Interesting study (by the Solomon Project) of patterns of political affiliation and voting among American Jews here. From the bullet points:
- The best estimate of the two-party Jewish vote in 2004 – based on the National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll sample of 1511 Jewish voters – is:
Senator John Kerry: 78%
President George Bush: 22%
- The Jewish two-party vote in 2004 was 29% more Democratic than the national two-party vote. This number has been remarkably stable over the last three presidential elections.
- A large majority (from 65% to 74%) of American Jews identify as Democrats. Estimates of the percentage of American Jews who identify as Republicans range from 11-21%.
- Jewish Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as liberal (up to 40% liberal in surveys by The Mellman Group along with Kiley and Co. and the Feldman Group) or moderate on an ideological scale. Somewhere between 13-18% of Jews identify themselves as conservative.
- There was a significant gender gap among Jewish voters in November 2004 according to the NEP survey. Though Jewish men voted for Kerry 70-28% (a 42% margin), Jewish women voted for Kerry 82-16% (a 66% margin).
- The strongest GOP subgroups within the Jewish population appear to be voters who attend synagogue at least weekly (47% for Bush in The Mellman Group’s surveys) and Jewish men under 30 years of age (35% for Bush according to the NEP survey). The strongest Democratic subgroups were Jewish women who were 60 years of age or older (90% for Kerry in the NEP survey) and Jewish women under 30 years of age (88% for Kerry in the NEP survey).
- Though there is some evidence that Bush captured a majority of Orthodox Jewish voters and Russian Jewish voters, sample sizes for both of these subgroups were either unavailable or too small in all surveys to make any definitive claims regarding their partisan attachments in 2004.
No reason to believe this sort of nonsense, then:
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said the strong loyalty of the Depression-era generation of Jewish voters to Democrats is eroding.
"We have had two presidents, Ronald Reagan and this president, who have addressed anti-Semitism in the world and threats in the world to both America and to Israel with moral clarity," he said. Still, he acknowledged, "we have a lot of work to do."
Reagan?!?!?
(Hat tip: Jonathan Singer)
UPDATE: My impression that Mehlman is completely out to lunch on Jewish views of Reagan receives confirmation from this graph (from the Solomon Project report, p11):
UPDATE: In light of the sort of considerations addressed in this post, one might suspect that lower curve won't be dropping much in the near future.
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