Realignment of the Jewish Vote?

Abstract

The Jewish vote has long been of concern to national political managers because of the strategic location of the Jews in metropolitan areas of states with considerable electoral impact and because of high electoral participation. Since the development of survey research students of politics have had a more precise means to monitor the Jewish vote, although general ethnic voting patterns have been discernible for many decades. All of the early surveys found the Jews to be strongly liberal and Democratic. The consistency of this liberalism over a twenty-year period, in spite of demographic characteristics which normally lead to conservative, Republican sympathies, suggested an almost inborn Jewish affinity for liberalism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, as a result of some important racial and political developments, a number of observers close to and even within the Jewish community-the insiders-noted the breakdown of Jewish liberalism and of the tie with the Democratic party. Dissemination of these observations was sufficiently widespread to convince people that change had occurred. But the observations were made by people with limited access to systematically collected data.Examination of this evidence will show that theories of increasing conservatism and erosion of Jewish liberalism are premature. The Jews were not always liberal Democrats-in part because the Democrats were not always liberal, in part because of the composition of the Jewish community. The first American Jews, descended primarily from the Sephardic community of Holland, had become a respectable, middle-class, propertied community by the period of American independence. There is clear evidence of