Can Nikki Haley Win the Jewish Vote?
The Republican presidential contender wants to win Jews over to the other side of the aisle. How realistic is that?
When I started The Cholent, one of the first things I started hearing was disillusionment with the left. One of my early stories explored this emerging phenomenon: Jews breaking ranks with Democratic institutions, but not ready to go full red pill. The average socially liberal Jew is, I think it’s safe to say, repulsed by Trump for his apparent lack of any sort of value system, yet skittish around the more buttoned up conservatives who seem one economic crisis away from turning America into Gilead.
For many Jews, I suspect Biden is a safe bet. Too old to need to prove himself with the young radicals, too jaded to shake up the Middle East. But also, too asleep at the wheel to notice where that the progressive flank might be pointing his party toward a cliff.
I think we’re in the middle of a shift. Not necessarily of Jews switching parties, but of the “Jewish vote” splintering in a more definite way than we’ve seen before. Jews of the progressive variety will double down on the left, while Jews who used to be in the center will drift to the right. Centrist Jews, who feel an affinity for Israel, won’t be able to abide by the politics of the far left, while progressive Jews will wave goodbye to Israel in favor of an American promised land. The May 2021 Gaza conflict was a harbinger: it split open the chasm and made everyone choose a side. We probably won’t come back from that.
Anyway, here we are, at the beginning of another election season. Will centrist Jews have it in them to leave behind hard-won victories, like immigration rights and abortion, for the promise of defense against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Are we just stuck, to borrow Dara Horn’s phrase, with choiceless choices?
Nikki Haley, a two-term former governor from South Carolina and former ambassador to the UN under Trump, stopped in Seattle for barely a day this week. I wish to thank Saul Gamoran, Washington State Chair of the Nikki Haley Campaign, for helping me arrange this interview. I am honored to have had the opportunity to get 10 minutes with Haley to hear her thoughts about winning over the politically homeless Jewish community.
“We’re going to fight hard to earn your support.”
The Cholent: American Jews have historically voted Democratic. In recent years, though, many American Jews have become disillusioned with the Democratic Party due to attacks on Israel and anti-Semitism from the left. What's your strategy for winning the so-called Jewish vote?
Haley: It’s something that I’ve actually said to the Republican Party, that we should be actively trying to earn the support of the Jewish community. It’s an important community. They understand the values of family, they understand the values of education, they understand the values of faith. It’s very natural that they be with Republicans. But I know that we still have a large segment that’s with the Democratic Party. And I think that in the past that’s been because they felt like Democrats sympathized more with them. But I think if you look at what’s happening now, you can’t be comfortable with what Democrats are doing in terms of the way they are attacking the Jewish people, whether it’s with anti-Semitism, whether it’s against Israel, those types of things. It's an opportunity for Republicans to say, this is a story about addition: We need you, we want you, and we’re going to fight hard to earn your support.
That’s what I’m going to do. I want to go and fight hard to earn the Jewish community support, because I think it matters. And I think they're important and I think they’re strong and I identify with them. I identify with them on the values that they have. I identify with them on being a minority and knowing what it feels like to be singled out. And I identify with them on the hate that can come your way and the push that you have to fight back against. I feel I can definitely relate to them, and I hope that I can earn their support in the process.
You have been an unapologetic supporter of Israel. What steps would you take to work toward peace and stability in and around Israel?
I think build off of the Abraham Accords. That kind of stopped after the Biden Administration came in. And it’s such an opportunity if you look at what's happened with the Israelis and the Emiratis. It is beautiful to see the cultural exchange, the trade exchange, the communication that’s happening between the two. We need to build on that. Right now, the Emiratis don’t feel like we appreciate what they did. You’ve got Bahrain who thinks the same thing. We’re on the verge of trying to get Saudi Arabia. It’s really important that we pull them in. And so trying to connect the Arab community back in with Israel is really important. What the Abraham Accords meant to me wasn’t that Israel needed the Arab countries—the Arab countries needed Israel. They were looking for an opening. This was the opening. Biden put a stop to all that. I would bring that back and make sure that we do that. Not just with the Arab world, but make sure that Israel is seen for the asset that it is around the world. I think it’s important.
Going back to American Jews, how can you win over Jewish voters on socially liberal issues they tend to support, like abortion, immigration, and the social safety net?
I think the Jewish community should want to be with someone who values them. And you can’t look at the Democratic Party and say that they value the Jewish community, because if they did, they wouldn’t be allowing the anti-Semitism that is coming from our universities, that’s coming from our politicians, that’s coming from Congress, that’s coming from the Biden Administration. My parents always taught me, take care of those who take care of you. The Democratic Party’s not taking care of the Jewish community. I want to give them a home. They know that I will always have their back. They know that I’m going to make sure that people understand that anti-Semitism is hate and it can never be allowed in any form whatsoever. And they know that I’m always going to say that Israel is a Jewish state and the Jewish people deserve to have a home. And I’m always going to fight for that.
Anti-Semitism is hitting new records, as you know. Do you have thoughts about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and Biden’s new strategy to address anti-Semitism? Specifically, how do you view anti-Semitism in relation to anti-Zionism?
[The anti-Semitism strategy] was a slap in the face to the Jewish people. It was a slap in the face to pro-Israeli people. I mean, the fact that [Biden] caved to the progressives and wanted to make sure that there was still an opening that Israel could be attacked, and that it still could weaken the argument that Israel is a Jewish state, says everything you need to know about where the Biden Administration is going. There’s not much that the Jewish and pro-Israel community asked for. This was one of them. And so you're not giving the one thing that has been solid for a long time—you're gonna cave on that? It was very telling, it was very offensive. And I think that people need to understand if you are going to go and attack Israel and claim that Israelis are like Nazis and claim that it’s like an apartheid state, that’s anti-Semitism. I will always say that. And so anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. We have to always see that for what it is. And I think Joe Biden just put a crack in that. That’s incredibly dangerous in a time where, you know, our Jewish children are struggling enough in college and struggling enough with liberal professors and you’ve got pro-Palestinian people giving graduation speeches against Israel. That’s not helping the situation. They only hurt it further.
I want to ask a broader question. You probably know what cities like Seattle have been going through. Fentanyl epidemic, property crime, homelessness, gun violence, a shortage of law enforcement, and so on. What would you advise our city and cities like ours to do to get back on the right track?
I think that we have to remember that America is a country of laws. The second you stop being a country of laws, you give up everything this country was founded on. So if you go back to that premise, and you look at Chicago and you look at San Francisco and you look at Seattle, the one thing we have to do is we have to go back to having the backs of our law enforcement. We have to go back to realizing that we have to close the border and defund sanctuary cities. We have to go back and understand that we’ve got to get illegal guns off the street and stop street crime. All of this can go away. If we just went back to prosecuting laws the way they were meant to be prosecuted, the weakening of laws by district attorneys has done more damage to these cities than anything else. And when we go and bring that back, you’re going to start seeing quality of life again. You’re going to start seeing safety again. You’re gonna start seeing people willing to move back into these cities that they’ve left. But right now, if they don’t feel like anyone's got their back, and they don’t feel like their families are safe, they're going to continue to leave in droves. And I think that's unhealthy for the economy in these cities, and it's unhealthy for America.
Is there a way to reconcile this with a more compassionate approach? A lot of this is mental illness and people coming on hard times. How do we reconcile the two?
When you look at homelessness in our country, we have to deal with the cancer that is mental health. One in four people have a mental health issue, but if treated, they can live a perfectly normal life. But if someone does have a mental health issue, there aren’t enough therapists. There are not enough mental health facilities for them to go to. Even if there were, insurance doesn’t cover it. So people are dying every day due to mental health issues. And if they can’t deal with their mental health issues, they get into drug addiction. We don’t have enough drug addiction facilities. So we have to treat it like the crisis it is. And we've got to start focusing on how do you lift everybody up?
You know, in South Carolina we had thousands of people on welfare. I partnered with my businesses and I said, if you will take this person, I will pay for them for X weeks if you train them and afterwards you decide if you want to hire them. We moved 35,000 people from welfare to work. It’s not that those people didn’t want to work. They needed someone to connect the dots, to show them how to get trained and how to have a job. We did the same thing in our prison systems. I wanted to know how inmates got in there, what happened when they were there, and what happened when they left. We put in family planning, we put in budgeting, we put in computer skills, we put in resume building, we put in faith-based education if they wanted it. But we put equipment behind the fence, started training our inmates on a skill. Now when an inmate leaves a [prison] in South Carolina, they’ve got a job to go to the next day. We have the lowest recidivism rate in the country. When you lift up the least of these, you help everything. You help the economy, you help the workforce, you help safety, you help everything. But you have to focus on everybody, not just the people that are easy to focus on. It’s actually the people who desperately need that one leg up to be able to get their life back on track. That’s what I'll do.
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"too asleep at the wheel to notice where that the progressive flank might be pointing his party toward a cliff." This is false. The Biden White House is the most amazing White House I have ever seen in my lifetime. Instead of filling leadership positions with donors and CEOs, he hired nonprofit leaders, Ph.D.s and lawyers with deep experience. This includes the hiring of Jews with stellar qualifications. For the first two years, Josh Dickson from the campaign and, formerly, the Obama administration, came back as a senior adviser and associate director of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He and the liaison to the Jewish community, Channan Weisman (who is Orthodox) are completely astute about all of the nuances of domestic and foreign policy. Channan Weissman returned to the State Department and Josh Dickson moved to a top job at United Way. The Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, has been a tremendous advocate for Jewish causes inside the White House and to the public. He took on his role with great seriousness and dedication. Two early-to-mid career, brilliant Jewish leaders in the White House immediately come to mind: Aviva Aron-Dine, Deputy Director, National Economic Council and Stefanie Feldman, who authorized a great deal of the administration's gun violence prevention policy. Feldman has an amazing mind and rattles off laws and their reference numbers with ease. The Department of Education ruled in favor of the Jewish students at the University of Vermont and, since the George Washington University case is more serious, I expect the students to there too. The FBI's hate crime bureau includes Jews in its long list of groups covered by this program. FEMA makes funding available for synagogue safety. The new program to combat antisemitism will depend on who applies for the money the quality of their proposals. It's up to the Jewish community to bring forth meaningful proposals and apply for the funding. Similarly, Jewish organizations have to be proactive in applying for funding in education, the arts and social services. Jewish organizations underapply for municipal and county funding here in the Seattle area. In 2023 the Department of Education hosted some zoom programs on faith-based rights in education. The ADL was one of the main leaders of this program, and the ADL's statements are being written into Department of Education policy. Remember that 10% of all Jews in the US earn less than $32,000 per year, and we have a generation of Jewish going into old age alone and in poverty. Jews who didn't have inheritance or equal opportunity vote, and elder care, Medicare, Social Security and social services are major concerns to us.
The federal Department of Education does not have jurisdiction over curriculum. Therefore, the issue of anti-Jewish bias in "liberated" ethnic studies and particular content providers and websites is a state issue and a local school board issue. Instead of attacking Biden, we should be working on the severe problems going on in our own state, such as the PESB awarding a leadership grant to WAESN. We should be asking the candidates for governor what they are going to do about this and about paradigms that arbitrarily divide the student body into "white" vs. "BIPOC". Biden isn't promoting this, but our state PESB is. And we should asking the state OSPI candidates about that too, and school board candidates in places like the Northshore School District. Bellevue has teachers trying to promote protocols in which white students should wait to speak until after the "BIPOC" students speak, and using that as a demonstration of antiracism.