November 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — Exit polls Tuesday night showed President-elect Barack Obama garnering 78 percent of the Jewish vote against 22 percent for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his Republican rival.
For months, polls showed Obama languishing with about 60 percent of the Jewish vote, a critical chunk short of the 75 percent or so that went to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004.
Democrats said the results demonstrated an overwhelming Jewish rejection of efforts to paint their party and its standard-bearer as weak on Jewish interests.
“I’m ecstatic by the outcome and the confidence the Jewish community showed Obama in the teeth of some of the nastiest campaigning I’ve ever seen,” said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “People got a chance in the last three months to see Barack Obama and the idea that they should be afraid or frightened didn’t wash.”
Forman was referring to waves of Internet rumors, talk-show chatter, and semi-legitimate and then legitimate forums that often combined guilt by association with false information — for example, that Obama was a Muslim. The negative campaign often obscured a more serious debate over Obama’s approach to foreign policy, while it glossed over Obama’s deep ties in the Chicago Jewish community and how he has picked a preeminently pro-Israel foreign policy team.
Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said his organization’s anti-Obama ads raised legitimate questions about Obama’s judgment and had an effect: Obama was outpolling Kerry among Jews by only about 2 percent, he said, whereas he was doing much better than Kerry had among other constituencies, including Catholics, blacks, and Hispanics.
“This is a huge political tsunami that has hit Republicans across the board,” Brooks said, referring to the economic crisis that helped precipitate Obama’s win on Tuesday.
“It’s a testament to McCain that we’ve done as strongly as we have to hold onto our support,” he said, noting that Obama’s Jewish results lagged slightly behind showings for Al Gore in 2000 and for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
Brooks said he stood by his group’s ad campaign. “There’s no reason for regrets,” he said. “We had an important and meaningful debate in the community.”
Key to Obama’s effort were waves of Jewish surrogates — chief among them U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) — who blanketed Jewish communities in swing states in the campaign’s final weeks. Wexler had been on board with the Obama campaign from the outset. A number of other surrogates who had been loyal to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) added weight to the campaign once she conceded the primaries race over the summer.
“I’ve never seen a presidential campaign so well-organized in the Jewish community,” Forman said, referring to the Obama outreach effort.
Some Democrats said McCain, once popular among Jews because of his willingness to reach across the aisle, hurt himself in the community by choosing the deeply conservative and relatively inexperienced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
An American Jewish Committee poll commissioned in September found that 54 percent of American Jews disapproved of the Palin pick, compared to just 15 percent who disapproved of Obama’s decision to tap Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).
But Obama’s appeal to Jews might have been most deeply rooted in shared values, said Mik Moore of JewsVote.org.
“Folks just wanted to be with us, with the more progressive candidate; it’s where their heart is,” he said.
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