By Richard Baehr
The Jewish vote in the coming presidential election is up for grabs to
an extent unseen for almost three decades, assuming Barack Obama wins
his party's nomination. And that has got Jewish Democrat activists
worried.
An email is circulating in the Jewish community in Chicago from a
Democratic Party operative, containing an article written last year
about why his party is where Jews belong. Some of the arguments that
are used make the case are that both parties are good for Israel, so
Jews need to look at other things, such as that Democrats "care" more
for people in need. Republican Jews, the author claims, are either
greedy or scared. Such rhetoric flies in the face of the alleged unity-
inducing qualitiy that is often trumpeted as a key appeal of Obama. By
demonizing Jews who sup****t Republicans, Democrat partisans are merely
revealing their insecurities about the bona fides of their presumptive
presidential candidate.
And crime of crimes, the GOP is the party that brought the Terry
Schiavo case to a vote in Congress, thereby mixing church and state. I
have my doubts that the Terry Schiavo case is an issue that will
resonate at the moment with Jewish voters, given Iran's nuclear
program nearing completion (Barack Obama says he'll talk to
Ahmadinejad about it), economic worries (Barack Obama says the
solution is to raise taxes and spend a lot more government money), and
the war in Iraq (Barack Obama says get out now, and leave the locals
to fend off Iran and al Qaeda).
As it turns out, Democrats in Congress from Illinois voted 4 to 2 for
the Schiavo legislation. I really have no interest in how Barack
Obama voted on the Schiavo case. I care about his views on Iran,
Israel, Iraq, the economy. It turns out Obama was for the Schiavo
legislation (voted for it), before being against it (shades of
another Democratic presidential candidate I remember).
The letter that is circulating with the email repeats several times
the results of a totally discredited poll from the 2006 congressional
elections that suggested Jews voted 87% for Democrats that year. The
author concludes, none too subtly, that if the Messiah returns, there
is an 87% chance he will be a Democrat. I never thought about the
Messiah in terms of red and blue before, but then it is not I mixing
church and state with my metaphors.
That 87% poll result was based on a survey sample of 200 Jewish voters
in the national exit poll. That is a very small sample size for a
national subgroup, and was not a randomly selected sample. The entire
exit poll sample size was near 13,000. So Jews, who typically
represent 3% of the voting population, were but 1.5% of this national
sample. That does not sound right either. In any case, when I first
saw the articles and emails from liberal Jews gloating about the poll
with the 87% figure, I wrote a few pieces (like this one) on why the
survey was unreliable nonsense. Some of the gloating emailers who had
contacted me agreed and backtracked. But now the Jewish Democrats are
back spouting the poll as fact again. A random sample of 1,000 Jewish
voters were questioned in three states after the 2006 races, and that
showed Jews voted 75% for Democrats, 25% for GOP candidates, almost
exactly as they split between John Kerry and George Bush in 2004.
If 25% was too high a percentage of Jewish Republicans for liberal
Jews to stomach, they must really be having heart burn with the new
Gallup poll, that showed that The Democrats' 50 point win over Bush
with Kerry is now but a 29 point lead for Obama over McCain (61-32,
with 7% undecided).
In a state like Florida, with about 400,000 Jewish voters in
Presidential election years, that is a net ****ft of about 85,000
votes. John McCain is trouncing Obama in virtually every poll in
Florida taken to date, and the ****ft among Jewish voters seems to be
part of Obama's problem in the state. I think given the way some
Clinton voters have told pollsters they were for Obama this year (an
average over-polling for Obama of close to 5% in primary states), my
guess is that many of the undecideds are really McCain voters, and so
are some of the 61% who say they are for Obama.
McCain could break the modern day GOP high water mark of 39% set by
Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980, which was before Carter's
venomous attitude towards the Jewish state was so evident. A ****ft of
that magnitude could make a difference in Pennsylvania, a state Kerry
won by only 2.5% in 2004, and in which Obama was trounced by Clinton
in the recent primary. There are over 200,000 Jewish voters in
Pennsylvania.
None of this is surprising. Jews who care about Israel have many
reasons to have concerns about Barack Obama, pretty much all of which
have been laid out in the American Thinker in a series of exhaustively
researched articles by Ed Lasky. Of course, some Jews do not care
about Israel very much, and those Jews can find a comfortable home in
the Democratic Party, where sup****t for Israel is far lower than among
Republicans overall in every national survey that has been taken
comparing the parties on this issue.
In any case, with Obama a risk on Israel and untested in matters of
national security and foreign policy, and with the Republicans
offering John McCain, a long time strong sup****ter of the US-Israel
relation****p and a man, whose entire career provides a definition of
the words "tested" and "experienced", it is no wonder that those Jews
who choose this year to finally vote Republican will have a lot more
company than they might have in the past.
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