Why Jewish Americans vote Democratic

The Manchester Guardian ^ | October 2, 2013 | Harry J. Enten

[2ndDivisionVet]

A striking aspect of the new Pew survey on Jewish Americans is how liberal Jews are. Is it good for the Democrats? You bet.

Why do people vote the way to do? For swing voters, the answer is usually the state of the economy. For most, however, voting patterns are surprisingly fixed. People tend to vote for one party consistently over time. For Jewish American voters, the party of choice has been the Democratic party.

Conservatives have been trying to crack the code for a number of years on how to get Jewish voters over to their side. Based on the findings of the new "Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey from the Pew Research Center, Republicans will need to find a different key. Jews are likely going to be Democrats for the foreseeable future.

Let's start with the fact that the most important determining factor of voting pattern is partisan affiliation. If you identify as a Democrat, you are far more likely to vote Democratic than if you identify as an independent or a Republican. In this instance, 70% of Jews self-identify as leaning to or members of the Democratic party. That compares with just 49% of the American public overall who at least lean Democratic. Only 22% of Jews consider themselves as leaning Republican, compared to 39% of the overall public. Orthodox Jews, who represent no more than 10% of the United States' Jewish population, tend to make up the majority of Republican Jews.

Given their self-identification, it's unlikely that Jewish Americans will break from their Democratic ways. But a closer look at why Jews are Democratic should give Republicans further pause....

[Zionist Conspirator]

I suspect many Jews became lifelong Jews when they first came to the U.S. back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Dem Party was the party that readily accepted immigrants into its fold while the Republican Party, run by the eastern country club elites in those days, rejected immigrants....especially Jews. Rich, Protestant elites who voted Republican were the ones who kept Jews out of their country clubs and discriminated against them in other areas. Attitudes die hard.

Ironically, groups such as the John Birch Society regard these old northeastern Republican Protestant elites as the "real power" behind Communism.

[ansel12]

That is a pretty sharp post, well done.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I think Daniel Ellsberg was a Protestant from a Scandinavian background.

[xone]

It is my challenge to twist those stiff necks into leather necks.

Make 'em Marines baby!

[Zionist Conspirator]

2,000 years of oppression has made Jews wary. The Democrats have been very good at exploiting that wariness. I can’t seem to get it through the thick skulls of my stiff-necked fellow Jews that modern America is different, and why it is different.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Jews being wary. Being wary does not necessarily require support for "gay rights." In fact, the in-your-face identification of Judaism with moral depravity is no way for a wary person to act.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Somebody who wanted Jews to persist as a distinct people would work hard to increase hostility and exclusion from the surrounding population.

Unfortunately for your thesis, the segments of the Jewish population that are responsible for the vast majority of positions that cause anti-Jewish hostility are the intermarried ones. Some liberal "branches" of Judaism even accept the children of intermarried couples as Jewish if only the father was (this is contrary to Halakhah). There is a whole Jewish world out there unknown to most non-Jews--the charedim or "ultra-Orthodox"--who are extremely parochial and withdrawn and has little interaction with the non-Jewish world.

Jews living as an exiled minority among the nations of the world is a punishment from G-d for turning away from the Holy Torah. Jews are supposed to live in a Theocratic, Torah-governed polity in 'Eretz Yisra'el.

[ansel12]

Here are some numbers for you to look at, I didn’t go over them or the source’s accuracy but taking a quick glance it looked like you are right or might be.

http://theinjusticefile.blogspot.com/2011/08/prison-and-crime-records-by-race-black.html

If you look at them and form a summary or good conclusion ping me.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Jews have never gone republican, ever, in fact when given major candidates to the left of the dems (as in the 1920s), they flocked to them.

Just which Republican presidential contender of the 1920s was "to the left of the dems?" Harding, Coolidge, or Hoover?

[ansel12]

Huh?

[Zionist Conspirator]

I wonder if there is a big political split between urban-living Jews and those Jews who live in rural areas. I mean, I can’t think of any other group that tends to live in urban areas as frequently as Jews but who also tend to vote more conservatively. Maybe it’s just a function of urban areas tending to produce liberals vs rural areas tending to produce conservatives.

That may indeed have something to do with it, but please recall that once upon a time cities could be as conservative as they could be liberal (this was before the Democrat ethnic/immigrant/Black machines). Alexander Hamilton, the original American Conservative, and his Federalist party (the original American conservative party) represented the cities and the mercantile class. Even the large churches in large northern and eastern cities were what we call "Fundamentalist" once upon a time.

There are basically two reasons that Jews tend to gather together in Jewish communities. One is that Jews who live among the nations of the world are in exile. Historically, they have never known when they were going to be expelled. This discouraged land ownership and encouraged keeping assets liquid. Also, it was often against the law for Jews to own land. The second reason is that it is practically impossible to practice Judaism in isolation. Public prayer requires a minyan of at least ten circumcised males, and the first thing that must be built where Jews settle is a miqveh for family purity. This makes city life easier and less problematic than isolated rural life.

That doesn't change the fact, however, that there have been rural and agricultural Jews even in the United States. And pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe was a very rural and small-town world by modern standards. The shtetlach in which Eastern European Jews lived in tended to be small villages, though of course the large cities had large Jewish populations too.

In the historically Protestant United States, Catholicism almost as urban a religion as Judaism (without the excuses), while being rural in traditionally Catholic countries.

[ek_hornbeck]

If they were not persecuted, they would no longer be Jews. Think about it. The worst enemy of Judaism is assimilation, becoming so accepted that intermarriage causes the Jews to disappear as a distinct people (as is happening now in the US, with the intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews being 71 percent, 58% overall). Somebody who wanted Jews to persist as a distinct people would work hard to increase hostility and exclusion from the surrounding population.

I've always maintained that many Jewish activists like Alan Dershowitz actually prefer a low level of anti-Semitism in American society, though they would never admit to this. Not high enough that Jews are physically threatened or interfered with economically, more along the lines of "country club" anti-Semitism that excludes them socially and forces them to form social bonds strictly with fellow Jews.

In the absence of anti-Semitism, many Jews tend to have little or no group identity, and are just as likely to form social connections with (and intermarry with) non-Jews as with fellow Jews, in the same way that the Irish assimilated and intermarried as soon as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice started to fade.

[Zionist Conspirator]

You have to put this in context. In the early 1800’s a theory called Higher Criticism was formed that showed pretty definitively that 4 distinct sources could be teased out of the text of the first 5 books of the Bible (Torah). This was kind of meant to hurt the Jewish community and it destroyed it in many ways.. but it has come to bite the Christian community just as hard.

"Higher criticism" was actually intended by its pioneers to be a vindication of chrstianity by showing that the Torah was (has veshalom!) a "Pharasaic" imposture written later than the Prophets, and that chrstianity was a "restoration" of this alleged original, "pure," pre-Torah form of "prophetic Judaism."

All this has been forgotten today. Now higher criticism is considered a nefarious plot against chrstianity, and most people don't even know the traditional Jewish teaching that every single letter of the Torah comes directly from G-d (in fact it is forbidden to reject a single letter of the Torah). This is now actually considered a "chrstian" concept (Protestant, to be precise) and most people think Jews don't have a dog in that fight.

Unfortunately, the Orthodox community is experiencing a great deal of turmoil with things like so-called "Open Orthodoxy" and the poisoning of the minds of even Charedi scholars by modern western academia. If you want to know how bad things are getting, just check out some recent articles at The Jewish Press, such as this one which celebrates modern academic theories and chides Orthodox Jews for their "fundamentalism" (notice that no one has posted a dissenting view). Then you have people like Lord Sacks (chief rabbi of the UK) saying that non-Jews need not leave their old religions and become practicing Noachides. In short, Orthodox Judaism today is under the same relentless attack that all traditional "western" religions are.

Similar to the issue of higher criticism, it is still actually normative Jewish teaching that the world was created in six days, though this belief is far from universal today among "centrist" Orthodox or even Charedim.

[ek_hornbeck]

What percentage of blacks were Republican from 1860 to 1964? What percentage were from 1976 to today? Those biases can be changed relatively quickly by the right circumstances.

The switch in black voting patterns wasn't due to a change in black attitudes, but because of a near-reversal in political parties. The Democratic party was once the party of the Confederacy and States' rights, while the Republicans opposed it. By the 1960's, this was reversed.

The Democrats and Republicans changed, not the black voters. Similarly, as Republicans become more liberal (which is happening as we speak), I have no doubt that more ethnic and racial minorities will start to vote Republican. The point is, it's not the party label that matters, but what (if anything) that party label stands for.

[Daveinyork]

Someone convinced them that gays are n oppressed minority.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Huh?

::Sigh:: I'm not trying to start a big debate with you. But I thought your post said that Jews wouldn't even vote Republican when the Republican candidate was to the left of the Democrat one, as in the 1920s. If this is not what you meant then I apologize.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Someone convinced them that gays are n oppressed minority.

In the Book of Joshua, "compassion" for "oppressed minorities" doesn't seem like a big part of Judaism.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Our founders, especially Jefferson, were judeophiles.

I think some of our founders, particularly the more "enlightened" like Jefferson was "judaeophilic" for the same reasons modern liberals are: they were a constituency his enlightenment/anti-traditional religion philosophy appealed to because of their experiences, and because they voted for him.

Considering Jefferson's animus against ancient, sacerdotal religions, I doubt a full Torah Jewish polity would have appealed to him at all.

[wardaddy]

Lol

I can only imagine how this is going.

Personally...
When you replace Gods word with a worship of humanism and creating heaven on earth this is what you get

Levin sorta explains it unintentionally in Ameritopia

Some buck the upbringing though.....must always qualify lest the bounds be unleashed

[Daveinyork]

“In the Book of Joshua, “compassion” for “oppressed minorities” doesn’t seem like a big part of Judaism.”

Nor in most books of the OT, but we’ve been an oppressed minority ever since, at least until modern America. It put us in the thick of the civil rights movement, and liberals have convinced many Jews that gay rights is an equivalent.

[wardaddy]

Blacks went to the better panderer

This ideology of Jews....particularly Ashkenazim from east of the Rhine

Is more entrenched....I don’t think out pandering will change them

As I’ve aged I realize how much how you were raised and your family and regional culture plays

I’m southern white baptist.....social conservatism is natural to me

BTW....blacks turned to Dems in 1930s under New Deal.....not after Reconstruction ended

Plus I think most Jews....like anyone else can....will claim minority victim hood for the benefits

Tear down existing order that oppresses us.....which is utter bullshit in their case....hell they are the order these days

But its an easy lazy excuse to act in ones self interest

Plus its get back for some Country Club slight from the 1930s grandma always kvetched over

Why do Indians and Chinese and Japs.....do the same....they all prosper here too