This morning, senior fellow of the American Freedom Alliance and fellow in American studies at the Claremont Institute Larry Greenfield spoke with Breitbart News about the rising pro-Romney sentiment in the Jewish community. The American Jewish community has long been considered a bellweather for national elections; with population centers in battleground states like Florida and Ohio, the Jewish community has outsized influence on presidential elections in particular.
“The Jewish vote went for President Obama by 78-22 percent over Senator McCain in 2008, consistent with previous election cycles,” said Greenfield. “Only President Reagan, running against Jimmy Carter, managed to keep the Jewish vote under 50% for the Democrats, in 1980.” But Greenfield is more optimistic about the Jewish community’s voting pattern this year – he says he expects about 35 percent of the Jewish vote to go to Mitt Romney.
Why? Greenfield explained that the demographics of the Jewish community are changing; older, less religious Jews are dying off, and younger less religious Jews are having less children. Consequently, the Jewish population is becoming more observant overall – and Orthodox Jews vote heavily Republican. “Exit polls are notoriously inaccurate and do not well measure Orthodox, Russian, Israeli, and Persian Jews,” Greenfield stated.
Greenfield acknowledged that much of the Jewish tendency to vote Democratic springs from historic conflicts with European Christianity. But as he said, “Jews are admired in the US. It is time they grew beyond coalition with the liberal-left, which does not generally like religious Americans or Israel, and made friends with today’s center-right America, with which they have much in common as decent, patriotic, and rational observers of our common enemies, radical leftism and radical Islam.”
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