Beyond Trump and Harris: Seven congressional and governor’s races Jews should watch
Downticket races includes candidates vying for Hasidic votes, a centrist Jew opposite a ‘black NAZI,’ and a Soviet Jewish whistleblower facing a Republican who faked a family
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is close and consequential, with the candidates offering two vastly different ideas of America — and that contest has gotten the lion’s share of Americans’ attention.
Below the top of the ballot, voters will decide on Tuesday in around 470 races for the US House of Representatives and Senate — where both parties have a chance of gaining, or retaining, control. There are also 11 gubernatorial races on the ballot. And a number of the outcomes may hinge on the Jewish vote, whether because of debates over Israel or because the district in question has a large population of Jewish voters.
Here’s a quick glance at six races where Jewish issues have come into play.
New York 17th Congressional District: Mike Lawler vs. Mondaire Jones
Control of the House may run through several swing districts in New York; Democrats have so far flipped one, the 3rd, where Tom Suozzi regained his old seat after the House expelled fabulist George Santos. Both parties have turned their focus to the 17th, covering an area the north and west of New York City, where Republican Rep. Mike Lawler beat a Democratic incumbent in 2022. Now, Lawler is facing former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones.
The district is home to Rockland County, which has a large ultra-Orthodox population, many of whose members vote based on the endorsements of leading rabbis.
Both candidates have vied for those endorsements, visiting local Hasidic leaders alongside senior members of their respective parties. Lawler visited the Hasidic village of New Square with House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Jones recently followed suit with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.
????????✡️ — PHOTOS House Speaker Mike Johnson and former NY Rep. Lee Zeldin just visited Satmar Rebbe Rav Zalman Leib Teitelbaum in Williamsburg to secure endorsements for NY-17 Rep. Mike Lawler and other congressional Republican candidates.
A source attending the meeting revealed to… pic.twitter.com/EeZJohuu5Z
— Belaaz News (@TheBelaaz) November 1, 2024
Lawler, according to The New York Times, has been “ubiquitous” in visiting Hasidic voters. “I’ve seen Lawler more times than I’ve seen my rabbi,” one local public relations executive quipped.
Jewish Insider reported that Lawler is poised to nab the New Square endorsement. (A similar dynamic exists in the neighboring 18th district, where Democrat Pat Ryan appears to be safe, partially due to his cultivation of Haredi voters.)
Both candidates have also touted their support for Israel — and their opposition to its critics. Lawler has been a leader on pro-Israel issues, often working with pro-Israel Jewish Democrats; he recently introduced legislation that would penalize universities for allowing antisemitism to flourish.
Jones, meanwhile, was once floated as a potential member of the Squad, the progressive group of lawmakers who are critical of Israel, but pivoted once the moderate Democrat he hoped to unseat decided not to run again. This year, he denounced Squad member Jamaal Bowman’s criticism of Israel and endorsed Bowman’s successful challenger.
Jones’ pivot didn’t stop Lawler, in a debate last month, from lambasting Jones for supporting a Palestinian state. Jones, in turn, has aired an ad blasting Lawler for defending Trump after the former US president said Jewish voters would be to blame if he lost the election.
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District: Eugene Vindman vs. Derrick Anderson
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, stretching from Washington’s outer suburbs south to Richmond, is a true swing district. Voters there have supported both Republicans and Democrats, including Rep. Abigail Spenberger, a moderate Democrat who is running for governor.
Both of the candidates to replace her are military veterans, one of whom is Jewish and has a higher profile than the other.
Eugene Vindman and his twin brother Alexander were working in the White House in 2019 when they played roles in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Alexander, a Ukraine specialist, raised the alarm about a call in which then-President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on US President Joe Biden, then a candidate for the job. Among the officials Alexander notified was his brother Eugene, an ethics specialist in the White House.
Trump sacked the Kyiv-born twins after he was impeached, elevating into national prominence their story of coming to the United States as toddlers from the Soviet Union, seeking freedom as they fled persecution of Jews.
In his congressional testimony during Trump’s trial, Alexander Vindman assured his father that here in the United States, one was free to expose wrongdoing by the president.
Republican Derrick Anderson has cast Eugene Vindman as being on a “revenge” tour against Trump. Vindman has not focused his campaign on his role in Trump’s impeachment, though he recently began a fundraising email, “It’s been 5 years since Trump made the corrupt phone call that forever altered the lives of me and my twin brother.”
Another feature of the campaign: Anderson, who is not married, posed for publicity shots with a family who wasn’t his, and Vindman has not let voters forget it, running an ad with an Anderson double tossing a frisbee at a cardboard-cutout daughter.
The NYT first flagged that Derrick Anderson's campaign was using footage of him posing with a woman and three children in what could easily be mistaken for a family photo shoot — except it's not his family.
It's his friend's family. pic.twitter.com/rElgF06tF2
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) November 1, 2024
Michigan Senate: Elissa Slotkin vs. Mike Rogers
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat, is fighting hard to keep this swing state Senate seat blue, running to replace longtime Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring.
The race was a tossup for weeks, but Slotkin solidified as a likely favorite in the campaign’s waning days.
When Slotkin declared her candidacy last year, she seemed like a natural choice: She’s a defense hawk, with a resume that includes years in the CIA and the US Department of Defense. Stretching from Detroit’s suburbs to East Lansing, her district encompasses a lot of Republican patches, but she has held it since 2018.
In early polls, she handily led her Republican challenger, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who worked in law enforcement and as a CNN commentator. But the race has tightened in part because of Arab- and Muslim-American disaffection from the Democratic Party because of Biden’s support for Israel amid its war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.
Michigan has a large population of Arab and Muslim voters and has been a center of pro-Palestinian political organizing.
A pro-Trump political action committee with ties to billionaire Elon Musk has run ads highlighting Slotkin’s Jewish identity and support for Israel in Arab-American areas.
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught in southern Israel and the start of the Gaza war, Slotkin has sought to walk a tightrope, taking meetings with leaders of both communities in her state. And when a controversy last month pitted Michigan Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib against the state’s Attorney General Dana Nessel, Slotkin was the only Congress member whose name appeared on two letters: one condemning bigotry against Nessel and the other condemning bigotry against Tlaib.
North Carolina governor: Mark Robinson vs. Josh Stein
Of the seven swing states where the Trump and Harris campaigns have spent scads of money and time in recent weeks, North Carolina is seen as among the likeliest to go red, with Trump consistently enjoying a small lead in the polls.
The state’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, isn’t faring as well. Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, has been mired in a succession of embarrassing revelations about past statements, including invoking antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and money, and writing in an online forum that he is a “Black NAZI.”
Those scandals have led the race to look like a blowout win for the Democratic nominee, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Jewish centrist Democrat and the son of leading civil rights attorney Adam Stein. The younger Stein has previously worked as a lawyer and state senator.
California Senate: Adam Schiff vs. Steve Garvey
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish Democrat, is a shoo-in to replace the late Dianne Feinstein, the long-serving Jewish Democrat who died in office a year ago. (The incumbent Sen. Laphonza Butler, named by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill out Feinstein’s term, is not running.) Schiff is well ahead of his Republican rival, former baseball star Steve Garvey, in the polls in the deep blue state.
Schiff, in many respects, is a conventional old-school Jewish Democrat: He’s a security hawk who, like Feinstein, earned his congressional chops in the Intelligence Committee. He is also pro-Israel and has the endorsement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s affiliated political action committee.
What makes Schiff stand out on the national stage is how much Trump despises him for taking leading roles in the president’s two impeachments. Later, Schiff was in the spotlight for his work on the committee to investigate the deadly pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump dubbed Schiff “Shifty Schiff,” a moniker that was seen by some as antisemitic. The former president now calls Schiff an “enemy from within” and has threatened to jail him along with the other members of the January 6 committee. Responding to the threat, Schiff told a local California outlet, “We’re taking this seriously, because we have to.”
Should Trump and Schiff both of them win their races, that would presage a difficult relationship, to say the least.
Arizona House and Senate: Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh, Kari Lake, Ruben Gallego
Arizona is notable for its preponderance of far-right Republican House members. Five of the state’s six Republicans (out of nine total representatives) have peddled falsehoods about the 2020 election.
At least two GOP candidates in this cycle, US Rep. Paul Gosar in the 9th District and Abraham Hamadeh in the 8th, have been dogged by accusations of antisemitic statements or associations with antisemites.
In 2008, when he was a teenager, Hamadeh wrote “If you think Jews aren’t big in america (2%) how come 56% of them are CEO’S [sic],” in a post on an online forum. Gosar was among the speakers at a 2022 conference run by Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier.
Two years ago, four like-minded far-right Republicans — whose candidacies all disquieted local Jews — lost elections in the state, among them Hamadeh and Kari Lake, a former newscaster who then ran for governor (and who never conceded her loss). Lake is now running for senator against Rep. Ruben Gallego.
Lake, who once exchanged pleasantries online with a Nazi sympathizer with whom she had posed for a photo, and who endorsed (and then withdrew her endorsement) a virulently antisemitic Oklahoma State House candidate, is trailing Gallego.
Despite her far-right and insurgent bona fides, Lake has the endorsement of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which conventionally favors traditional Republicans and has worked to defeat Republicans with reputations for antisemitism or opposing Israel.
Nevada Senate: Jacky Rosen vs. Sam Brown
Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority leader, ruled Democratic politics in his home state with an iron hand.
There was puzzlement when he selected Jacky Rosen, a software developer with no political record except the presidency of her synagogue, to run for the US House in 2016 in a competitive race in suburban Las Vegas — but the state party fell into line, and Rosen won the primary and then the race. (Maybe Reid’s choice should not have been such a surprise: His wife was born Jewish and he had a longstanding and deep affection for Israel.)
Less than two years later, with her freshman term barely under her belt, Reid — retired but still wielding considerable influence — tapped Rosen to run for Senate. Once again, Rosen validated Reid’s pick when she won the purple state. (She likes to say it was harder leading a synagogue than working in national politics.)
Rosen has become a leading figure in combating antisemitism on Capitol Hill, setting up a Senate task force on the issue with Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. She is a lead cosponsor of the Countering Antisemitism Act, which would create a coordinator to combat antisemitism in the US. Last year, in the wake of the war in Gaza, she faced death threats.
She has also earned a derisive Trump nickname: “Wacky Jacky.”
Reid died in 2021, but his legacy looks set to extend beyond the grave: Nevada is must-win if Democrats hope to keep the Senate, and for a while the race was touch-and-go for Rosen. In the final days of the campaign, however, polls show her pulling ahead of Republican challenger Sam Brown, a businessman and decorated war veteran.
Times of Israel Staff contributed to this report.
