A new survey of Florida’s Jewish voters has found that Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by a margin of 66 to 23. The poll was conducted by veteran pollster Jim Gerstein of GBA Strategies and first reported by Jewish Insider. With a Jewish population between 600,000 and 700,000, the swing state’s Jewish community is a crucial component of any winning electoral coalition.
The poll’s results are important not just for what they say about Florida, but what they suggest about the rest of the country. In the 2012 election, Obama defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney 68-31 among Floridian Jews, according to exit polls. Thus, at just 23 points, Trump has lost over 25 percent of Romney’s Jewish vote share in the state. It is not so much that Republican voters are flocking to Clinton as that they can’t stomach voting for Trump, a very poor indicator for the GOP candidate.
If Trump is bleeding previously-Republican voters in one of the more conservative-leaning Jewish constituencies in America, just two months before election day, it spells trouble for him nationwide.
Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Subscribe to his newsletter, listen to his music, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
