The reaction to Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin's official Democratic response to President Trump's address to a joint session of Congress this week provides some helpful insight into the major question her party has to answer these days:
Is the Blue Team able to accommodate its new coalition?
Republicans have been and still are going through a good bit of difficulty in becoming the party of both the rich and the working class. Many of the current fights in the GOP about foreign policy and tariffs speak to the split between the haves and the have-lesses on the Republican side. Blue-collar Americans tend to like protectionism and dislike foreign intervention, regardless of which party they are in, while members of the upper-middle class tend to take a more pro-engagement view on trade and foreign affairs.
But in the age of mega-MAGA, there's no question about whether the priorities of the new working-class voter base of the GOP is having its way. What was the party of the suburbs for most of the 20th century looks a lot more like a party arranged around small-town and rural voters' demands. Farmers tend to dislike tariffs for obvious reasons, but other than that, the policy priorities for the Republicans seem aligned with their core voters' on core issues.
But what about the Democrats?
In her response to Trump, Slotkin — the newest Jewish member of the Senate — touted her national security background and her work in the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She heaped praise on Ronald Reagan's understanding "that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity." It was an effective message for a woman who just won a Senate race in a state Kamala Harris lost.
But for many Democrats, praising Reagan and talking about one's work in the post-9/11 CIA doesn't appeal.
"If parading Liz Cheney around didn't help Democrats win, maybe praising Ronald Reagan won't either," wrote former Michigan state Rep. Abraham Aiyash (D).
Aiyash, who represented a district on the north side of Detroit that included parts of Hamtramck — a little city with a big Arab population — was one of the leaders of the effort to sink Joe Biden in Michigan's primary because of Biden's support for Israel in its war with Hamas. As Democratic leader in the state House, he won lots of attention as a 30-year-old who combined the hard-left progressivism of Bernie Sanders with the anti-Israel views of so many in Metro Detroit's large Arab community.
There's no case to be made that Aiyash and the Uncommitted movement in Michigan cost Democrats' the presidency last year. The shift toward Donald Trump from 2020 to 2024 was sharp in Michigan, indeed. But the red-to-blue effect was not as pronounced as it was in other swing states like Nevada and Arizona, where there are not substantial Arab populations of the kind that mobilized in Michigan.
But Uncommitted can certainly be said to have cost Democrats.
As Harris started her brief general-election campaign last year, the Biden administration in which she served had managed to make a complete political hash out of the issue of Israel. Biden and Harris managed to be seen as both insufficiently pro-Isreal by many Jewish voters and moderates but also anti-Palestinian in the eyes of progressives and Arab voters. If Aiyash could say the administration was "fund[ing] a genocide" at the same time that pro-Israel Democrats in Congress were defending the Jewish state amid frequent White House criticism about its tactics in the war, Biden and Harris had managed to lose with both sides of the argument.
By the time Harris was choosing a running mate in August, the problem was front and center. Harris courted and considered Pennsylvania's very popular and proudly Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro. But in addition to being pro-Israel, he had also denounced the antisemitism that had infected the campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania and other elite schools in the spring of last year. Moderate, popular, and from the most important swing state, Shapiro looked like a lock. When Harris snubbed him, though, we were told it was because she "clicked" better with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Chemistry is great, but plenty of tickets have won without it. It seemed more likely that Shapiro was deemed "too controversial" because of his views on Israel and the protesters. Walz had the robust backing of many in his home state's substantial Muslim population and of hard-line progressives. Walz was the safe pick with the Democratic base while Shapiro was the pick to reach out to the middle. Either could have made sense. What made no sense, though, was toying with Shapiro and then snubbing him.
To understand Harris's choice, consider the new numbers from Gallup on Democrats' views on Israel. As recently as 2016, 53 percent of Democrats said their sympathies were more with Israelis than the Palestinians. Just 23 percent took the Palestinian side. Now, it's reversed: 59 percent for the Palestinians and 21 percent for the Israelis.
This is not entirely surprising given the carnage of the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's emergence as a friend of the GOP, but even considering all that, it's still a stark number. So where does that leave pro-Israel Democrats, particularly Jewish Americans?
Increasingly with the other party, as it turns out.
Figuring out how the estimated 6 million Jews in the American electorate cast their ballots is no easy task. The census doesn't track Judaism as either a religion or an ethnicity, and polling on the question is tricky. But the data gurus at Split Ticket gave it their best shot by using polling data but also focusing in on the 2024 results in several communities that are predominantly or substantially Jewish. What they found was that Jews swung 6 points nationally from blue to red, but perhaps even more in places like Squirrel Hill, Pa.; Teaneck, N.J.; and Scarsdale, N.Y.
A 36-point advantage with Jews is still very robust, but maybe not good enough. As the authors explain:
"More dangerously for Democrats are the long term implications of a change in Jewish voting habits in combination with other trends, particularly among working class Hispanic and Asian Americans. The 2024 presidential election in New Jersey is particularly illustrative, with the state shifting from D+16% to D+6% between 2020 and 2024. While the 5-10 point rightward swing among Jewish voters is clearly insufficient to explain what happened in New Jersey, it could be a key factor: in places like Wisconsin, Democratic gains in educated suburbs have mitigated continued bleeding in rural areas, but in places like New Jersey and New York, a swing right among college-educated Jews may have doomed the party's attempt to mitigate the strong GOP gains of 2024."
The message is that if the Republican Party continues to make inroads with lower-income Americans, Democrats will not be able to afford any slippage with educated, affluent, upwardly mobile voters. The kind of folks you are likely to find in places like Scarsdale and Squirrel Hill.
It would be a mistake to do with Jewish voters and Israel what both parties did with Hispanic voters and immigration in the previous 20 years. Jewish voters are not monolithic and their individual interests and concerns are far broader and more complicated than the issues of Israel and domestic antisemitism.
But it is certainly correct to say that a viable coalition for Democrats will demand supermajorities of the kinds of voters who very often happen to come from Jewish communities. The same could be said of many Asian American families. Affluent and educated, Democrats need them to come out for the blue team again and again.
A party that can't comfortably contain Abraham Aiyash and Elissa Slotkin isn't a party that can win national elections.
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