes. There are data showing that performance among Jewish voters has been a historic success, due to the money and manpower invested by the RJC. Fox News exit polls indicated that Trump received 33 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide, while the nonpartisan Pew Research Center pegged Trump’s support among Jewish voters even higher, at 35 percent. “But to understand the real and consequential movement toward Trump by Jewish voters in 2024, you have to look under the hood, at the exit polls of battleground states and local precincts with significant populations of Jewish voters. That’s where Trump made his mark with a cohort usually elusive for Republicans,” Drucker concludes.
(The Dispatch, https://thedispatch.com/article/republican-jewish-coalition-history-success/)
