By Morton A. Klein and Elizabeth A. Berney, Esq.

(May 19, 2025 / JNS) A few days ago, multiple news publications reported on the results of a poll by Jim Gerstein’s GBAO Strategies for a newly formed, supposedly “nonpartisan” outfit: the Jewish Voters Resource Center. The final tally suggested that half of Jewish Americans believe that U.S. President Donald Trump is antisemitic, in addition to other left-wing results.

Unfortunately, the mostly identical news articles in The Forward, The Times of Israel, Israel Hayom, The Hill and Arutz Sheva failed to mention the poll’s dishonest phrasing of its questions to elicit far-left results, the poll’s skewed polling sample or the fact that Gerstein was J Street’s former vice president and biased pollster.

But many active in the American Jewish community suspected that the poll results were not believable and simply wrong. It did not seem possible that a legitimate poll would find “half of American Jewish voters believe Trump is antisemitic”; that 62% supposedly believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu resumed the war in Gaza in March for personal political considerations as opposed to Israel’s national security”; or that significant numbers of American Jews believe that Trump’s efforts to end campus antisemitism causes more hatred.

So what’s going on? First, pollster Gerstein has a history of conducting deceptive polls to promote J Street’s agenda.

Commissioning Gerstein’s polls through the new “Jewish Voters Resource Center” outfit seems to have been an effort to obscure that these are still misleading polls designed to promote the same anti-Israel J Street agenda.

Second, the polling sample was heavily skewed to overrepresent Jews who voted against Trump and to underrepresent Republicans and Orthodox Jews. Only 26% of Gerstein’s polling sample voted for Trump, and 16% were Republicans. An AP/Fox News analysis exit poll showed that 33% of American Jews voted for Trump. The exit poll numbers for Trump were also much higher in states with large Jewish populations (45% in New York, 43% in Florida and 41% in Pennsylvania).

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