Did Kamala Harris lose more points by alienating anti-Israeli or pro-Israeli voters?

Question

Has Kamala Harris lost more votes due to her perceived pro-Israeli stance (non-endrosement by uncommitted movement, and other Genocide Joe, Killer Kamala folks) or due to her perceived cosying to antisemitism?

I am mostly interested in statistical data and their analysis here. IMHO, both accusations are false - in her public rhetoric Harris mostly upheld the traditional American view of supporting Israel's right to exist alongside the Palestinian human rights, while opposing terrorism. Her attempts at positioning herself as a pro-Palestinian, were mostly lip-service to a popular cause, whereas her basic support to Israel largely aligns with the US interests in the Middle East.

Remark
I have change the title, since the debate in the comments has focused on ethnic vote, although the body of the question does not contain direct references to Jews/Arabs/Muslims, and questions of Israel, human rights, antisemitism, and terrorism are of importance to much broader groups.

Answer 1

Gaza / Undecided Movement Probably didn't Change the Outcome

But they might have - it's a close thing.

We won't know for certain until / unless we get better polling, but Gaza policy almost certainly cost Harris Michigan. But even with Michigan, getting the rest of the Electoral votes she would have needed might have been a stretch.

Electoral Collage Math

For a Harris victory, she would have needed to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin - those three states have 44 electoral votes, which is enough to put her over the 270 needed to win.

The margins in those states were ~130,000, ~80,000, and ~30,000 votes, respectively.

Arab Americans

According to the Arab American Institute, the Arab American population in those states are: 180,000, 500,000, and 60,000.

Dearborn Michigan is ~50% Arab American, and shifted from 75% Biden to less than 50% Harris (3rd parties got nearly 20% in 2024 in Dearborn).

So if Dearborn is representative of Arab Americans overall, and one quarter of Arab Americans would have otherwise voted for Harris, then Gaza / the Undecided movement may have cost Harris ~45,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 125,000 votes in Michigan, and 15,000 votes in Wisconsin.

This is enough for Harris to win Michigan, and to close the gap by half in the other two states.

Jewish Americans

Jewish Americans went for Harris and Biden at about the same margin, 80%.

There are over 400,000 Jewish Americans in Pennsylvania, and only about 30,000 in Wisconsin. So even if Harris completely captured the Jewish American vote, it probably wouldn't have changed the outcome in those states, since it would only gain her 80,000 and 6,000 votes respectively.

Overall

It's possible that Harris could have threaded a needle and pulled out a victory by changing her Gaza policy.

A full throated condemnation of Israeli policies would have almost certainly won Michigan, and while Arab American don't have the numbers to swing the other two states, if excited Arab American voters managed to mobilize an additional ~90,000 Pennsylvanians and 15,000 Wisconsinites it could have turned the tide.

But the Jewish American vote is very large in Pennsylvania, so if that policy cost her any margin with the Jewish vote it would have put that critical swing state out of reach for Harris.

Answer 2

The Israeli Haaretz has a recent opinion article on this subject - Gaza? Antisemitism? Democrats' Online Witch Hunt Over Harris' Defeat Begins - which concludes that Biden / Harris' attempt to "appease" both sides did lose it vote. (It however doesn't include any hard data).

But other Israeli and Jewish media certainly seem to suggest that Kamala Harris definitely alienated the Arab-Americans and "Uncommitted" anti-war voters, even though she overwhelmingly won the votes of the American Jewish community.

The Forward claimed in an article that Gaza didn’t cost Harris the election but her campaign cost her some of the Arab-Americans and American Muslim votes:

These appeals may have softened the Election Day impact of voters angry at Harris over her position on the Israel-Hamas war, given that polls have found about half of Democrats describe what is happening in Gaza as genocide. But she did bleed significant support in regions with large concentrations of Arab and Muslim voters, like Dearborn, Michigan, where Trump’s share of the vote grew from 30% in 2020 to more than 42% on Tuesday, and Stein, whose campaign uniform included a kaffiyeh, got 18%. Allentown, Pennsylvania, a ward home to many Syrian Americans, saw support for Harris drop nearly 15% compared to the share that backed Biden four years ago.

But Harris’ unwillingness to make serious concessions to voters unhappy with her position on Israel was indicative of a broader failure to make a convincing appeal to the left flank of the Democratic Party ... “The campaign’s approach on Gaza was similar to their approach on other issues, in terms of ignoring the overwhelming concerns of the base to court a white, Republican constituency that was always very unlikely to vote for them,” Borgwardt said in an interview.

The Times of Israel reports that 79% of US Jews voted for Harris, according to largest preliminary exit poll:

In recent decades, between 20 percent and 30% of American Jews have supported Republicans in national elections. The GOP hit a high-water mark in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won some 40% of Jewish votes, but the more typical split makes Jews among the most reliably Democratic demographics in the United States ... The National Election Pool, which produces an exit poll for a consortium of major news organizations, found that 79% of Jews said they voted Democratic, compared to 21% who voted Republican ...

If accurate, the National Election Pool’s result would be the lowest proportion of Jewish votes for a Republican presidential candidate in 24 years ... Fox News, which is right-leaning but has a reputation for reliable polling, conducted its own Election Day “voter analysis” ... It found that 67% of Jews voted for Harris, compared to 31% for Trump. The poll still found that Jews voted for Harris at higher rates than members of any other religion.

Forward cites similar data to reports that almost all voting groups shifted toward Trump, except American Jews and suggests that the American Jews are traditionally ideologically Democrat voters, worry more about America than Israel and thus stuck with Harris:

Exit polls showed that the two top concerns for most Americans going into the voting booth were democracy and the economy, and American Jews said the same. According to the exit poll done by Edison Research, 34% of Jewish voters said the state of democracy was their chief concern, followed by the state of the economy (31%), abortion (14%) and immigration (11%) ...

Why democracy? Jews make up 2.4% of Americans. Without voting rights, freedom of religion, free speech, the rule of law — all the safeguards democracy affords a minority — life for American Jews would be as tenuous here as it’s been for Jews throughout the world, throughout history ... And Jewish voters simply did not buy the Republican message that Harris posed a greater danger to democracy than Trump. They were not willing to risk the status quo on someone like Trump, who holds so little regard for the institutions and traditions that have long kept their community safe.

The Times of Israel and Jewish Telegraphic Agency both carried similar articles reporting that Trump explicitly didn't give any credit to the "Jews" for his win:

• Trump hails ‘historic’ coalition that propelled his election win, doesn’t cite US Jews
• Donald Trump thanked a ‘historic coalition’ for his election. He didn’t include Jews.

The Hill reported on March 2024 how the Trump campaign targetted the disaffected Arab-American Democrat voters, who felt ignored / betrayed by the Biden / Harris campaign and The Times of Israel reports on the success of these overtures - :

It was a scene that was virtually unimaginable just four years ago, when Joe Biden won nearly 90 percent of the vote in the southern part of Dearborn, where a similarly overwhelming percentage of residents are Arab and Muslim. But riding the community’s utter fury over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza, Donald Trump managed to win a plurality of the vote in Dearborn — 47 percent to 28% for Vice President Kamala Harris ... Attendees at the election watch party hailed from various areas throughout the Middle East — from the Palestinian territories to Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But they were unanimous about their primary reason for backing Trump: They believe he can succeed in ending the ever-expanding Israel-Hamas war where Biden has failed.

Given that the majority in the U.S. disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza (Mar 2024) it is quite clear (in hindsight) that Biden / Harris campaign made mistakes in handling the "Uncommitted" anti-war movement that did help them consolidate the American Jewish Democrat voters (and more importantly donors) while totally alienating many Arab American and American Muslim Democrat voters. And Trump benefited from it because his campaign specifically reached out to these voters and convinced many of them to not vote for Harris and to even consider him as a viable alternate.

While it is hard to conclude that the war in Gaza (or in Ukraine) played an important role in the defeat of Kamala Harris in the recently concluded American elections, Gallup poll (in my opinion) does hint that Trump's campaign position on both wars were possibly more attractive to American voters - Trump had an advantage over Biden / Harris on the perception of an American leader who could "keep U.S. safe from foreign threats".

Answer 3

(Partial answer)

This source suggests that analysis is under way, with early results indicating that Harris indeed lost a lot of votes because of the Palestine issue. Exactly how many one can only guess (since the analysis is not complete), but:

Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy organization Emgage, guessed that Harris’ Muslim support might have come in as high as 90% if she had clearly signaled plans to break from Biden’s policy in the region. Emgage ultimately endorsed Harris, despite some of its members’ misgivings, arguing that “pursuing an anti-war agenda had a better shot under (the Democrat’s) administration.”

and

Four years after Biden dominated [in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab-American population], Trump got 42% of the vote, a plurality. Green Party nominee Jill Stein nearly cracked 20%. Harris landed in the middle, with 36%. According to national exit polls, more than 6 in 10 Muslims voted for the Democrat – a clear majority, but a stark decline from past cycles.

So if Wa'el Alzayat's guess is correct, 3 in 10 Muslims did not vote for Harris over the Biden administration's Middle East policy. There are about 4 million Muslims in the US. There were about 150 million votes cast out of 336 million population, so turnout is about 45%. If Muslims voted at the same rate as the rest of the country, then there were about 1.8 million Muslim votes cast. Of these, there were 30% "lost votes", or about 0.5 million.

I.e., an order of magnitude estimate is that Harris lost 0.5 million votes by alienating the pro-Palestine population. (This is likely an underestimate because it only counts Muslim voters.)

Trump leads Harris by 2.6 million votes country-wide, so espousing a pro-Palestine position probably would not have been enough to swing the election.

You might also be interested in this source, which suggests that the margin of victory in Michigan would've been much closer if Harris were pro-Palestine (200k voters affected; Trump won by 84k votes) - but even if Harris had won Michigan, it would not have been sufficient to win the election.

Answer 4

Neutrality was the best policy, but not in a very meaningful way

Exit polls were pretty clear that Israel was not a major issue in the election. Only 4% of voters considered foreign policy an important factor, and Ukraine and Tariffs were such "hot topics" in the foreign policy issue category, it is likely that Israel was not a deciding factor for more than 1% of Americans anyway. On top of that, the American populus was very evenly split 3 ways about which side of the Israel conflict the US should be on weather we should be neutral, for, or against Israel.

By being such a strong supporter of Israel, Trump basically left Kamala with 2 options to set herself apart: strongly support Palestine and alienate the middle, or try to stay neutral which could make her own party less happy with her, but do a better job of bringing in swing voters. Since the far left was going to vote for her either way, staying neutral on a relatively unimportant topic like this appeals to swing voters without driving her own party members into Trump's pro-Israel arms.

Any different strategy would have likely resulted in a worse outcome for Kamala, but since the topic was not important enough to influence the average voter either way, it probably did not swing the popular vote by more than a fraction of a percent.