Nate Silver makes a compelling case that, hype aside, Jewish voters aren’t all that much of a swing vote.
All this fuss seems to be misdirected. It is not as though Jewish voters make up an especially large share of the electorate. Just five percent of voters were Jewish in the 2004 elections in Florida, and they split their votes 80/20 for John Kerry, hardly qualifying them as the most unpredictable swing demographic. By comparison, atheists made up 11 percent of Florida’s electorate–but you can’t find any Atheists for Obama yard signs. Nor are there any mailers designed for, say, parakeet owners, or stay-at-home dads, who probably make up a comparably large fraction of the electorate.
So why so much fuss over Jews in Florida? I suspect it has a lot to do with the same reason there is so much focus on black anti-Semitism. Jews become a proxy for white folks when dealing with American racial tensions–while some white people may not feel entirely comfortable expressing the feeling that they are
intolerance Jews in America are a mostly white group that has a history of persecution, and therefore people get more comfortable getting angry on their behalf regarding “black anti-Semitism” when what they’re really reacting to is what they see as black anti-white racism. Yet, the tensions between Jews and blacks are somewhat overplayed–as Silver points out above, Jewish voting behavior is actually very similar to that of African-Americans, and what tension still exists is primarily a northeastern phenomenon. There are Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Not so many in Atlanta.
By the same token, we’ve seen racial tensions sloughed off on various white sub-groups the entire election, white working class voters in Ohio, West Virginia. So it’s not surprising that the media, which observes events mostly through the lens of non-Jewish whiteness, would want to press what is essentially a national problem onto Jews the same way they do onto white working class voters. I also suspect that wooing Jewish voters with hawkish positions on Israel is partially a cultural dogwhistle to conservative Christians, who are hawkish on Israel for their own reasons and seem to think Jews are motivated by little else.
–A. Serwer
