The leader of a noted Evangelical advocacy group predicts that the Jewish vote will move in Republicans’ direction in the 2024 presidential election as he forecasts a strong turnout among religious voters.
Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, discussed his organization’s ground game and efforts to reach out to faith-based voters ahead of the November election during a call with reporters on Wednesday.
While Reed mainly discussed the organization’s efforts to ensure “Evangelical Bible-believing Christians” and “frequent Mass-attending Roman Catholics” get to the polls, he also addressed the Coalition’s outreach to Jewish voters.
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“To the extent that a Jewish voter is modeled as socially conservative, they’re going to be in our database and we’re going to be knocking on their doors,” he said. “Because of our stands on Israel and our stands on antisemitism, which are among the most robust and muscular in the country, we have developed an awful lot of relationships in the Jewish community, both nationally and in these battleground states.”
“We have a lot of friends that we work with,” Reed said. “Some of those are involved in the Republican Jewish Coalition,” he added, noting that others are either involved in the Republican Party, active in their synagogues, or are donors the Coalition.
Noting how the election is taking place at “a time of an existential crisis for the state of Israel” and when Americans are seeing “probably the most extreme forms of antisemitism, certainly that I can ever recall going on in our country,” Reed said the polling he’s seen indicates that “the Jewish vote is going to move in a way that I have not seen in my career.”
Reed stressed that although he couldn’t share the polling “because it’s proprietary and internal,” he has seen data suggesting that “the Jewish vote is moving. And in states like Pennsylvania […] in Ohio, where you’ve got a key Senate race, in Michigan, it’s going to matter, and it’s going to matter in New York because of those battleground congressional races.”
“Jewish voters are paying attention and they’re paying attention to the way Harris and Biden have sought to appease Iran,” he continued. “And they’re also paying attention to the extent to which Harris and Biden appear to be beholden to Arab voters, especially in Michigan, in a way that has compromised their ability to take stands on antisemitism.”
Reed’s comments about Jewish voters reflect how the religious demographic tends to support Democrats in presidential elections but might be less inclined to do so this year due to concerns about how President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are handling the Israeli-Hamas conflict and antisemitism in the U.S.
Exit polling from the 2016 presidential election showed that 71% of Jewish voters, who constituted 3% of the electorate that year, supported Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, while just 23% backed Republican Donald Trump.
While Reed shared his predictions about the Jewish vote, he cited his outreach to the community as just a small part of what he called “the most ambitious, far-reaching and sophisticated ground game operation that has occurred on the center-right outside the Republican Party itself in your or my lifetimes.”
He expressed confidence that “by the time we get to Election Day, we will have communicated with 17 to 18 million center-right voters of faith at the door.”
“We are already at a point with 26 days to go where we have reached over five times as many voters at the door as we did in 2016, and roughly double the number we reached in 2020,” he asserted. Reed outlined the Coalition’s efforts to reach “truly low propensity voters” in the final weeks leading up to the election, referring to “people who have voted in one or fewer of the last three elections.”
Reed detailed how “there are about 700,000 of those in Pennsylvania, there are about 500,000 of those in Georgia and then there’s subsets of that who are really the true target.”
Describing this group as “the bullseye” for securing a victory for Trump in the election, he remarked, “If we can get even half of those smaller data sets to actually vote either on Election Day or preferably before, it’s going to be a game changer, I assure you.”
“It will be more than the margin separating Trump and Biden by a multiple,” he proclaimed. In the 2020 election, Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes and lost Pennsylvania by just over 80,000 votes.
Winning those two states in the 2024 presidential election, along with every state he won in the 2020 presidential election, would give him exactly 270 electoral votes, the magic number needed to win the presidency.
Reed’s discussion of the Coalition’s ground game focused on Georgia and Pennsylvania. His organization has deployed 300 paid staffers to Pennsylvania and “hundreds of volunteers beyond that.” In Georgia, the Coalition has 185 paid staffers reaching out to voters ahead of Election Day along with 600 volunteers.
He also weighed in on his organization’s outreach efforts in other battleground states.
“We have thousands of paid canvassers, depending upon the week, between [3,000] and 5,000, but we also have thousands of volunteers. So we’re reaching these doors and these voters for far less per home visit because a lot of our people are volunteering their time,” he said.
“We’re using the most sophisticated data science to model these voters. We know whether they voted by mail early in the past or whether they wait until Election Day so that we can drive them in developing their plan to vote.”
Characterizing the Coalition’s voter mobilization efforts as “the Gold Standard, at least on the center-right in the country,” Reed said, “I’m really proud of what our team is accomplishing.”
Highlighting how “there’s never been anything like this in my career and it’s going to make a big difference,” Reed remains confident that support from Evangelical voters will be enough to put Trump over the top in the presidential election: “In 2016, Donald Trump received approximately 24 million Evangelical votes. In 2020, that number increased to 34 million. So the total number of Evangelical voters increased by about 13 million and he got 10 to 11 million of them.”
“We think, conservatively, we’re going to see another increase. And we think on the low side, it’s going to be a gross number of 5 million, and we think it could go as high as 7 million,” he said. “So, you’d be talking about in two cycles, the number of votes that this constituency is delivering to the bottom line increasing by as many as 18 million votes in two presidential cycles.”
Reed also responded to a study from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University forecasting that 32 million self-identified Christians plan to abstain from voting in the 2024 election, declaring, “It doesn’t really comport with what we’re seeing on the ground.”
Reed highlighted how the Coalition had modeled “45.1 million Evangelical Christians who are on the voter file,” adding. “In the battleground states that will matter, not just presidential but Senate and even congressional, they’re going to come and they’re going to come in big numbers.”
He estimated that “on the low side, it’s going to be 75 percent turnout,” while “on the high side, it’s going to mid-80s to upper 80s-percent turnout of those who are registered.”
Reed added that “self-identified Evangelical Christians turn out” to vote “at a much higher rate than” both “all voters” and “all Republicans.” But added that “it varies from state to state.”
He estimated that between “50 to 60 percent turnout for all voters, 70 to 75 percent turnout for registered Republicans or modeled Republicans and it will be, depending upon the state, 6 to 10 points higher turnout if you are an Evangelical Christian.”
Reed responded to concerns that unregistered Evangelicals could have an impact on the outcome of the election, telling The Christian Post, “We estimate that there’s somewhere between 10 and 15 million unregistered Evangelicals.” He contended that “by the time everything shakes out this cycle, we believe that about 6 million to 7 million of those will register to vote this cycle.”
Conceding that “we’ll still have a lot of unregistered” Evangelical voters, Reed mentioned that “we’re doing a lot in churches, we’re doing a lot digitally to reach those unregistered Christians primarily using consumer data because they’re not on the data file.” He reported a “tremendous amount of success” in registering new voters, specifically at Hispanic churches.
“I don’t think the picture is quite as bleak as that study would indicate,” Reed added. “Two can both be true. It’s true that there are a lot of self-identified Christians who either aren’t registered or don’t participate. But it’s also true that the number who participate is the highest in modern American political history and that they participate and turn out at much higher rates than secular voters.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
