Rosner's Domain: Apparently, Jewish Orthodox voters didn't think Obama was scarier than John Kerry

1.

For those still in doubt: the National Jewish Democratic Council has published a short analysis sent by the Mellman Group (namely, Mark Mellman) to the Solomon Project (namely, Ira Forman). Bottom line: Jews voted for Obama in numbers similar to the exit polls numbers. It might be 78-22 or 77-22 or 75-23, doesn't really matter. Using three data sources, Mellman got to a conclusion: "Barack Obama won the Presidency with between 76% and 78% of the Jewish vote".

The three sources are the national exit polls, exit polls in 28 states, and Gallup polls. "Each of these data sources has strengths and weaknesses, but they converge in finding that the President-elect garnered between 74% and 78% of the total Jewish vote and 77%-78% of the two-party Jewish vote".

Case closed, I guess.

2.

And more on the Jewish vote:

Using data available to the public, the Public Policy office of the Orthodox Union has compiled a short list of precincts "with High-Concentration Of Orthodox Jewish Voters". This will not be a surprise to the experienced reader, but Orthodox tend to vote the Republican ticket in much higher numbers. However (as you can see in the table bellow) this was more visible four years ago than it was this time. In other words: In some of the cases presented here, Orthodox voted in higher numbers to the 2004 Bush-Cheney ticket than for the 2008 McCain-Palin ticket. This means - interestingly - and assuming that such pattern can be found in other places too - that the Obama-bad-for-Israel campaign didn't really work with Orthodox voters, and that Obama was not seen by the O-voters as someone less trustworthy than John Kerry.

Several reasons contributed to the relative timid response by Orthodox voters to the McCain ticket (that's an opinion, the data does not provide for many clues):

1. Like many Americans, Orthodox Jews thought it was time for the GOP to get its butt kicked.
2. The economy has a profound impact on Orthodox families with a lot of children and a lot of expenses.
3. Bush was rewarded in 2004 for his friendship toward Israel. McCain wasn't.
4. Sarah Palin was a downer to Jews, some Orthodox included.

 For those interested in the numbers, here's the OU table:

	2000		2004		2008
	Bush/   Cheney	Gore/   Lieberman	Bush/   Cheney	Kerry/   Edwards	McCain/   Palin	Obama/   Biden
Beachwood, OH1	20	77	35	65	28	71
Boca Raton, FL2	32	67	55 (48)	45 (51)	52	48
Brooklyn, NY3	34	56	66	29	Not yet available	Not yet available
Lakewood, NJ4	46	51	67	33	69	31
Miami, FL5	29	69	57	42	49	50
Teaneck, NJ6	17	81	47	52	49	51
Wickliffe, OH7	41	55	52	46	59	37
Passaic, NJ8	-	-	-	-	42	57