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02/06/2008

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Jewish Vote Eclipsed By Hispanics

Sen. Hillary Clinton fared far better with Hispanic voters on Super Tuesday than did Sen. Barack Obama. Photos by Getty Images

Sen. Hillary Clinton fared far better with Hispanic voters on Super Tuesday than did Sen. Barack Obama. Photos by Getty Images

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

A California Jewish newspaper dubbed it the “Jewish primary,” but the Super Tuesday contest in California might be more accurately called the Hispanic primary. And California wasn’t alone — in a number of states, a surging Hispanic population is poised to play an unprecedented role in the 2008 presidential election and beyond.

Jewish leaders have been slow to recognize a seismic shift in the political landscape that also includes a black electorate galvanized by the Barack Obama phenomenon and a growing Asian community, some activists say — although political strategists in both parties are already factoring it into their planning.

“This year’s elections will be a wake up call for a lot of people,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder and president of the Foundation

for Ethnic Understanding, a group that forges alliances with Hispanic and other ethnic groups.

While Rabbi Schneier said Jewish political clout is not on the endangered species list, it will in the future depend heavily on alliances with newly ascendant ethnic groups.

“It is clear Jewish organizations will have to concentrate many more resources in the direction of intergroup relations,” he said. “It’s a new United States, a new America, but I see in this newness great opportunities for the Jewish community.”

The 2008 presidential contest — and the Super Tuesday results — put a bright spotlight on those changes.

“Hispanics were the difference between a good night and a bad night for Hillary Clinton,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “They delivered the big prize of California and also Arizona.”

While Jewish votes were hardly irrelevant and Jewish campaign money remains critical in 2008, “if you look at the states where the Jews have the largest concentration of votes, nobody’s really talking about the Jews now,” said Colby College political scientist L. Sandy Maisel.

“In many ways, Jews have been reduced to donors. As a voting bloc, they’ve really been marginalized, at least in the primary process,” Maisel said.

One big reason is that other minorities, rising in both numbers and political involvement, are coming into their own, he said.

Predictable Outcomes

Nationally, the Super Tuesday results were much as the polls predicted: another boost to John McCain’s frontrunner status on the Republican side, enough of a boost for both Democratic contenders — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — to keep the nomination race tight.

Clinton took the biggest prizes — New York and California — but Obama won 13 states to Clinton’s eight, with the two candidates about even in the critical fight for convention delegates.

On the Republican side, McCain scored wins in nine states, including electoral powerhouses like New York and California where GOP “winner take all” rules provided a rich harvest of delegates.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, propelled by Evangelical Christians, revived his campaign with victories in five Southern states and former Gov. Mitt Romney picked off seven, but they fell further behind McCain in the delegate sweepstakes.

McCain is the Republican considered to have the best chance to win a modest share of the Jewish vote; Huckabee is the Republican Jewish Democrats would most like to run against.

Despite a viral Internet campaign against him targeting Jewish voters with rumors of Muslim leanings and comments by some Jewish and Israeli leaders questioning his pro-Israel commitment, Barack Obama scored modest successes with Jewish voters (see full results and exit polls here ), but Hillary Clinton seemed to have the edge.

Clinton took 65 percent of the Jewish vote in her home state of New York and 63 percent in neighboring New Jersey, according to exit polls. She won in California by a slim 48-44 percent margin and in Arizona 51-44. But Obama took the Jewish vote in Connecticut 61-33 percent and Massachusetts, 52-48.

An Obama campaign official said on Tuesday “we were very pleased by the strong vote in the Jewish community,” but Clinton backers had a little more to crow about.
In the overall electorate, analysts say Clinton emerged from the Super Tuesday free for all with a slight advantage.

“What hits me when looking at the overall patterns — Jewish voting aside — is that Obama tends to win in places that will never go Democratic, like Alabama and Georgia, or places that will go Democratic regardless, like Connecticut,” said University of Florida political scientist Ken Wald.

Clinton, on the other hand, is doing best in places the Democrats must win to capture the Electoral College in November, he said, including California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and in some southern swing states like Tennessee and Arkansas.

“Clinton’s combination of downscale voters, Latinos, seniors and women is a tough combination to beat overall,” said political scientist Sabato. “Obama is heading for more favorable states the rest of February but he can’t afford any setbacks. And he needs to crack Ohio in early March.”

On the Republican side, the Jewish vote in most states — including New York and New Jersey — was too small for breakdowns by candidate.

Few Jews In Exit Polls

But the real ethnic story on Super Tuesday was a super Hispanic and African American turnout in some states.

In California, Hispanics constituted 29 percent of the Democratic primary vote, Jews only 5 percent; on the Republican side, Hispanics were 14 percent of the vote, Jews a tiny 2 percent — not enough, even, for exit poll breakdowns.

In Illinois, blacks and Hispanics together constituted 39 percent of the Democratic vote; Jews barely registered in the exit polls.

A Democratic strategist said that Jews may have voted in their usual disproportionate numbers in that state — but Obama, the hometown favorite, prompted huge turnouts among other groups, as well. African American turnout was 23 percent, and they gave Obama 94 percent of their votes; Hispanics comprised 16 percent of the Illinois Democratic total.

That shrank the Jewish vote to relative invisibility, a harbinger of the new age of ethnic politics.

On Tuesday, Jewish, black and Hispanic voters shared a strong affinity for the Democratic Party — Jews and African Americans by long tradition, Hispanics, in part, in response to anti-immigrant rhetoric on the part of many Republican candidates.

But Hispanic voters were more consistent in their support for Clinton over Obama, and their numbers proved far more significant in several key states.

While Jews turned out in force to give Clinton a big New York victory, Hispanic voters did even better, giving Clinton 73 percent of their votes.

Latinos and Jews were only 4 percent each of the GOP vote in New York, too small a number for statistical breakdowns between the candidates.

Latinos were a whopping 19 percent of the electorate in the Democratic primary in Arizona, giving Clinton a 53-44 percent victory; Jews comprised 5 percent of the Democratic vote there, favoring Clinton 51-44.

While nobody is predicting a precipitous drop in Jewish political muscle, those numbers — and demographic trends that mean the impact of other ethnic groups will continue to soar — represent a watershed in American politics and a huge challenge to Jewish leaders.

“It’s more than this election — it’s the reality of the new United States,” said Rabbi Schneier of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. “You have demographers forecasting that within 50 years, Latinos, African-Americans and Asian Americans will constitute a majority in this country. What is the Jewish community, two percent? That is the new reality.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean a crisis for Jewish politics, he said, because Jews “tend to be concentrated in major states like New York, Florida, California, Massachusetts and Illinois,” and because Jewish campaign money will continue to be a huge factor in both parties.

Other analysts point out that while African-American turnout has been high this year because of growing support for Obama, it has traditionally lagged; some speculate the Obama-driven surge could prove ephemeral, as did the higher levels of black voting when Jesse Jackson ran for president in the 1980s.

And the Hispanic population, while huge, is hardly a unified bloc; Cubans in Florida tend to vote differently from Puerto Ricans in New York or Mexicans in Los Angeles.

Still, some Jewish leaders say the rising tide of Hispanic and Asian voters and a big African American electorate that may be energized by candidates like Obama demand changes by the Jewish establishment.

Big Jewish organizations talk a lot about their relations with the Latino community, said Daniel Sokatch, director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance in California, but there is little give and take with the organizations representing a majority of the emerging Hispanic population.

“What’s been at play is the expectation that these communities should come through for us, but no recognition of the need for us to come through for them,” he said.

When Hispanics held marches in Los Angeles supporting immigrant rights, most local Jewish groups declined to participate, he said.

“Until that changes, we’re not going to really build relations with these newly important communities.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization