Jewish votes 1916-2008

[CJK]

It appears that picking Lieberman didn't help Gore with the Jewish vote. Gore actually got a smaller % of the Jewish vote than Bill Clinton did in 1992. I suspect that this is because Jews aren't nearly as suspectible to identity politics as other groups are.

I've heard of a theory that Jews in 1992 were very alienated by Bush's 1991 efforts to stop Israeli settlement building, but I could be wrong.

[Progressive]

As a Jewish voter, I can tell you that Sarah Palin and a "third term" of Bush scares Jewish voters. We, and of course I don't speak for every Jewish voter but I feel that I do speak for a majority, fear the religious right and feel that the religious right pushes against certain values such as education and tolerance. And when Orthodox Jews are taken out of the picture, the vast majority of us vote Democratic.

[Bo]

It appears that picking Lieberman didn't help Gore with the Jewish vote. Gore actually got a smaller % of the Jewish vote than Bill Clinton did in 1992. I suspect that this is because Jews aren't nearly as suspectible to identity politics as other groups are.

I've heard of a theory that Jews in 1992 were very alienated by Bush's 1991 efforts to stop Israeli settlement building, but I could be wrong.

Some of them possibly were, but I don't think Israeli "settlements" were very high on the priority list for most Jewish voters. Thus, I don't think it had that much of an impact. Besides, Clinton was pretty tough on Israel and pretty friendly to Arafat, but that didn't stop him from overwhelmingly winning the Jewish vote in 1996 or for Gore to do the same in 2000. Bush Jr. was pretty friendly to Israel, but Kerry still overwhelmingly won the Jewish vote in 2004. Thus, this just strengthens my point that most American Jews don't vote based on Israeli interests.