Demographics and Decisions: Projecting the Jewish Vote in 2016
Why do Jews Vote Overwhelmingly Democratic?
Ahead of Passover, Dr. Leonard Saxe—director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, both at Brandeis University—cites the holiday as the orienting story of Judaism that explains the Jewish voting mentality.
Jews, Saxe told JNS.org, “have always been a group concerned about the general social welfare, because we were the objects of discrimination and prejudice, the target of the horrific actions of the Nazis. We’ve always been social-liberal and that’s been associated in this country with the Democratic Party.”
Sheskin argued that the Republican Party has shifted a great deal to the right over the last 20 years. He said it used to be “possible to be kind of liberal on issues like birth control and abortion, and the death penalty, and then be conservative on economics and be a Republican. It is very difficult to do that today.”
Another reason Jews lean Democrat, he said, is that they “are very pro-science.” For example, many Jews support the scientific consensus on climate change and may dislike when Republican candidates commonly deflect that issue on the grounds that they aren’t scientists.
What does this mean for the primary and general elections? Pew’s 2013 survey showed that 30 percent of Jewish voters described themselves as moderates. Saxe believes, therefore, that most Jewish voters are likely to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
Sanders—a Jew himself—may be alienating some Jewish voters with his critical stance on Israel’s actions during its 2014 war with Hamas. In a recent interview with the New York Daily News editorial board, Sanders said that Israel launched “indiscriminate” attacks against the residents of Gaza in 2014, and inflated the number of Palestinian civilian deaths in the war at least sevenfold to 10,000. The Sanders presidential campaign also hired Simone Zimmerman, an outspoken critic of Israeli government policies, as its Jewish outreach coordinator. The campaign later suspended Zimmerman over her profanity-laced social media posts about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
