SGM

If the national claim has some real, if overstated, support behind it, the Michigan claim doesn't have much support at all. The specific assertion is that Jewish voters predominantly backed Abdul El-Sayed over Mike Rogers in the Senate race, and the evidence offered for it is a poll of 482 Jewish early voters conducted October 25 to 31 on behalf of a group called The Jewish Majority. I read that poll's own published methodology directly rather than relying on how it got summarized in the press, and a few things stand out immediately. First, the sponsor. The Jewish Majority is a Washington-based advocacy organization whose explicit mission involves pushing back on what it sees as the Democratic Party's treatment of Jewish concerns. That doesn't make its numbers false, but a finding that happens to support the sponsor's existing narrative, that a Democratic Senate nominee badly underperformed a fellow Democrat among Jewish voters specifically because of antisemitism concerns, is the kind of result that calls for independent replication before anyone treats it as settled. They have an incentive to make their group larger than it really is. I looked for a second poll measuring the Jewish vote specifically in this race and could not find one. The entire public narrative about Jewish voters in Michigan rests on this single survey by a pro-democrat agency. READ THAT AGAIN! ☝️ Second, the pollster. This was run by Mercury Public Affairs, a political consulting firm, not by Edison Research or SSRS, the organizations that run the standard exit polling infrastructure for the major networks. Multiple outlets, including Jewish Insider and Forward, nonetheless described this survey as an "exit poll." It fielded only among early and mail voters, before Election Day, before the race was decided, and before at least one notable late endorsement in the race. It was NOT an "exit poll". Calling it an exit poll borrows credibility from a methodology it doesn't actually use, and generalizing its findings to "the Jewish vote" in Michigan skips over the fact that early voters are a different population from Election Day voters, typically older and more habitually partisan. Third, and most importantly, the sampling frame itself is never disclosed. The poll's own methodology note tells us the sample was weighted by gender, age, geography, education, and recalled 2024 vote, and that respondents "identified as Jewish" when contacted. What it never says is how the list of people to contact in the first place was built. Were they drawn from a voter file vendor's statistical model of likely Jewish surnames and neighborhoods, from synagogue or Jewish organization membership rolls, from some combination of the two? Or was the list just made up of pre-selected members of this democratic Jewish voters to begin with? Nobody competent objects that they personally weren't surveyed. The real question is how the pool of people eligible to be approached in the first place was assembled, because that pool was never a random slice of Michigan's Jewish voters. It was a list built by someone, using some method, and that method is not public. A list-based targeted poll like this one risks systematically excluding people who are Jewish but don't show up on whatever list was used: secular or unaffiliated Jews, intermarried households, people without a "listable" surname, recent movers, lower-propensity voters who've never donated to a Jewish organization or joined a synagogue. None of that exclusion is random. And a bigger sample size doesn't fix it, because the problem isn't noise, it's a systematically incomplete list. Even taking the poll entirely at face value, the topline numbers mask how thin the underlying subgroups actually are. The finding that "99 percent of self-identified Jewish Democrats who didn't vote for El-Sayed would have voted for a different Democratic nominee" sounds precise, but that statistic is computed on a fraction of the 482 total respondents, likely somewhere in the range of 100 to 160 people once you filter down to Democrats who specifically rejected El-Sayed. At that sample size, the real margin of error is closer to 8 to 13 percentage points, not the headline 4.9 points that only applies to the full, unfiltered sample. The poll's own methodology note acknowledges that subgroup estimates carry more uncertainty, without putting a number on it, which leaves most readers assuming the precision of the topline applies everywhere in the report. It doesn't. There's also a quieter problem worth naming: even the secondary press coverage of this single poll doesn't agree with itself. Some outlets reported El-Sayed at 57 percent and Rogers at 34 percent, matching the pollster's own release. Others reported El-Sayed at 60 percent and Rogers at 36 percent. That's not a rounding difference, it's two different numbers being treated as interchangeable facts by outlets covering the same underlying survey, which should be a signal to slow down before repeating either figure as precise. So for the Michigan claim, here's the full list of holes as I see them: - a single advocacy-sponsored survey with no independent replication, - a pollster that isn't part of the standard exit polling infrastructure - an undisclosed sampling methodology that almost certainly excludes meaningful parts of Michigan's Jewish electorate in a non-random way - subgroup statistics reported with topline-level confidence despite much smaller real sample sizes, - a survey window limited to early voters rather than the full electorate, - press coverage that can't even agree on the basic numbers from the one poll everyone is citing. This claim rests on far less than the national one does, and the national one already has more holes in it than its confident repetition suggests.