With the bombastic and hawkish "pro-Israel" rhetoric streaming from the mouths of the GOP candidates, some worry that swaths of Jewish voters may abandon President Obama in the 2012 election. However, the only problem Obama has with Jewish voters is not that they will abandon him. It's that there aren't enough of them.
Such was the argument offered at this morning's J Street conference by Jim Gerstein – a long-time strategic consultant in Middle East peace efforts and progressive political campaigns. Gerstein offered that Israel's place as an election wedge issue is greatly exaggerated, and that the President's standing among Jewish voters is solid despite claims to the contrary.
And there's data to back him up. A recent Pew study, which made headlines when it indicated waning support amongst American Jews for Democrats, still showed Jews' alignment with the Democratic Party to be a whopping 36 points higher than their alignment with the GOP. While this was a decline from the 52 point advantage Democrats saw in 2008, Jews have traditionally out-performed their Democratic polling numbers when set before the ballot box.
Gallup found at the close of 2011 that Jewish support for President Obama was 13 points higher than the national average (54 percent approved of his performance, compared to 41 percent nationally). Gallup also found that any changes in support amongst Jews were proportional to overall national changes.
Why is this significant? While Jews make up just two percent of the U.S. population, they (or should I say we?) make up between four and five percent of the electorate in such battleground states as Pennsylvania and Florida.
This is also significant because as the GOP candidates continue to try and make Israel/Iran a major foreign policy wedge issue (as I wrote about last week), Obama's campaign staff would do well to consider whether or not it needs to match the GOP's rhetoric on Iran and Israel.
In other words: Obama doesn't need to lean to the right of the Israeli public (which overwhelmingly is against a strike against Iran), nor does he need to lean to the right of most American Jews.
He should lean towards promoting a two-state solution, and toward seeking a diplomatic solution with Iran on its nuclear program – toward his stated Middle East foreign policy goals.
When Romney and Santorum lean so far right on the question of Israel, falling over themselves to court the Jewish vote, that they fall off the stage entirely, Obama should simply watch them tumble and laugh.
Not fall over with them.
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Author's Note:
To put things in perspective, here's Gerstein in 2010:
Here we go again. As Israelis and Palestinians resume direct peace talks, misinformed pundits and Republicans with an agenda are busy forecasting a Jewish revolt against Democrats in an upcoming election. While a Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer organization runs attack ads against Democrats who “joined an assault on Israel” by signing a letter favoring aid to Gaza, The New York Times’ Charles Blow writes that President Barack Obama isn’t “good for the Jews.” We’ve heard this sort of “oy vey” attack and analysis before. The attacks haven’t worked in the past, and the analysis is still wrong.
In 2004, a minority of vocal Republican Jews argued that President George W. Bush was such a “good friend of Israel” that American Jews would abandon the Democrats to reelect him. John Kerry received 74 percent of the Jewish vote.
In 2008, the argument moved from Republican greatness to Jewish worry over Obama’s “secret Muslim identity” and an anti-Israel vision antithetical to American Jews. The right wing spread vicious e-mail smears through Jewish inboxes everywhere and ran ads conflating Obama with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The return on investment? Obama got 78 percent of the Jewish vote — virtually the same as Al Gore received with an Orthodox Jew on the ticket eight years earlier, when Gore and Joe Lieberman received 79 percent of the Jewish vote.