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The Presidential Voting of American Jews

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American Jewish Year Book 2019

Part of the book series: American Jewish Year Book ((AJYB,volume 119))

Abstract

Most American Jews have been voting Democratic since the late-1920s. In every election since 1948, there has been speculation as to whether Jews’ affinity to the Democratic Party is about to end; but it has displayed remarkable persistence. Yet, more careful examination reveals that there has been variation in Jews’ voting patterns. Partisanship is not static or immutable. Attention to Jewish voting received renewed attention in early 2019 when the Republicans launched a new organization intended to create a Jewish “exodus” from the Democratic Party.

This chapter summarizes the recent surge of research on Jews’ politics and supplies great detail on their voting history and voting patterns. Section 2.1 provides a review of the literature. Section 2.2 considers the various factors that have been advanced to explain Jews’ voting. Section 2.3 offers a brief analysis of their voting turnout and their political participation more generally. Section 2.4 presents a lengthy history of their presidential voting, including analysis of voting trends. Section 2.5 focuses on three factors that affect Jews’ voting: ideology, partisanship, and Israel. Section 2.6 turns to the contemporary period, including their voting in the 2016 election, the impact of the Trump administration, and the 2018 election. Section 2.7 provides a brief conclusion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Both conducted 31 surveys over these time periods, with the ANES interviewing 1388 Jews (an average of 45 each year) and the GSS 1246 (an average of 40 each year).

  2. 2.

    The 2013 Pew survey results in this chapter are based on reanalysis looking only at US citizens. As in the Pew Report (Pew Research Center 2013), the JNR are included along with the JBR in this chapter.

  3. 3.

    Because of the large proportion of American Jews who lived in New York City, this averaging gives extra weight for New York by counting its vote equally with the average of multiple studies for the other cities.

  4. 4.

    Less than a fifth of foreign-born adult males in a largely Jewish New York district in 1910 were naturalized and so could vote (Goren 1961), and similarly only a fifth of Kessner’s (1981, p. 232) random sample of 1500 New York City Jewish families in 1925 were on the voting rolls.

  5. 5.

    Marks and Burbank’s (1990) multivariate regression analysis confirms a significant Socialist vote in 1920 and 1912 among the Russian-born, who would have been largely Jewish.

  6. 6.

    Another reason to doubt the Manhattan-based standard figures is that they overstate the Socialist voting of Jews in 1920 while missing their Socialist voting in 1916, 1928, and 1932.

  7. 7.

    Weisberg’s 1936–1944 estimates use weights derived by Berinsky and Schickler (2011) to correct for Gallup’s quota sampling.

  8. 8.

    Medoff’s examination of precinct-based analysis for the 1950s also estimates the Eisenhower vote at only about 25% (Wentling and Medoff 2012, p. 163 and n. 410).

  9. 9.

    The margins of error for the Jewish vote after pollsters switched to probability-based sampling are probably in the range of 5%–7%.

  10. 10.

    Averaging Pew Research Center poll results on yearly leaned partisanship totals from 1994 through 2017 obtains virtually the same result.

  11. 11.

    Evangelical support for same-gender marriage could be seen an instance of their wanting to have their religious views enacted into law, regardless of the traditional separation between church and state. However, questions on moral issues, on church-state separation, and on attitudes toward the Christian right have not been asked in the same surveys of Jews, making it difficult to assess their relative importance in affecting Jews’ political positions.

  12. 12.

    Edison Research was the main media exit poll. The Comparative Congressional Election Study is a large academic survey, while J Street is the progressive group that lobbies for a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinians dispute.

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Weisberg, H.F. (2020). The Presidential Voting of American Jews. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2019. American Jewish Year Book, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40371-3_2

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