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The Election and the Jewish Vote
- Abstract
American Jews constitute only 3 percent of the voting public, and have cast a majority of their votes for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election since 1916 (the first for which we have data). Yet, every four years, the minuscule Jewish vote generates a great deal of curious attention and analysis. Last year was no exception. Only days after the November election, Republican activists began pointing to a significant increase in Jewish turnout for George W. Bush over his first presidential run in 2000. Their counterparts in the Democratic party were no less quick to point out, despite Bush’s undeniable gains, that not only did the majority of Jews remain in the Democratic column but the President’s own level of Jewish support was significantly under the historical norm for other successful Republican candidates.
As with many claims rooted in statistics, both sides were right. While Bush did increase his share of the Jewish vote to 25 percent—almost a third higher than he had polled in 2000 and more than twice what his father accumulated in 1992—he still came in far below the 33 percent averaged by the four other postwar Republicans to have won the White House through 1988: Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, Sr. in his first race. But why all the fuss? The central fact about the Jewish vote is, after all, not how changeable but how stable it is. American Jews do not merely favor Democrats; they are the second most reliable bloc of Democratic voters in the country, exceeded only by African-Americans. One has to go all the way back to the election of Warren Harding in 1920 to find a Republican who gained more than 40 percent of the Jewish vote. Still, if there is little mystery about which party the Jews will support in any given presidential election—the range is consistently between 60 to 90 percent for the Democrat—what remains worth considering are the factors that trigger variations in voting patterns within that range, and what may be learned from this for the future
About the Author
Jay Lefkowitz, a lawyer in New York, served as a senior domestic-policy adviser to President Bush in 2001-2003, and previously as a policy aide to Preisdent George H.W. Bush. He is currently the President’s special envoy for human rights in North Korea.
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