I personally believe that President Obama’s anti-Israel attitudes may be the tipping point needed to bring observant Jewish believers into the Republican Party. (Frankly, liberal Jews are increasingly irrelevant due to intermarriage and assimilation.) That may be difficult, but it is no more silly than it sounded in the 1970s to say that Southerners would vote Republican in places like Texas and South Carolina.
Getting attacked on the street (i.e., knockout games and the like) and conservatives keeping a light in the window for them will ultimately yield huge dividends. When I lived in Far Rockaway and saw the local observant Jewish notables suddenly appearing in Chuck Schumer’s camp when he inexplicably moved from the Upper East Side was both alarming and disgusting. Mayor Giuliani’s amazing eight years in office made a lot of converts to the GOP throughout the NYC observant rank and file, which is usually very conservative. But there’s Chuck Schumer, still cracking the whip with the rabbis and yeshiva heads, as far as I know.
I think there are close parallels to traditional Roman Catholics in the industrial states, and evangelical Protestants in the South, continuing for years to vote for Democrats based on long-ago Republican attacks on the “rum, Romanism and rebellion” of the Democratic Party.
It is beyond dispute that a century ago, way back when Republican leaders were nativist WASPs from the Northeast who detested most European immigrants, let alone Jews, the Democratic Party was a logical home for Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and others who were being abused by Republican leaders.
It should also be beyond dispute that those days are long gone.
There is no good reason for conservatives who take their religious faith seriously, no matter what their faith is, to vote for a Democrat on the national level. The Democrats have clearly become the party of opposition to basic morality, not the party seeking full political rights for Roman Catholic and Jewish believers.
And as Hildy correctly points out, Sharia law is a possibility if America continues to move down the road Europe has taken. It may be too much to say demographics determine destiny, but Europe's need for a blue-collar workforce, a need created in significant measure by aborting babies, has led to the immigration of massive numbers of Muslims.
It would be quite ironic if a post-Christian future for Europe, a future which liberals thought would be secular and tolerant of gross immorality, turned out to be a future of strict Islamic law and rules stricter than anything enforced by the traditional churches of Europe.