Dead Heat Among Jewish Dems

Poll finds support evenly divided between Obama and Clinton, but many would choose McCain if their favorite isn’t nominated.

Barack Obama, left, seems to have weathered the controversy over his pastor and emerged relatively unscathed with Jewish voters in his battle against Hillary Clinton. photos by Getty Images

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

Despite a furious rumor campaign linking him to Islamic causes, charges that he is soft on support for Israel and the controversy over a black nationalist pastor he calls a mentor, Sen. Barack Obama has made serious inroads with Jewish Democrats, according to data released by Gallup this week that shows him in a virtual tie with Sen. Hillary Clinton in the race for Jewish votes.
The two new polls also contain hints that the extended, bitter primary fight between Barack and Sen. Hillary Clinton may help Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the fall, since many Clinton supporters and some Obama backers say they would jump to the GOP if their candidate is not the nominee.
A Gallup official said the new

data, which shows Obama with a slight lead over Clinton nationally, suggests the Democratic presidential contender has largely recovered from the flap over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose anti-American tirades have been endlessly replayed on YouTube and lambasted by the Democratic contender’s political opponents.
“The Jeremiah Wright controversy did not seem to have a lasting impact,” said Frank Newport, the Gallup editor in chief.
Clinton received a momentary bounce from the Wright controversy and the pastor’s longstanding connection to Obama, Newport said, “but she was not able to sustain it. Whether there is a lasting impact, of course, is unknown, but in terms of the short term impact on our tracking data, it’s back to the point where Obama is slightly ahead.”
But a leading political scientist said that the poll does not measure the real danger posed by the Wright controversy: its impact on independents and Republicans who might be tempted to cross the line.
“Yes, Democrats don’t care much about Wright in most respects,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “But independents and Republicans have a very different view, at least while Wright is in the news.”
And the Republicans have made it very clear they will do their best to make sure that happens.
Newport also described a neck-and-neck race for the Democratic nomination in which neither candidate is able to “close the deal” with Democratic voters. “Democrats nationally cannot seem to coalesce around one candidate or the other.”
Clinton has held on despite projections that it will be difficult for her to win the number of delegates needed for the nomination, he said. Obama, while largely recovering from the Wright controversy, has not been able to parlay the growing feeling that his nomination is inevitable into a big surge in the polls.
In the new Gallup poll of 368 Jewish Democrats taken in mid-March, respondents showed a “slight preference” for Sen. Hillary Clinton, who beat Obama by a 48-43 percent margin. But Clinton’s lead is within the survey’s six-point margin of error.
The Jewish numbers may not fully reflect the impact of the Wright controversy, since they represent an agglomeration of polls intended to create a bigger sample size, Newport said. Some of the data was collected before the Wright controversy exploded onto the nation’s front pages.
While the Clinton-Obama race is a near draw among Jewish Democrats, Clinton is ahead with Catholic Democrats, leading by almost 20 points. Among Democratic voters who are Protestant, Obama leads by a hair – but that figure “hides a deep racial gap,” according to Gallup, with Clinton leading by 20 points among white Protestants but Obama holding a 45 point lead among nonwhite Protestant Democrats.
Among Democrats with no religious preference, Obama is a 54-30 percent winner, and an even bigger winner among those who profess a religion other than Judaism or Christianity.
In a sign of how polarized the Democratic Party has become as the primary battle drags on, “a not insignificant proportion of Democrats say they would vote for McCain if their candidate is not the nominee,” Newport said.
Clinton supporters are more likely to jump the Democratic ship if their candidate loses the nomination fight, he said, with 28 percent saying they would vote for McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee, 59 percent saying they would stick with the Democrats and vote for Obama.
“Obama supporters are a little more loyal to the party,” he said, with 72 percent saying they would vote for Clinton if she is the nominee.
“But still, 19 percent said they would vote for McCain” if Obama fails to win the nomination, he said.
There were no breakdowns indicating whether Jewish Democrats differed from the broader sample in terms of party loyalty as the nomination fight slogs on.
Newport said some Democrats might “return to the roost” when they go to vote in November.
“We don’t know the relationship between what they say now and what will happen in November, but it does suggest that are some interesting and perhaps important fissures in the Democratic Party, and that the continuing fractious fight between Obama and Clinton doe have the potential to have some negative impact,” he said.
Overall, he said, McCain is “blown out of the water” by both Obama and Clinton in the race for the general election, since Jewish voters are predominantly Democratic.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization