Ben Smith has the exit poll numbers:
For all the ink and money spilled on McCain's hopes of making inroads into the Jewish vote, exit polls suggest Obama won the demographic by a margin even higher than John Kerry's, and like Al Gore's and Bill Clinton's.
The exits currently have it at 78 percent to 21 percent.
I am not surprised. All the talk about Jews not voting for Obama, or the belief that the Jewish people would be easily manipulated rather than offended by cheap political appeals to the Shoah was astounding, and largely a function of the disproportionate number of Jews in punditry who are right wing and do not represent the mainstream opinions of Jewish Americans. If Republicans actually want to win Jewish votes, they're going to have to talk about things that Jews care about, not simply send out mailers warning of a second Holocaust or that Israel might be destroyed.
But as with Latinos and blue collar whites, the belief that Jews might not vote for a black guy was always projection, a way to deal with the anxiety that Americans in general might not vote for Obama based on race, by shoveling the responsibility onto ethnic subgroups. The Right simply does not comprehend the cultural context of Jewish Americans, who could never find the racial tensions of the 60s as frightening as the neo-McCarthyism of the past year. We are too used to seeing people attacked and demonized for their beliefs to fall so easily into the trap of buying it when done to others. Many of us have uncles, aunts, grandparents who were communists or socialists, who were blacklisted, who fought to unionize, who fought segregation, who marched on Washington.
It was never going to happen. Certainly not after McCain nominated a vice presidential candidate whose Christianist philosophy is so obvious. Millions of Jews died so that Jews could be Jews. They're not going to vote for someone who thinks government should make our religious choices for them. That's why we came here, remember?
--A.Serwer
