Where the Jewish Vote Is Going

FISHER, ALAN M.

WHERE THE JEWISH VOTE IS GOING ALANNLFISHER Younger Jews have voted differently from their parents and grandparents in five consecutive elections. Three months after the U.S. presidential...

...The bottom line is that American Jews are moving to the right, but slowly...
...Jews still see themselves as socially vulnerable...
...Through the placement of liberal Jewish Democrats both in the party and in positions of leadership within the Jewish community, liberal norms are reinforced within the Jewish community...
...The single most significant datum indicating that the Jewish vote is moving toward the Republican column—but slowly—is the difference between younger and older Jews...
...Nevertheless, it is true that Jews continue to identify primarily as Democrats (55 percent), much more so than as independents (25 percent) or, the least popular choice, Republicans (20 percent...
...As Figure 1 shows, younger Jews are by no means hard-core Republicans...
...Jews fall into both categories...
...That partially explains their concern with civil liberties and limiting the power of the government (the majority) to interfere in private issues...
...On the basis of these polls, in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee surveys, we know more about Jewish voters today than ever before...
...The percentage of Orthodox Jews in the voter mix is likely to increase in the future primarily because of unusually high birth rates, but also because Orthodox participation in the political process is increasing...
...Despite the movement to the right—which is likely to continue in the future—the Jewish vote in this presidential election (68 percent Dukakis, 32 percent Bush) was 23 percentage points more Democratic than the non-Jewish vote (45 percent Dukakis, 55 percent Bush...
...The Democratic party continues to be seen as the party that is more responsive to the concerns of marginal peoples...
...Another factor that bespeaks an overall move to the right in the Jewish vote is the factor of religious affiliation within the Jewish community...
...They still retain a Diaspora mentality of a minority group, a marginal people, the stranger in a strange land...
...But the anticipated decline of the Jewish Democratic vote will not mean a radical upheaval of American Jewry...
...Jews still see themselves as socially vulnerable...
...This is understandable doctrinally: The more haredi (zealous) among the Orthodox tend to agree with fundamentalist Christians on aid to religious schools and prayer in school, although, of course, they favor prayer addressed to the Father and not the son...
...Their priorities and political experiences differ from those of previous generations...
...These figures have remained surprisingly stable over the last decade...
...Similarly, in presidential elections over the last 40 years, the Jewish vote has been as much as 34 percentage points more Democratic than the non-Jewish vote, although the spread has decreased since the 1960s (see Figure 3...
...As Seymour Martin Lipset has demonstrated, Jewish academics and intellectuals tend to be liberal and heavily over-represented in institutions that have a special impact on Jewish students, the opinion leaders of the future...
...For the fifth consecutive election since 1980, younger Jews have voted differently from both their parents and, particularly, their grandparents...
...It is three generations removed from the foment of the Jewish labor union movement...
...In short, Democratic support has eroded among younger Jews...
...This attitude is often held by the educated, and to a lesser extent, by minorities generally...
...Does this mean that Jews vote their values, rather than their interests...
...They retain a Diaspora mentality of a stranger in a strange land...
...The majority are still Democrats and voted for Dukakis...
...The growing split between the right-wing Orthodox, on the one hand, and both the other denominations and unaffiliated Jews, on the other, will carry over into the political arena in the United States—as it already has in Israel...
...Between 80 and 84 percent of Jews over 60 voted for Dukakis and for Democratic congressional candidates...
...We Jews are headed in that direction...
...Normal patterns of parental political socialization have not been completely severed...
...The seller always receives a higher price in an auction when there is more than one bidder...
...The more Orthodox, the more Republican...
...Moreover, twice as many Jews consider themselves liberal as conservative (42 percent compared to 21 percent—the rest in the middle...
...presidential election, it's safe not only to predict the result, but to analyze the Jewish vote with some subtlety and care...
...Jews are twice as likely as non-Jews to consider themselves liberal...
...A benefit accrues to the Jewish community, however, as the Democratic proportion decreases...
...If we look only at their socioeconomic status, we would expect them to be far more Republican and far less likely to identify themselves as liberal...
...They do not feel as comfortable as their social status or their economics would seem to warrant...
...This is the Reagan generation, having come of political age during the eight-year Reagan administration, a generation that knows not FDR or JFK...
...That ancient guardian against secular encroachment, Agudat Israel, has just opened an office in Washington, D.C., to lobby for its politics...
...Among Jews, Dukakis did only about 5 to 8 percentage points better among the poorest than the richest according to CBS exit polls...
...From the perspective of power maximization, one is always in a better position to have two suitors than one...
...They differ far less from their non-Jewish contemporaries than do their Jewish elders (see Figure 2...
...That should not determine political values but it is a useful side benefit of political diversity...
...Nevertheless, Jewish yuppies are yuppies...
...they are half as likely as non-Jews to consider themselves conservative...
...In the Reagan-Falwell America of the 1980s, the fundamentalist Jews feel increasingly at home, and the old-time secularists less so...
...Wealthy Jews, by contrast, gave 58 percent of their votes to Dukakis...
...This analysis is confirmed more clearly at the other end of the age spectrum...
...From a purely political viewpoint, the Republicans ought to pray for the ha'old t'shuva movement...
...Exit polls, the networks' vainglorious and profit-motivated device to predict the vote before their competition, make this analysis possible...
...The oldest Jews, often the poorest, are by far the most Democratic...
...Party affiliation is not a precise predictor of voting behavior, especially in presidential elections (remember that nationally Democrats have outnumbered Republicans for more than half a century, yet since the 1964 presidential election only one Democrat has won the presidency...
...In the 1988 congressional elections, the Jewish vote was about 19 percentage points more Democratic than was the country's vote as a whole, again at the low end of the recent range...
...Jews are still as Democratic as the much poorer Hispanics...
...As might be expected, income does not differentiate nearly as much among Jews as it does for the rest of the electorate, either in the vote for president or for Congress...
...As the overwhelmingly Democratic blacks have discovered, the Democrats tend to take them for granted and the Republicans tend to ignore them, calculating that it is too expensive to get them to shift...
...Because of their immense sample size, exit polls are a boon to public opinion researchers, particularly those of us who study relatively small population groups such as Jews...
...These are the people who will soon slide away from the electorate, leaving the Jews as a group less Democratic...
...The change in the voting patterns of the Jewish electorate will therefore be gradual, as the older generation is replaced by younger Jews...
...The more evenly split or the less committed the Jewish vote, the greater the incentive for both parties to appeal to its special interests...
...Among non-Jews, however, D,ukakis won 63 percent of votes from families making less than S12,000 annually, but only 28 percent of votes from families making more than SI00,000...
...In the Reagan-Falwell America of the 1980s, the fundamentalist Jews feel increasingly at home, and the secularists less so...
...Yet there is another explanation for this besides "Jewish values...
...for this generation, even the civil rights and student anti-Vietnam movements of the 1960s coincide with their birth and infancy but not with their political experience...
...Also, as the economic condition of the Orthodox has improved, they have developed the economic policy sympathies of other middle-class groups...

Vol. 14 • March 1989 • No. 2


 
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