The latest on Jewish races: Elissa Slotkin wins in Michigan

Rep. Elissa Slotkin Image by Getty Images

By Helen Chernikoff, Molly BoigonNovember 4, 2020

In North Carolina, a Jewish leader and political neophyte won a seat in Congress. In New York, a sitting congressman who’d barely won in 2018 lost this round.

Other races are still too close to call, but as the day goes on, more questions are getting answered. Here’s an update on the big Jewish races with the latest counts from the Associated Press.

On Wednesday afternoon, Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat of Michigan, was reelected to her House seat against Republican Paul Junge. She finished with 51.1% of the race; he had 47.1%.

Jon Ossoff’s Senate race in Georgia is undecided, as is Dr. Al Gross’s in Alaska.

Gross, who is running as an Independent, is way behind; Ossoff’s race is tighter. With 94% of the votes counted, Republican incumbent David Perdue has 50.6% of the votes, while Ossoff, a Democrat, has 47.1%.

In Alaska, with 45% of votes counted, incumbent Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has 63.1% of the vote compared with Gross’ 31.8%.

Elaine Luria, a Democratic congresswoman from Virginia, pulled out a victory in a tight contest against Republican Scott Taylor with 51%of the vote, allowing her to hold on to the seat she had taken from him in 2018.

Democrat Kathy Manning, the former chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, has won her District 6 House seat in North Carolina with more than 62% of the vote, according to the Associated Press.

She beat out Lee Haywood, a Republican who got slightly less than 37.7% of the vote, after court-mandated redistricting in 2019. That district went to President Donald Trump in 2016.

Max Rose is a Democrat whose 2018 victory in a famously red district that includes Staten Island was a surprise. Now Republican Nicole Malliotakis has taken his place; with 95% of districts reporting, she’s got 58% of the vote.

JTA contributed reporting.

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at chernikoff@forward.com and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

Molly Boigon is an investigative reporter at the Forward. Contact her at boigon@forward.com or follow her on Twitter @MollyBoigon.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO