The Myth of the Rightward Turn

...Other whites voted two-to-one against McGovern...

...Neither labor unions nor the United Nations have the same cachet for Jews they once did...

...in any case, it's surely inevitable...

...To say nothing of James Watt, despoiler of the environment and insulter of nearly everybody, including explicitly the Jews in both ethnic and political references...

...That makes the Jews one and a half times more Democratic and just half as Republican as other white Americans...

...But the notion of a landsman vote challenges Lawrence Fuchs's principle that Jews vote on the basis of issues and character rather than kinship...

...The Republican administration is not unaware of these political developments...

...We can learn a good deal about Jewish political tendencies from examining the initiatives that regularly appear on the California ballot...

...in Massachusetts, they gave Edward Kennedy 81 percent...

...In two Connecticut races, one involving a generally mismanaged Democratic administration and one involving the liberal, pro-Israel, anti-Reagan Republican, Lowell Weicker, the Jewish Democratic vote dropped below 60 percent, actually swinging Republican in the case of Weicker...

...Sophisticated symbolic interactionists have a technical term to describe this administration's style—goyish...

...Among all Jews, 60 percent thought the Democrats friendly—and 14 percent thought the Republicans friendly...

...when his popularity increases generally, the Jews follow suit—but always at levels of approval below the general assessment...

...Jews, wherever they live, are largely eastern...

...In short, it turns out that Himmelfarb was right 20 years ago, when he said that the Jews earn like WASPs but vote like Puerto Ricans— and he was wrong more recently, when he suggested that we were now shifting our political loyalties...

...He has written extensively on Jews and politics and on Jewish demography...

...If we are interested in knowing whether the Jews have turned right-ward, we can look not only at the vote in presidential elections, but also at Jewish behavior in congressional and other elections...

...Reagan's policies, particularly his abuse of the "safety net...

...In some deep sense, Jews do politically resemble other voters, since both tend to move in the same directions at the same times...

...Candidates—and issues...

...How well...

...If Jews have indeed become conservative, they should oppose environmentalism...

...First, even the redistributed Reagan figure is within five percentage points of Eisenhower's Jewish vote in 1956, at a time when political experts were proclaiming the tenacity of the strong Jewish liberal Democratic vote...

...Some of the Reagan people come from large corporations with close Arab connections, and some of Reagan's strongest supporters— Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms come to mind—have histories of opposition to civil rights and hostility or indifference to Israel...

...For the simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Jews in the United States feel much closer to and safer in the Democratic Party...

...oppose restrictions on the right to bear arms...

...in California, they gave black Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley a (slightly) higher proportion of their vote than did the much lower socio-economic status Mexican-Americans...

...The differences are less dramatic when it comes to comparing liberals and conservatives, but they are in the same direction: 46 percent of the public and 44 percent of the leaders think liberals friendly, while 10 percent of the public and 27 percent of the leaders think conservatives friendly...

...But slightly less than half was still two and a half times as high a percentage as other whites in Chicago gave the Democratic candidate, even though Democratic loyalty in Chicago had long seemed a fact of nature...

...44 percent of the general population was for the proposition, and 55 percent of the Jews...

...Spread out, they'd be spread thin as well...

...it is the issues that have changed...

...concentrated, they matter, and they may matter today more than ever before, since they have demonstrated now that though they are always available to the Democrats, their support cannot any longer be taken for granted...

...Among white non-Jews, the Democratic vote was 52 percent...

...one early Harris poll (cited in Moment by Aaron Rosenbaum) gave him 59 percent of the Jewish vote...

...Those people are generally westerners, more in the style of 19th century captains of industry...

...During Reagan's first year in office, the percentage of Jews,who approved the President's performance dropped from 50 to 39...

...The Nuclear Freeze initiative, on the ballot in nine states, passed in eight, just barely in California, 52 to 48...

...In the country as a whole, no president has ever received more than 65 percent of the popular vote...

...Outside the black community, these figures are simply unheard of...

...support a strong nuclear arsenal...

...Sarbanes and Moynihan were two of the six Senate candidates targeted for defeat by the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), and Kennedy would have made that list as well had he been considered beatable...

...Jews simply do not think of themselves as a moneyed or high-status class...

...But among the Jews, the vote was 73 percent for and only 27 percent against...

...Given a compelling reason to defect, they will—but only until they can return to the place where they feel more at home, where they feel they properly belong...

...To judge by those who have seconded his judgment in the intervening years, there is little question that he was...

...That Lautenberg was Jewish likely earned him a few extra points among the Jews—but not many...

...Moreover, to some Jews, he appeared to be tilting Middle East policy away from Israel and towards a more "even-handed" approach...

...these rumblings, taken together with the administration's delay in replacing Spiegel, led no less a Republican and Reagan stalwart than Congressman Jack Kemp to charge the administration with writing off the Jewish vote...

...But if these bits and pieces of evidence are straws in the wind, the wind is still wafting most gently...

...But if we examine the likely distribution of the Anderson vote in a two-party race, the results would have been about 60-40 in Carter's favor...

...An ethnically insular and increasingly conservative Jewish community should have been expected to vote heavily in favor of Lehrman...

...in Maryland, the Jews gave Paul Sarbanes 90 percent of their vote...

...In New York, the Democratic primary for governor pitted the Jewish mayor of New York, Ed Koch, against the Italian liberal, Mario Cuomo...

...Reagan himself, though personally not unpopular among Jews, is hardly considered sympatish...

...And among Independents, Jews are more likely to lean towards the Democrats...

...These three Senate races share a common theme: publicly liberal, pro-Israel Democrats facing Republicans who present themselves as conservative alternatives...

...Many of the most articulate students of Jewish life in this country have by now made the same point, some with celebration, some with regret...

...At the beginning of his campaign, in two Gallup polls in which he won 23 percent of all Americans who had a specific preference, he won 52 percent of the Jewish sample...

...percent for Daniel Moynihan...

...Then, too, Lehrman vastly outspent Cuomo in the election campaign...

...The Jews of New York went 91 It turns out that Jewish conservatives, if they exist, must be deviant...

...When it was time not for rhetoric but for tough decisions, the Democrats stood with Israel and with the Jews, and the Republicans and their administration did not...

...Second, we know from the 1980 primaries that the Jews gave Edward Kennedy much more support than they gave Carter, and we know from the polls of that year that both Kennedy and Mondale would have considerably outpolled Carter among the Jews...

...In 1982,70 percent of the respondents in one CBS poll asserted that they viewed their vote in the congressional elections as a way of sending a message to President Reagan...

...The country was suffering its most serious economic recession since the Great Depression...

...But he won 65 percent of the Jewish vote...

...new battles are fought and new alliances are formed...

...Little wonder that Carter lost votes in all voting groups except, perhaps, among the blacks...

...Jews voted two-to-one in his favor...

...However, in the 1980s, and even among respondents who fared slightly better than Americans at large in the recession, Jews are more likely to say that Reaganomics has hurt the country as a whole...

...Reagan dropped to 10-15 percentage points lower than those of other Americans, and stayed at that lower level until January 1982...

...In general, across the country, Jews have voted slightly more Democratic than other groups with far more obvious connection to the party of the underprivileged...

...A second environmental issue, the Water Conservation measure, was solidly defeated by a vote of 35 to 65—but the Jews were for it, 54 to 46...

...Neither will they refuse to accept ballots from blacks...

...And, according to the widely accepted myth, the Jews, too, did well for Reagan...

...And now the candidate was no longer an eastern liberal such as John Lindsay or Clifford Case...

...If he had only managed to split the Jewish vote, Lehrman would have won...

...After another three months, it rose slightly and settled in again at a figure about 10-15 points below other Americans, a difference that has persisted through 1983...

...The votes of Jews and blacks may seem to them too expensive to pursue, and may come only at the price of unsettling other (conservative) Republican interests and constituencies...

...In that race, the Jews went for Koch two-to-one...

...Jimmy Carter hardly excited American Jews...

...It may, therefore, be time to add a postscript to the oft-recited formula that "it's good there are Jews all across the political spectrum...

...By 1980, even the skeptical, sagacious scholar of the American Jewish Committee, Milton Himmelfarb—a man who had written in 1960 that the Jews "earn like WASPs but vote like Puerto Ricans"—acknowledged that Jews might finally be engaged in the ultimate political heresy, voting for the Republican Party...

...On election day, voters were asked, "Do you think of your vote for [the] House today as a vote for or against Ronald Reagan...

...Only 14 percent of the Jews assert Republican loyalty...

...Sophisticated symbolic interactionists have a technical term to describe this administration's style—goyish...

...Hence it is fair to say that the Jewish vote in 1980 was, in large measure, anti-Carter rather than pro-Reagan, a view confirmed by a strong Democratic vote at the congressional level as well as by Jewish attitudes towards President Reagan in the period since his election...

...This we know not only from their party enrollment and voting behavior, but also from a recent study by Steven M. Cohen which provides additional support for the view herein put forward...

...In 1976, the Democratic presidential candidate was, in some ways, strangely like McGovern, only more so: rural, southern, fundamentalist, born-again, a peanut farmer with little political experience and no previous Alan Fisher teaches political science at California State University, Dominguez Hills...

...Both candidacies were tainted, and in the end slightly less than half the Jews voted for Washington...

...But in the general election, with Cuomo running against a conservative Jewish Republican, Lewis Lehrman, the Jews held firm, voting for the Democrat by two-to-one...

...Then, in the period between January and March of 1982, in the wake of the AWACS battle, that percentage declined dramatically to 29...

...In 1982, those elections generated few surprises, except to those who had predicted party re-alignment...

...But the Democrats also do better...

...When the issue changes from equalizing opportunities for minorities (affirmative action)—which the Jews have supported consistently—to quotas—which the Jews have always opposed—a fissure is opened...

...President Carter was generally perceived as an inept leader, and he approached the elections with some of the lowest popular evaluations ever given a president by the American people...

...It is, after all, the largest percentage of the Jewish vote any Republican candidate has won since World War I. But there are many reasons to conclude that it is not a harbinger of things to come...

...These are astonishing differences...

...The memory of AWACS lives on, especially among the leadership...

...Seventy-eight percent of them—more than any other group except the blacks, more even than the lowest-income voters— went Democratic...

...And what of the Jews...

...In the Senate races in Maryland, New York and Florida, Jews were within 4-7 percentage points of the black vote...

...They, too, read and conduct polls and for some time they have been actively engaged in planning a campaign strategy for 1984...

...And on handgun control, decisively defeated by a vote of 37 to 63 in the state, the Jews weighed in 71 to 29 percent in favor...

...Style is not everything, to be sure, but there is a significant difference between an FDR or a JFK, surrounded by close Jewish friends and advisors, and a Ronald Reagan who comes from so far away and seems to be plugged into a world with so few landmarks familiar to Jews...

...Is a 40 percent pro-Reagan vote sufficient to indicate a major shift in Jewish political loyalties...

...On the question of handgun control in California, for example, it is as though we are looking at two separate universes—one of Jews, one of all other Californians...

...It cannot be a simple matter of economics...

...And in a rough election, one can sometimes see the opposite pulls of tradition and change...

...THE MYTH Of THE MGHTWARD TURN For most Jews, home is still where the Democratic Party is ALAN FISHER As far back as 1975, in the very first issue of moment, Harold Schulweis, a scholar with rare insight into the temper of American Jewry, identified—and cautioned against—a political shift by American Jews...

...From the data we know that under the right circumstances—as in 1980 for the presidency, as for Javits in New York and Ed Brooke in Massachusetts—Jews may end up voting for a Republican...

...Anderson, widely perceived as the most liberal of the three major candidates, did better among the Jews than he did with any other standard demographic group...

...And in New Jersey, across the river, they also went for the liberal—a Jewish Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, running against an independent moderate-liberal Republican who might well have squeaked through had she not supported Reagan's economic policies...

...The election day exit polls of 1982 confirm methodologically what a decreasing number of observers have suspected all along—Jews remain significantly and systematically more liberal than their neighbors...

...Cuomo won by appealing to upstaters, blacks, Puerto Ricans, unions and his Italian kinsfolk...

...In the beginning, one cannot say that Jewish views .have changed...

...But in fact, while Cuomo only won 42 percent of the white non-Jewish vote (a vote that includes, of course, his Italian paisanos)—he took 67 percent of the Jewish vote...

...But there is a powerful sense in which the Jewish voter remains a breed apart...

...Indeed, such behavior has been standard for virtually all immigrant groups...

...With only one exception, the greater the ideological difference between the candidates, the more likely the Jews to vote for the liberal Democrat...

...In the other twelve major elections, the lowest Jewish Democratic vote never fell below two-to-one...

...Yet Carter managed to win a robust 72 percent of their vote, compared to 46 percent of the white non-Jewish vote...

...But as time passes, new conditions develop and new issues arise...

...We are, he said, moving to the right, and rapidly...

...To have a home, but to be ready to spend some time away from home—that may be the most potent political formula of all...

...McGovern ended up winning just 32 percent of the white non-Jewish vote...

...In short, Jews identify the Democrats as friends, and, by and large, they stay with their friends...

...It was Ronald Reagan...

...Jews have long identified with the Democratic Party—and in 1980-82, 53 percent of them still did so...

...the article was followed, in April of 1983, by the sudden resignation of Reagan associate and informal Jewish liaison Albert Spiegel...

...A Wall Street Journal article suggested that Republican strategists have doubts about the potential support of the Jews...

...By itself, the 47 percent Carter vote suggests a radical break with the Jewish past...

...In other words, 1982 was a typical political expression for Jews—and the 1980 presidency was not...

...Cohen asked his respondents, a sample of American Jews and a sample of Jewish leaders [see the accompanying article by Cohen], whether they thought each of a number of American groups was "generally friendly, mixed or neutral, or generally unfriendly to Israel...

...In New York, faced with a choice between two candidates, one Jewish and widely perceived as a moderate-liberal, the other non-Jewish and generally considered a liberal, the Jews went for the moderate (Koch...

...public record on Israel...

...Was Schulweis right...

...Among Jewish leaders, the Republicans do much better...

...They do have hold of something, even if that something remains for the time being more a shadow than a trend...

...42 percent of the leaders think them friendly...

...Among non-Jews, 36 percent saw their vote as anti-Reagan...

...among Jews, that figure soars to 62 percent...

...Carter was running against a fresh leader with eight years of experience governing America's largest state, a man who promised fundamental change in the ways of government...

...These are important conservative rallying cries— and each one was tested in 1982 at the polls in California...

...the balance, 33 percent, call themselves Independents...

...And, had his candidacy been taken more seriously, he would have done very much better...

...Why did Himmelfarb wait until 1980...

...they ranked him far below other traditional Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson...

...But it would take an as-yet-unforseeable realignment of policies by the parties to force a permanent alienation between the Jews and the Democratic Party...

...To be sure, the Republicans will welcome every Jewish vote they can win...

...Invariably, Jewish precincts vote more liberally...

...The same conclusion can be derived from examining Jewish preferences in senatorial and gubernatorial elections in states with large Jewish populations...

...Because he knew the numbers—which, in detail, tell a story quite different from the by-now-familiar tale of galloping Jewish rightwardism...

...By and large, when the President slides in the general evaluation, he slides among the Jews...

...Finally, Jews hear the voice of the President with regard to Israel, but the hands are those of a Secretary of Defense about whom they remain—at best—skeptical...

...Such new circumstances and alliances provide the framework for potential political change...

...On the Automatic Bottle Deposit proposition, a major environmental issue, Jews were the only group to vote in favor...

...But there is at least some reason to suspect that their major investment will be directed at other groups—at Hispanics and employed blue-collar workers, for example...

...Other explanations help cast light on the matter...

...In comparing areas of high Jewish concentration with areas that are socio-economjcally similar, but with few or no Jews, striking differences appear on such matters as open housing, rights of migrant workers and rent control...

...Nor are Jews likely to feel much identification with the people who surround President Reagan...

...Moreover, there remains a surprisingly large number of Jews, particularly among the elderly, who are close to poverty—and they vote...

...California Jews are naturally affected by and respond to the same forces as other Californians...

...Interpretation of the 1980 figures depends on how one treats the Anderson vote...

...Americans were being held hostage in Iran...

...The Democratic Party is home to them...

...Initially, during the traditional three-month "honeymoon" period every new president enjoys, Jews gave the new president a generally favorable rating, albeit slightly lower than did other Americans...

...faced with a choice between a non-Jewish liberal Democrat and a Jewish conservative Republican, they went for the liberal...

...As a group, the Jews were near the top of the economic ladder 35 years ago, yet their liberalism has persisted, though slightly attenuated on economic issues...

...After those first months, however, Jewish assessments of Mr...

...Indeed, it is good...

...And then came 1980, the year (according to some observers) die Jews finally decided to vote their current interests rather than their earlier ideology...

...Indeed, from 1960 to 1980, Jews averaged between 77 and 79 percent Democratic in congressional elections—about 24 percentage points higher than the rest of the country, about 27 percentage points higher than other whites...

...And so it has been in California for the last 20 years...

...Blacks, the group most neglected by Reagan, gave Democratic candidates for Congress about 87 percent of their vote...

...Two states in 1982 allow us to test the "landsman phenomenon...

...76 percent of Jewish leaders think them friendly...

...There is, first, tradition...

...It turns out that Jewish conservatives, if they exist, must be . deviant...

...For all citizens, renouncing the party of birth is political apostasy...

...Second, in the current debate, Jews are not attracted to Mr...

...Why...

...Apart from voters' sentiment towards President Reagan, there is much to be learned directly from the congressional elections...

...Some obvious examples come to mind...

...today, Jews evince the same distribution of attitudes towards these institutions as other Americans...

...But, as the editor of this magazine has suggested, it is probably at least as good, and as important, that the Jews constitute a critical element in one of the major American political parties...

...Note: If the landsman hypothesis were correct, this would have been the ideal election for it to surface...

...And that will leave the Jews, again, in the Democratic camp, where they have felt most at home...

...Schulweis's observation of increasing ethnic insularity has been described by some observers as a kind of landsman vote—the tendency of Jewish voters to vote for Jewish candidates...

...Nationally, Democrats won 56 percent of the two-party vote...

...According to the most accurate estimates, based on seven major polls, the Jews gave Reagan 34 percent of their vote—about what they had given Nixon in 1972—while giving Carter 47 percent and John Anderson 17 percent...

...Back in 1972, a doomed George Mc-Govem, a moralistic preacher from the upper-Midwest widely thought to be sympathetic to the Palestinians, ran against the incumbent Richard Nixon, who had supplied Israel with critically needed arms...

...In 1983, the Chicago mayoral election pitted a black, Democrat Harold Washington, against a Jewish Republican...

...To argue that the circumstances encouraged such a choice is to understate the case...

...Jews are more burdened by memories of social, political and economic oppression than most others are...

...But Schulweis—and those who have added to his critique—are too perceptive to be completely wrong...

...In Massachusetts, they gave Kennedy more support than did the Catholics...

...Issues, styles, habits and beliefs: On all scores, the Jews remain overwhelmingly predisposed to stay relatively liberal, to stay Democratic...