THE JEWISH VOTE

A national exit poll reported by CNN shows U.S. Jews favoring Sen. John Kerry over President Bush by 76 percent to 24 percent.


Gore Jewish Voters Choose Bush - Janine Zacharia (Jerusalem Post)
"From our exit sampling, very strong support for Kerry. But strikingly, a fairly significant number of Jews switching from Gore in 2000 to Bush, somewhere in the order of 12-13%," said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, after examining a tiny sampling of 200 Jewish voters in five battleground states. Bush won 19% and Gore 80% of the Jewish vote in 2000, according to exit polling. Harris said that nearly all voters who switched from Gore to Bush "identified either Israel or terrorism (and) 9/11 as the first reason for their decision." AJC also separately polled 370 Russian Jews in New York and Philadelphia, where at least 75% said they were voting for Bush, citing his Israel stance and his strong leadership in the war on terrorism.

Despite Republicans' best efforts,Jews still vote strongly Democratic By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 (JTA) -- The past four years have seen a defining terrorist attack, a divisive war and a radically different economy, but at the ballot box, it seemed, not much had changed: Election night produced pretty much the same electoral map, pretty much the same angry, polarized nation and pretty much the same anxious obsession with a single state and how it counts its ballots.

And Jews, for their part, voted pretty much the way they did four years ago. Expectations that Republicans would make inroads into decades of Jewish support for the Democratic Party ran into a wall of Jewish votes for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic candidate.

President Bush’s unprecedented closeness to Israel and his reputation for toughness on terrorism did little to shake the traditional 3-1 Jewish break for Democrats.

Two national exit polls showed that Bush gained only slightly more than the 19 percent of the Jewish vote he scored in 2000: One, from the Associated Press, split Kerry-Bush 77 percent to 23 percent; another, from CNN, went 76 percent to 24 percent. A phone poll by pollster Frank Luntz in Florida and Ohio, two battleground states, split the vote 72 percent to 25 percent in Kerry’s favor, suggesting that the Bush campaign’s blitz in those states in the final days might have had a small degree of success.

But local networks said both Florida and New York split the Jewish vote 80 for Kerry, 20 for Bush. Despite the unprecedented resources — by both campaigns – devoted to swaying the Jewish vote, in the end, it was doubtful that Jewish voters played a central role in determining the outcome in any of the swing states.

Jewish wins, Jewish losses
Congress will say goodbye to one of its most prominent Jewish members, but will say hello to two new Jewish women. Other incumbents won easy re-election Tuesday in races of import to the Jewish community, but several Jewish hopefuls lost their bids.