Nikki Fried warns that Dems are ‘losing our Jewish voters’

Nikki Fried. Photo by Jacob Ogles.

Splits in the national Democratic Party around Israel’s foreign policy and the right to self-defense are providing challenges in Florida.

That’s the grim prognosis that Nikki Fried, the Chair of the Florida Democratic Party, offered during a Zoom call with Jewish Democrats. She said that events since Oct. 7, 2023 — the date of Hamas terror attacks on Israeli civilians — have caused a cultural shift, with Democrats “losing our Jewish voters.”

“What has happened since then in American politics has made a lot of our Jewish brothers and sisters start to question the Democratic Party,” she said, as reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“I hear a lot about the Squad,” Fried continued. “I hear a lot about Kamala Harris’ policies, you know, what Joe Biden has or has not done.”

Indeed, Harris, who has not campaigned in Florida as the Democratic nominee, has taken heat at rallies for the administration’s attempt to triangulate between support of Israel and catering to a base that sees the Likud government as using the October terror attacks as a pretext for a wider and more destructive war in the region, and sees the administration as supporting “genocide.”

Fried says she told Harris, while Biden was still the nominee, that Jewish voters didn’t feel “seen or heard” based on the White House’s response to campus protests last academic year.

“We just didn’t feel like she was seeing us — or not her, but Joe was not seeing us, and not, you know, helping us to be secure,” Fried recalled. “And she was shocked, actually, that that was the opinion that I was giving to her. But she also said, ‘I hear you and I see you,’ and within 48 hours, and whether or not that was my lobbying or not, but within 48 hours was Joe’s big speech about the campus protests.”