Three new polls released in recent weeks show different results with respect to Jewish voter sentiment in the presidential election, raising questions about how a key voting bloc could shape the closely-contested race.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America this week released a national poll of 800 self-identified Jewish voters that demonstrates robust support for Vice President Kamala Harris — leading former President Donald Trump by a wide margin, 72-25%, in a head-to-head matchup.

Jim Gerstein, a founding partner at GBAO Strategies who conducted the poll on behalf of JDCA, said the outcome “shows remarkable, enthusiastic support for Harris” among Jewish voters, noting that she now maintains “an even larger lead over Trump than” President Joe Biden held in the 2020 election.

But two recent nonpartisan polls indicate that Harris’ lead could be weaker than JDCA’s results suggest, even as the majority of Jewish voters continue to favor her candidacy. A new survey released this week by the Pew Research Center, for example, showed Harris shedding 10 points among Jewish respondents, with a 65-34% lead over Trump  — a major drop in support in an election that is widely expected to be fought on the margins. 

While the Pew poll — conducted from Aug. 26-Sept. 2 — relied on a smaller subsample of 335 Jewish voters, the outcome would represent the worst performance for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than three decades.

Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research, speculated that the differing results might be attributed, among other things, to methodology, noting that its poll — whose data on Jewish voters represents a subsample of a broader poll on the election — relied only on respondents who identify as Jewish by religion.

“In our previous studies of Jewish Americans, we’ve used both definitions — Jews by religion and Jews of no religion,” Cooperman wrote in an email to Jewish Insider on Thursday. “In our more regular polling, like this political report, we use only Jews by religion. Our previous studies of Jewish Americans have shown that Jews of no religion tilt more heavily Democratic than Jews by religion — though even both groups tilt Democratic overall.”

The poll for JDCA — conducted during roughly the same time period — notes in an explanation of its own methodological approach that “all respondents were asked at the beginning of the survey whether they consider themselves Jewish, using the same question wording as” Pew’s 2020 report on Jewish Americans. 

Meanwhile, separate polling commissioned by Teach Coalition, a Jewish educational advocacy group affiliated with the Orthodox Union, shows Harris underperforming with Jewish voters in Pennsylvania — a key battleground state that could ultimately decide the November contest. 

The survey, conducted by Honan Strategy Group, found Harris with only an 11-point margin over Trump among 400 Jewish voters surveyed from July 26-Aug. 1 — far below the 72% that Biden won in the last election, according to an AP/Fox News voter analysis. The poll also showed that just 7% of respondents were undecided or declined to answer.

In contrast with JDCA’s poll — which found most Jewish voters overwhelmingly aligned with the Biden administration’s calls for a cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza — the Teach Coalition survey broadly showed respondents held a less favorable view of Harris’ approach to Israel.

The Trump campaign has been courting disaffected Jewish voters turned off by the Democratic Party’s far-left flank and its approach to the Israel-Hamas war, but the former president’s criticism of Jewish Democrats and his associations with antisemitic figures on the far right has threatened to jeopardize that outreach with just under two months until the election.

Experts say that surveying Jewish voters is difficult, and there is limited publicly available polling on the demographic group this election. The trio of new polls collectively paint a more complex portrait of Jewish voter preferences in a highly consequential election year — even as some Democratic observers expressed skepticism that Harris is at risk of losing meaningful ground to Trump.

“Every four years, Jewish Republicans say that this is the year Jewish Americans are going to tack Republican, and then every subsequent November it proves not to be true,” countered Steve Rabinowitz, a Democratic strategist who has long been involved in Jewish causes and helped co-found JDCA. “Every four years. This year will be no different and Harris will get 70-75% of the Jewish vote.”

Because Teach Coalition’s polls were conducted before the Democratic National Convention last month as well as other meaningful events in the campaign, its results are potentially less indicative of current voter sentiment than the surveys led by JDCA and Pew. 

Teach Coalition’s pollster also used a different methodology than the other surveys, first reaching voters with common Jewish surnames and only then asking them to self-identify as Jewish — an approach that could overlook a meaningful subset of Jewish respondents. The poll shared publicly does not include demographic details on voters — unlike JDCA, which identified its respondents by Jewish denomination, among other things. 

Bradley Honan, the lead pollster for the Teach Coalition survey, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

“In America’s deeply divided and polarized political environment,” Gerstein, the pollster for JDCA, said in an email to JI earlier this week, “the vast majority of American Jews identify with the Harris camp and express extraordinary contempt for Trump and the Republican Party.”

But another poll commissioned by Teach Coalition suggests Harris’ support could also be dwindling in New York — home to the largest Jewish population in the country. In a survey of six competitive House districts that could determine the balance of power in Congress, Harris won 56% of the vote among Jewish respondents, with a 19-point lead over Trump. In 2020, however, Biden claimed 63% of the Jewish vote in the state, according to the AP/Fox voter analysis.

“Jews in these areas are not hermetically sealed from their neighbors,” Nathan Diament, the executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, said of the survey results in Pennsylvania and New York. “Many of them are not going to think about things the way Jews in New York or California do because they’re in a different environment. They’re more likely — overall — to be a ‘swing vote,’ and that’s what our poll shows in the aggregate.”

If accurate, the New York survey in particular could have down-ballot ramifications as Democrats seek to regain a majority in the House. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who is facing a Democratic challenger in a Hudson Valley swing district that includes a sizable Jewish constituency, said that the Jewish vote could be decisive in November. 

“Certainly in a district like mine, where I have large Orthodox and Hasidic populations as well as secular and Reform Jewish populations, the issues of combating antisemitism and supporting Israel matter,” he told JI last week. “We see that reflected not only in the polls but in the response we get within the community writ large — and I think that obviously is going to have an impact on the outcome of the election.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story referenced an incorrect sample size of the Pennsylvania survey. The Honan Strategy Group poll surveyed 400 respondents.