J-Street poll also finds support for nuclear deal with Iran and an active U.S. role in peace process but also for Israeli operation in Gaza. IT ALSO FINDS THAT 47% APPROVE OF THE US PRESSURING ISRAEL. THAT’S WAY TOO HIGH.
Despite widespread public dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama, American Jewish voters did not significantly stray from previous voting patterns in this week’s mid-term elections and favored Democrats over Republicans by a 69%-28% margin, according to a new poll released on Wednesday.
The phone survey of 800 Jewish voters who actually cast a ballot on Tuesday was commissioned by J Street and carried out by Jim Gerstein of Gerstein, Bocian, Agne Strategies. It found potentially widespread support for a nuclear agreement with Iran and for a more active American role in the peace process. According to the poll, American Jews are somewhat critical of settlements in the territories but overwhelmingly supported Operation Protective Edge in Gaza; their attitude towards Prime Minister Netanyahu is more favorable than to most other American political personalities.
According to the poll, the top two issues that were important to American Jews in deciding their vote on Tuesday were the economy (44%) and health care (31%). Terrorism was named by 17%, ISIS by 13% and Israel by only 8%. Only 10% listed education as one of their two primary concerns.
The poll found that American Jews have a much better opinion of Obama’s handling of his job than the general public: his approval rating among Jews is 57%, compared to about 42% among Americans in general. But American Jews share the popular disdain for Congress, with only 18% approving of the way it’s doing its job.
The poll shows that while Republicans invariably predict a seismic shift in Jewish voting patterns, it usually fails to materialize: the voting percentages of Jews in Tuesday’s ballot closely resemble those of the 2012 presidential election. As of today, the poll shows that the situation would remain the same if Hillary Clinton was the Democratic candidate for president in 2016: Clinton would beat former Florida governor Jeb Bush 69%-24% and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul 71%-22%.
These numbers are also reflective of the basic self-definition of the respondents: 59% said that they think of themselves as Democrats (41% strong, 18% weak) with another 9% saying that they were independents who “lean” Democratic. Only 15% of the Jews defined themselves as Republican, and another 6% as Republican-leaning independents. 19% said they hold conservative views, 36% moderate, 36% liberal and 9% progressive.
Perhaps the most surprising finding of the poll is the support for a nuclear agreement with Iran that would restrict uranium enrichment to civilian purposes only and place inspectors at Iran’s nuclear facilities in exchange for a reduction of sanctions: 84% of American Jews said they would support such a deal, strongly or somewhat.(BUT THAT DEAL ISN’T HAPPENING)
In findings that were likely to please J-Street itself, the poll found that 85% of American Jews would support an “active” American role in trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. 73% would support U.S. pressure of both sides to the conflict (the poll speaks of “Arabs”, not “Palestinians”) but only 47% would approve of pressure on Israel “to make the compromises necessary to achieve peace.”
80% of respondents said they support a two-state solution. Presented with details of a theoretical peace agreement closely resembling the so-called “Clinton Parameters,” 67% said they would support such a plan and only 24% said they would oppose it. 77% said they would support an American presentation of such parameters to both sides of the conflict.
28% of those polled said Israel should suspend all settlement activity in the West Bank, and another 52% said that it should do so only outside “core settlement blocs.” Some 20% said that Israel should continue to build throughout the West Bank. 40% said Netanyahu’s policies have hurt relations with the U.S., 21% say they have helped and another 40% said Netanyahu’s actions have made no difference. 80% said they approve of Israel’s military operation in Gaza during the summer.
The poll asked respondents to rate their feelings of warmth towards various personalities and institutions on a scale of 0-100, and the results, in descending order of their mean score were: Netanyahu (61), Jon Stewart (58), Clinton (57), Democratic Party (51), Barack Obama (49), Malcolm Hoenlein (45), Sheldon Adelson (28), Republican Party (28), John Boehner (25) and the newly elected and soon to be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (24).
NormanF Said:
If it sucked, they would stop sucking !!!!!!!!!!! Darlin
comment to Norman spammed out. Pls retrieve and post.
@ NormanF:
Tell you story. My wife’s parents at least her mother were committed and believing socialists. They lived on a Kibbutz almost their entire adult life. In all the years they refused to question or see the inequity and inequality of the Kibbutz system were the strongest and fittest ruled. Lord and slaves actually by the time it came to put the system to a test on a personal plane the Kubbutz failed them.
After 50 years of faith and belief in an ideology and system they could never admit to themselves that their lives of self sacrifice for the cause was a lie, they knew but could never admit it.
So are American Liberal Jews…
American Jews are liberal… with the exception of Orthodox Jews.
As a conservative, I’m not bothered by it. Most Americans know full well Obama needed to be stopped.
American Jews know he hates them and Israel but they don’t care. Sucks to be them.
@ yamit82:
Loki is up>>>> I must go rake leaves.
Try to explain what happens in sequence can you get into the site for comments but they won’t let you post or you can’t get into comments at all? after you type press enter down space below the text and it might work.
Try rebooting your computer if nothing else works were you given a message… Same thing happened to be and i figured it out .
@ yamit82:
Seems to be the sever !!!!!!!!!! I tried everything I know, which ain’t much.
@ honeybee:
Sign out and sign back in.
yamit82 Said:
Yes, no go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
Have you tried linking to another author? or Just Hitting logo yamit82 which will essentially reboot the site?
@ honeybee:
Why are you on anti-biotitics?? I can’t Mr. Clemmons at all. I miss talking to him to you have his e-mail. Don’t know what the problem is, and I hate to drive into town to the Geek squad.
@ honeybee:
Must be catchy mine crashed and it took me an hour to get it back up. Stitches out slight infection now on antibiotics 🙁
yamit82 Said:
You’re in a mood, Darlin Send some of that brio to my computer which has been acting up all morning.
BethesdaDog Said:
I assume you live in Maryland ,back East, but the Jewish community in Texas lost a young man in last summer’s Gaza war. In other words,” speak for yourself Moshe”.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
Try this on for size:
Irony implies inconsistency.
There is no inconsistency when those who despise themselves support someone who despises them.
@ yamit82:
I like your approach. Excellent dual use… 🙂
This is for every “Jew” who voted for Obama.
Envision this scenario: The entire Hamas leadership is killed when we fly over Gaza and drop millions of liberal Hebrews on them.
Hamas graves can be inscribed with “K.B.K.”
Killed By Kapo.
My thought for today:
I will take the “Where’s my little Jewboy” kind of antisemite over the “Let’s Passively Watch Iran Nuke Israel” kind of antisemite any day of the week.
Think about it!!!!!!!!!!!
It seems Israel was not a factor in the Republican victories.
This is important in view of What Obama is doing against Israel and his actions internationally.
In 1981, President Reagan pressured Prime Minister Begin against bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Begin ordered the bombing operation.
Reagan was no friend of Israel. He listened to Weinberger, Baker, and other antisemites. I blame Reagan for Hezbollah; if he had any guts, after Hez bombed the Marines Reagan would’ve wiped them out. I’m uncomfortable with the mantra that the American people support Israel, as though that’s an ace in the hole. First, people are fickle, and second, Obama doesn’t care what the American people think.
I am supporting Knesset Speaker Feiglin position. The hell with American Jewish leftists. They are ignorant and antisemitic.
Does anyone think that a J-Street poll would be honest, valid, legitimate, or authoritative. I am a mid-western Jew, a registered Democrat, and very conservative. Dennis Moel, Louisville
@ BethesdaDog:
Generally the American Jewish community have basically committed mass Jewish identity genocide on themselves.
Even the orthodox Jews are not really growing as a high % of young ones move down to conservative movement rendering the Orthodox fairly static in absolute numbers. They have large families but the numbers as Jews following Orthodox isn’t.
This is why many rabbis rejected the offer of emancipation by Napoleon. Even then they could see the writing on the wall.
Not to worry we Jews have experienced similar situations in the past and have survived them.
Jews are destined to remain a small group among the many….
It’s our collective Karma. 🙂
@ honeybee:
Are you serious? You don’t know?
@ ArnoldHarris:
Obamism might be dead, but don’t write off the left. They have been around in one form or another since when I was in college, in the 1960’s. They have much mischief and danger left in that thrashing corpse. Their demographic base continues to grow, the shift of young people and single women toward the Republican side could only be a temporary phenomenon. They have permanently corrupted the American Jewish community, which is increasingly leftist, and decreasingly Jewish. We should only hope that reform Judaism morphs into ethical culture or Unitarianism, and stops the pretense of being Jewish. They should get out and leave the rest of us alone. They cannot be salvaged. The almost half that favor pressuring Israel is probably higher than the general American population. It is a massive fifth column of a decaying, rotting comatose and zombified corpse. It can never be fully recovered as a healthy, sensible and rational population able to recognize its real interests and act to pursue them. As my teacher, the Rabbi Richard Rubinstein, said many years ago, the American Jewish community is in an advanced state of decay. He said that in 1971-2. I remember it very well. It’s getting much, much worse.
BethesdaDog Said:
<blockquote that American Jews are a lost cause
What is the cause from which we a lost ??????????
@ yeshol: That type of info is usually not available in the USA.
I wonder if someone would publish a breakdown of the vote according to religious identification: Hareidi, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Unaffiliated and Nones.
Here, word for word, is the letter to the editor that I had published in two local newspapers in the Madison, Wisconsin area:
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Having voted for Scott Walker for governor in his last two elections, I’m standing with him again in next week’s election, along with Rebecca Kleefisch for lieutenant governor and Brad Schimel for attorney general. But I also support moderate liberals such as Sondy Pope-Roberts for the Wisconsin State Assembly, Patrick Downing and Abigail Wuest for the Dane County Board of Supervisors, and Dave Mahoney for Dane County Sheriff. Here’s why:
Walker earned my vote when he broke the power of the the closed-shop statewide teacher’s union, which had operated as an unelected body of government that continually broke tax-paid budgets for the school systems of this state, along with conspiring successfully to run the schools more as indoctrination centers for leftist liberalism rather than as educational centers for our children. Labor unions are fine for private enterprises, but not for public employees. That’s more or less what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt concluded in one of his letters back in the 1930s, so I’m in good company.
In addition, Governor Walker’s policies and reforms have cut our state taxes by $2 billion and the $3.6 billion state deficit has been eliminated. His leadership, along with his party’s control of both houses of the state legisture in supporting the rights — and responsibilities — of Wisconsin’s gun owners such as me were never possible when the Madison Democrats ran the whole state. As for Brad Schimel as attorney general, he promises to enforce all public laws, irrespective of what he privately thinks of them. That’s in contrast to his opponent, who apparently thinks legislation should be manipulated by selective enforcement.
As for the Dane County offices, as a rural resident, my wife and I support land use policies that will control the urban sprawl that, if allowed to fester, will destroy all the rural countryside open spaces in the outer parts of Dane County. We can count on Patrick Downing and Abigail Wuest to help protect those open spaces. The same goes for Sondy Pope-Roberts, who, as a fellow rural resident, understands these issues. Sheriff Dave Mahoney gets my support by consistently assuring Dane County of prompt, efficient and cost-effective law enforcement protection.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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As you all can plainly see, I don’t hide my name from my opinions among all these folks in the smaller communities around Madison, Wisconsin, just as I am too proud to hide my name from any of you folks in the Israpundit community.
I’m not the kind of Jewish American or American Jew — I’m not sure which of these terms best describe folks like me — who hangs around with the J-Street mentality. Moreover, if I were still a kid of the type I was when I was in high school, my instincts would have been to either avoid them or beat the shit out of any of them who got close enough to get on my nerves. I really don’t give a damn who they vote for. I’m pretty sure Obamism is finished in the USA, and if the Jewish left wants to hang around with walking political corpses, or if the political corpses want to take these creatures with them into the graveyards of American politics, that will just make them even more irrelevant than they already are.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
This is why I’ve said, for the longest time, that American Jews are a lost cause. I can only hope for intermarriage and assimilation at the fastest possible pace. If they are not going to be supportive of Jewish and Israeli security in the strongest sense, I wish for them to leave the Jewish community rapidly and cease to identify as Jews. They are more dangerous as Jews, or identified as Jews, than they would be as gentiles. I don’t think anything can be done for them. Jews alone, with blacks, stand in opposition politically to the general trend in this country. While Republican success yesterday was far more than I could have expected–including the election of the GOP governor in my own state–American Jews continue to support the execrable Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I’ll bet there were more Jews attending the Klinghoffer premier, inside and applauding, than there were outside protesting. There are probably many thousands more Jews reading and enjoying the Huffington Post, with its antisemitism and all, than read this far more important website, where hits for articles number far less. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three “Jewish” justices on the Supreme Court side with the Obama administration, and against Jews, in deciding the Visotofsky case. Appallingly, the “wise Latina” justice, Sotomayor (not Jewish) made a horrible remark by calling the existence of Jerusalem in Israel “a lie.” (See Daniel Greenfield’s article on this ignorant insult.)
@ honeybee:
Who???? >>>>
Now we know who “THE REAL CHICKEN SH-TS” are !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The next time anyone mentions “kiruv” with that garbage he or she will hear very harsh response.
Most of my fellow American Jews are mind-numbed leftist idiots.