Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moscowitz told Fox Business last month that Jews are feeling “politically homeless”: repelled by today’s Republican Party but anxious about rising antisemitism fueled by anti-Zionism on the left. 

Rabbi Avi Killip agreed in a recent essay in eJewishPhilanthropy. “Many American Jews feel politically homeless these days,” she wrote. Seeing antisemitism on the left and right, “it isn’t surprising that many of us are feeling abandoned and alone.”

In July, Ashley Inbar, a 38-year-old Jewish Democratic voter in Maine, described her predicament in a first-person essay for the Times of Israel. “I’m a Democrat. I still am,” she wrote. “But lately, I’ve begun to feel oddly homeless. Not because my values have shifted, but because [of] the conversation around me.”

Ahead of the 2026 midterms, “politically homeless” has become the Jewish label of the moment. The phrase has also surfaced on the campaign trail, in sermons and on podcasts about the future of Jewish political identity. 

There’s no doubt the language of Jewish political homelessness captures a real sense of estrangement. But it can also obscure a less dramatic reality: Poll after poll shows that most Jewish voters remain Democrats, suggesting that feeling unwelcome in a political party and being prepared to vote for the competition are two very different things.

“I do think that for a substantial number of people there is a sense of anxiety, and it is not as easy or automatic to be Democratic as it used to be,” Kenneth D. Wald, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida, said in an interview. 

“But at the end of the day, for the majority of the Jewish electorate, excluding the Orthodox, the evidence I’ve seen suggests that Jews will likely vote as they have voted over the last 15 or 20 years – between three-fifths and two-thirds Democratic.”

That evidence includes a September survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute, conducted by the Democratic-aligned Mellman Group. It found that Jewish voters favored Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans by 71% to 23%. The Democratic advantage was virtually unchanged from their similar survey in March. Among Jewish Democrats, 97% said they would vote Democratic.

At the same time, the survey found real unease within the party. More than a third of Jewish Democrats said the rise of anti-Israel candidates had made it harder for them personally to identify as Democrats. A majority of Jewish voters said antisemitism was increasing within the Democratic Party, and a similar share said it was increasing within the Republican Party.

The pollster’s takeaway was that Jewish voters were still “overwhelmingly voting Democratic” even as their identification with........

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