« "Pork and Beans" | Main | Canceling My Rainbow Party » A Chosen Drift23 May 2008 01:42 pm Looks like contra Jodi Kantor, Jewish voting behavior has been trending left over the past several cycles. It's curious, then, that The New York Times would run an article stating that "in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right." It's curious that the Times would report the facts wrong, but equally curious that the impression of a rightward shift is so widespread. Has there been an increase in the number of prominent Jewish conservatives, perhaps? Comments (36)
Matt asks: Has there been an increase in the number of prominent Jewish conservatives, perhaps? no, there's still a fairly small number. What the few Jewish conservatives have done is create an incestuous infrastructure that allows them to they have conservative think tanks that give awards to conservative opinion writers and vice versa. they make their own headlines and the beltway media types them up. 
AIPAC has considerable influence on the "village" idiots in the beltway punditocracy. Thus the erroneous "tilting right" meme/frame we keep hearing.
Maybe if prominent liberal Jews had Jewish names and not Cuban ones like Yglesias that would mitigate some of the confusion. And Cuban names which mean CHURCH for abraham's sake! Perhaps you can start writing under the pseudonym Matthew Yglasstein
Forgive me for posting the same thing over and over. Republicans have been predicting that their Israel policy would attract more Jewish votes since 1973, and it still hasn't happened. We are not idiots. The Democrats and Republicans both do more than enough for Israel. But there is a clear difference between the parties on separation of church and state here in America. The Republicans will never get our votes.
There has been an increase in conservative accusations of antisemitism hurled at liberals.
I get the sense that the Jewish "voice" one sees in the media is increasingly right-wing.
1) I'd like to see more data on the Congressional vote
This must be the reason the Times hired William Kristol -- to represent all the new right-wing Jews. Where they got that idea from, though, I'll never know.
Matt, do you even click through to look at the numbers? Sides claims a leftward drift from Dukakis forward to Kerry but I guess it depends on where you start counting "several cycles" 92 Bush - 11% Sides then cites a current poll showing McCain at 32%. So Republican percentages increasing = leftward drift?
...ermmm... oh! Your anti-semitism is so virulent and obvious that I have no need to say anything. My point is proven by your own words, which I need not repeat because they are anti-semitic, and that kind of repulsive bile begs only contempt. A Ha!
The myth of the rightward leaning Jewish vote over the Israel question is as persistent as it is easily debunked...my guess is the jewish vote will go for Obama at roughly the same rate it went for Kerry, like 70%. It all goes back to the totally fraudulent nature of any debate in this country over jews and Israel, the villagers only seem to know right-wing jews and the AIPAC crowd, so they report on them like they are the "voice" of the jewish community. Whether they're hawkish "appeasement" trolls on this website or elsewhere, who see shades of Munich everywhere, and despite lacking any real expertise on the subject are dead certain that Iran a)has nuclear weapons and b) will automatically use them to bring about the complete annihilation of Persian culture all for the sake of anti-Zionism...any voice of opinion on Israel or general Foreign policy that falls outside the hard right in both countries is deemed beyond the pale. It doesn't seem to matter that majority of jews in both this country and Israel are open to negotiation with Iran and its proxies, or Hamas. Its not like Israel isn't a regional super-power, it has the best army in the middle east, if not the world, and enough, you know, actual nukes to end all life in every single neighboring country, its hardly the tiny weakling in constant need of unconditional US support on everything that its made out to be. So basically, in this country the right wing jew is a tiny minority amid a tiny minority, but its still a group whose opinions are regarded as being indicative of the "mainstream" of thought in both this country and Israel.
that graph is percentage supporting the Democratic candidate. That doesn't necessarily mean a "leftward drift" if the Democratic candidates have themselves been drifting right, which is surely the case, no?
Forgive me for posting the same thing over and over. Republicans have been predicting that their Israel policy would attract more Jewish votes since 1973, and it still hasn't happened. Gary Sugar: please see Campesino's 2:54pm comment. My guess is the rise in Jewish support for the GOP in presidential elections may well have crested, but it'd undeniably been increasing over the last several cycles.
That doesn't necessarily mean a "leftward drift" if the Democratic candidates have themselves been drifting right, which is surely the case, no? Obama in 2008 is further to the right than Clinton in 1996? This is not "surely the case."
I did a paper on the Jewish vote a few years ago in College.It turns out that (shock of shock) Jewish Democrats tend to vote more for the Democrats that win in landslides like FDR and LBJ and vote less for Democrats that lose in landslides like Mondale.As for Bush geting more of the Jewish vote in 2004. Well with all the "Democrats like to makeout with Hamas" stuff going from 19 percent of the Jewish vote to 24 percent is not much of a big deal. I mean more Jews voted for Nixon! then Dubya.
Well with all the "Democrats like to makeout with Hamas" stuff going from 19 percent of the Jewish vote to 24 percent is not much of a big deal. No, but 11 percent to 24 percent -- which is what you get if you compare the more meaningful four cycle sample to the two cycle sample you've cherrypicked -- strikes me as fairly non-trivial. Certainly enough to decide a close election when every vote is precious in purple states like Florida and Ohio.
British novelist Ian Buruma surmised that the #1 cause of the Iraq War was "Jewish hysteria." Despite, the NIE report, the Baker-Hamilton Commission, ex-Centcom Commander Admiral Fallon, the debacle the War has turned out to be, and the 2/3 of the American public who want out of IRAQ...chances are better than even now that the ziocons will have their way and we will begin another "Shock and Awe" campaign of bunker-buster bombing Iran. Jewish hysteria will plunge us and the world further into the Abyss. So, it doesn't even matter whether this percentage of Jews is tilting left or right - although it's clearly right and McCain could well take 40-50% of the Jewish vote in the fall. Some other recent trends: 1. President Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize but Jewish groups slander him as a "Jew-hater" because of his moderate, reasoned criticism of Israel and on "The Tonight Show" - Jay Leno asks him if he's an "anti-Semite". 2. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice expresses some mild criticism of the non-stop Israeli settlement building and prominent Jewish groups begin calling her "The affirmative action piano player" as innumerable neocon Jew blogs begin calling her "Bush's Jew-hating shvatz cunt master". It never ends. It's putting every American man, woman, and child's life at risk. It's destroying our economy and plunging us into a Terrorist Revenge Hell we may never recover from. And, as Jewish hysteria sets in motion a new Mega-Holocaust for the world's 1 billion Muslims, we're arguing about whether or not Obama has lost Boynton Beach (Fla.).
It's curious, then, that The New York Times would run an article stating that "in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right." It's curious that the Times would report the facts wrong, but equally curious that the impression of a rightward shift is so widespread. My earlier comment used the numbers Sides claimed he found so easily and that supposedly supported his position. I guess the fact that Republican presidential candidates have increased their share of the Jewish vote by 218% between 1992 and 2004 (in a consistent upward trend) might account for the fact that "the impression of a rightward shift is so widespread". Doesn't appear that the Times was wrong at all
Actually, there was a slight increase in Jews voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004. Bush got 19% in 2000 and supposedly got 25% in 2004 (although if you look at the larger sample size of the exit poll for all the states, his Jewish total was only 22% in 2004). So, it's not incorrect to say Jews have been trending rightward in Presidential elections, but it's not much of a trend and it shouldn't be exaggerated. On the other hand, the 2002 to 2006 House cycles show a sharp move to the left by the Jewish vote, from 29% voting GOP in 2002 to 12% in 2006. However, the 2002 exit polling system aggregation software collapsed on Election Night so 2002 is almost forgotten, so it's hard to blame the NYT for not knowing about this. Only Ruy Texiera and I bought the 2002 exit poll data and crunched it ourselves. You can read about the 2002 demographics here: http://isteve.com/2002_election_exit_polls.htm In general, a simple model of Jewish voting trends in this decade would be that Jews were much stronger supporters in 2002 of invading Iraq than their traditional liberalism and Democratic Party-affiliation would predict. (The one late 2002 survey of Jews I found said that 59% supported the war, the same as the general population). But Jews wised up faster than most other groups about Iraq and thus returned to their traditional liberalism. (Of course, the top honor in figuring out that Iraq was a disaster fastest belongs to African-American voters.)
On the other hand, the longer term trend in Jewish Presidential voting is away from the GOP. As I wrote in January 2005: The Neoconservative Mirage: Bush's 22 percent share of the Jewish vote in 2004 is of course slightly better than the 19 percent he achieved in 2000. But then, John Edwards had replaced Joe Lieberman as the Democrat's VP nominee. So you'd expect a Republican to win back some conservative and moderate Jews who liked Lieberman. Compared to how well Republicans did from 1976 through 1988, when their share of the Jewish vote ranged from 31 percent to 39 percent, 22 percent is very bad. And, when you consider how much of the neoconservative invade-the-world-invite-the world foreign and immigration policies Bush adopted as his own, well, 22 percent is unbelievably awful. What this shows is that neoconservatives can make a big noise, but they can't deliver the vote. With Jews casting only 3 percent of all votes, the neoconservative vote comes out to only 2/3rds of one percent of the electorate. To put it in Texan terms the President ought to understand, the neoconservatives are all hat and no cattle. http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/050125_stomping.htm
Although it's difficult to prove a negative, I doubt that Ian Buruma (who is not primarily a novelist, having written one novel) ever made that comment about "Jewish hysteria." If Trevor has a link he should produce it. Here are some excepts from what Buruma wrote in the NYT Magazine in August 2003 in an article titled "How to Talk about Israel": There are several myths to be considered. The first is the idea that the American or the British government is dominated or manipulated by Jews. In fact, none of President Bush's cabinet members are Jewish, and the last time individual Jews played a prominent part in any British government was under John Major... What we see, then, is not a Jewish conspiracy, but a peculiar alliance of evangelical Christians, foreign-policy hard-liners, lobbyists for the Israeli government and neoconservatives, a number of whom happen to be Jewish... Not every demonstrator against Ariel Sharon's government or American imperialism is an anti-Semite, to be sure, but the ready identification of Jewish interests with the United States or, in the past, with Britain is old and loaded with prejudice... Trevor's last comment - that Jews are responsible for a "holocaust" against Muslims - is common anti-Semitism of the "Jews are Nazis" variety.
Bloix: First of all, the confluence of "Jews" with "Zionists" is incorrect. Numerous articles have appeared recently that indicate that most American Jews don't really care that much about Israel, despite politely showing support when asked in polls. Therefore, the issue has never been whether "Jews" are right wing or control America. Sharon was happy to say explicitly that "we Jews control America", but what he obviously meant by "we Jews" were the Zionist freaks in the neocon movement and the "Israel first" crowd at AIPAC. And while they don't actually "control America" in the absolute sense, they DO have far more influence than the lousy 3 percent population demographic of Jews in general would indicate. Mostly that influence is via money and hard lobbying of politicians - so much so that no US politician will willingly anger the AIPAC crowd. This is utterly beyond doubt, although since the publication of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and the disaster of Iraq which was hawked mightily by the AIPAC crowd and Israel, the dike appears to be cracking somewhat. As for "Jews are Nazis", no, Jews are not Nazis. Zionists of the sort who run Israel and support AIPAC (not the cuddly "classical Zionists" like MJ Rosenberg) ARE Nazis in all but name and uniforms. Their ideology is racist, imperialist, colonialist, and terrorist, exactly like National Socialism.
Author Ian Buruma's "jewish-American hysteria" link: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/17/usa.features11 and, Bloix, if Presidential candidate talk of "obliterate Iran" with no dissent is not Genocide. if all the ziocon calls to "NUKE IRAN!" "NUKE MECCA!" "NUKE SYRIA!" "NUKE LIBYA!" is not giving the go-ahead for a Mega-Holocaust...then, you need to stay away from politics and track back to J-Date.
Fifth Columnist Ziocon Lawrence Kaplan was pretty upset by Buruma's analysis too: Toxic Talk on War
Who is driving this rush to war in Iraq? A decade ago, on the eve of the last Persian Gulf War, conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan alleged that Israel and its "amen corner" were to blame. A media firestorm ensued, with condemnations pouring in from across the political spectrum. Now, on the eve of yet another Gulf war, Buchanan has revived the claim. Only this time a chorus of voices from the left, right and center has emerged to echo it. From the musty precincts of the Old Right, the contention that Israel and a powerful "cabal" of its American supporters have manufactured the present crisis with Iraq has become canonical. Buchanan, who writes that President Bush has become a client of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the "neoconservative war party," has transformed his new magazine, the American Conservative, into a regular forum for those who share this conviction. One of its contributors, University of Illinois history professor Paul W. Schroeder, deems it self-evident that the plan for an invasion "is being promoted in the interests of Israel." "Certainly it is being pushed very hard by a number of influential supporters of Israel of the hawkish neoconservative stripe in and outside the administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others)," Schroeder writes. Seconding this appraisal, conservative writer Georgie Anne Geyer, whose column appears weekly in the Washington Times, reveals how "the fanatic neoconservatives around the administration, the rabid Israel supporters in the White House and the Pentagon," plan to wage war in Iraq and then to "democratize the entire Middle East, including Syria and Saudi Arabia, if necessary by military means, in order to secure Ariel Sharon's Israel." Meanwhile on the left -- where many cannot fathom why, absent the urging of Israelis and their American co-religionists, the Bush administration would be so eager to topple Saddam Hussein -- the socialism of fools has been enjoying something of a vogue. Writing in the Nation, Jason Vest reports that the Bush team's "attack-Iraq chorus," working in tandem with "far-right American Zionists," subscribes to "articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests." The respected liberal intellectual Ian Buruma has managed to locate the reasons for a U.S. war against Iraq in, among other places, "Jewish-American hysteria" and the fact that "macho images of suntanned Jewish soldiers gathered round laughing tough guys such as Ariel Sharon wiped out, as it were, 2,000 years of being Woody Allen." Nor is this sort of fare the exclusive property of the political fringe. The ubiquitous talk-show host Chris Matthews pins blame for the impending war on "conservative people out there, some of them Jewish, who are very tough on foreign policy. They believe we should fight the Arabs and take them down. They believe that if we don't fight Iraq, Israel will be in danger." Matthews even thinks that Sharon is "writing [Bush's] speeches sometimes" and that Sharon's cabinet ministers are "in bed with the vice president's office and the Defense Department." Syndicated columnist Robert Novak has described the U.S conflict with Iraq as "Sharon's war," adding that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's branding of Hezbollah as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization suggests that "the U.S. war against terrorism, accused of being Iraq-centric, actually is Israel-centric." Twice in recent speeches, former senator Gary Hart has said that we "must not let our role in the world be dictated by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests." Does all this add up to an echo of Charles Lindbergh's charge that the clamor to wage war against Hitler was being stirred by "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration"? Not necessarily. How the Bush administration has arrived at the brink of war with Saddam Hussein, and to what extent Israeli influence has brought it there, is a legitimate question about which there is ample room for disagreement.
One should ask: why are Jews so much Democratic, given that many are affluent, and also many are suspicious of "Left attitudes toward Israel". I think that theocratic and nativist trends in GOP are largely to blame, with American Jews being non-Christian, with majority being not particularly religious, not homophobic, etc. "Sharon was happy to say explicitly that "we Jews control America", but what he obviously meant by "we Jews" were the Zionist freaks in the neocon movement and the "Israel first" crowd at AIPAC. And while they don't actually "control America" in the absolute sense, they DO have far more influence than the lousy 3 percent population demographic of Jews in general would indicate." My theory is that it so happens that Jewish neo-cons happen to include the most literate members of conservative establishment, in part because the less literate, but more powerful part of this establishment needs some folk to actually pen some articles, commentaries etc. to justify what those more powerful folks want to do. It is not like Rumsfeld and Cheney were deviously cajoled into something they would have no inclination of doing. Condoleeza Rice is a non-Jewish hireling with a similar job description.
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The Republicans, not a very bright crew to start with, think "Aha, the Jews are coming over to us at last." Dumbass WASPs, Hartford being only the first, are tremendously relieved that at last they can *truly* say "Some of my best friends are Jews." .
Piotr, oh, I absolutely AGREE that Rumsfeld and Cheney aren't neocons of the sort represented by AIPAC and other Israel first groups. I had this whole email argument with Arnold Evans about this. He is convinced it is all about Israel, while I argued that people like Cheney are strictly controlled by the desire for power and greed, war profiteering and US hegemony. That is why I disagree with Walt and Mearsheimer that the oil companies had no influence on the Iraq war. I think Greg Palast's research clearly shows they did, at least in terms of what the plan was for the Iraqi oil. Palast says the neocons wanted to use Iraqi oil to break OPEC, but the oil companies forced Bush to shut down that part of the Iraq plan. I think the "war profiteer" segment of all this had by far the most influence on US foreign policy, more so than the Israel Lobby. But there IS a huge "Israel first" component which influences a large number of neocons, as well as the morons in the Christian Zionist movement. I agree that the neocons are mostly the front men for those other groups, but the neocons are also using those groups to get what they want. And Israel is using all of them to get what it wants. And when it gets it, it will sell out the US in a heartbeat to the degree that it can. Those Israeli nukes aren't just for use against the Arabs. The day will come when Israel will use them as a deterrent to doing what the US wants when Israel and the US have a falling out. Israel has never hesitated to take vicious direct action against the US when needed - the USS Liberty incident, and the amount of spying the US does in the US clearly show that. I'm not saying Israel would ever threaten the US with nukes - that would be as ridiculous as Iran doing so. I'm saying the fact that Israel could threaten to use nukes against other nations in the ME could be used as a deterrent against the US. A fictional example would be the scene in the movie "The Soldier" where the Israeli cabinet, on being informed that the US intends to throw Israel off the West Bank due to the threat of a terrorist nuclear weapon detonation, orders a full scale nuclear attack on the Saudi oil fields. That was fiction - but it points out exactly how Israel having nuclear weapons is a disaster for everybody - far more so than Iran. What happened in Iraq is that a group of assholes came together in a "perfect storm of assholery" to cause that war: neocons, right wing Republicans, Zionists in the US and Israel, oil companies, war profiteering corporations, politicians like Clinton - even nitwits like Matt who didn't know better. Trying to pin down who exactly had the most influence to the nearest percentage point is like trying to measure how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's irrelevant - they're all guilty.
LOL
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Trevor= you link to a Buruma article in which he writes (in 2002), "some US columnists reacted to anti-semitic vandalism in several European countries by breaking out in hysterics...At no time and in no place have Jews been safer than in America today. Perhaps that is why the rest of the world, in contrast, appears so menacing. Jewish-American hysteria is a form of deep parochialism." But you say he said that "Jewish hysteria" was the #1 cause of the Iraq War". You are a liar, which is no surprise. And writing in capital letters is just shouting, which is not very persuasive.
Bloix, aimai
Given that Jodi Kantor was writing about the presidential election cycles, she was more certainly correct in stating that the Jewish vote has trended rightward. As Matt Yglesias argues the opposite, and as his erroneous reading of the data has been picked up by Delong and others, it might be nice to see a quick correction to the record, non?
Given that Jodi Kantor was writing about the presidential election cycles, she was more certainly correct in stating that the Jewish vote has trended rightward. As Matt Yglesias argues the opposite, and as his erroneous reading of the data has been picked up by Delong and others, it might be nice to see a quick correction to the record, non?
Given that Jodi Kantor was writing about the presidential election cycles, she was more certainly correct in stating that the Jewish vote has trended rightward. As Matt Yglesias argues the opposite, and as his erroneous reading of the data has been picked up by Delong and others, it might be nice to see a quick correction to the record, non?
92 Bush - 11% Margin vs. how those candidates did in the general election: 92: -26 If Jews are voting more Republican than in the past, but less more Republican than Americans as a whole, that's not a rightward trend. Not surprisingly, candidates who won drew a higher percentage of the Jewish vote than those who tied or lost.
Comments closed June 06, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
No, just a decrease in the quality of journalism.
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | May 23, 2008 1:57 PM