Pew: A Look at Religious Voters in the 2008 Election

Aaron Keyak — February 10, 2009 – 1:16 pm | Barack Obama | Election 2008 | Polls Comments (0) Add a comment

From Pew Research Center, “A Look at Religious Voters in the 2008 Election.”

“Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2008 for the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life’s biannual Faith Angle Conference to look at the impact of religious voters in the 2008 election.”

Here’s the section on the Jewish vote.

Winning the Jewish vote

Looking at all three sources of data going into the convention, it was pretty clear that Barack Obama was pretty seriously underperforming among Jewish voters. This trend line from Gallup shows you that in the summer, he’s getting anywhere between 60 and 65% of the Jewish vote, which seems very high obviously. But relative to—certainly since Clinton—Democrats get around 80%—78, 80%—of the Jewish vote. So that kind of number is actually pretty low. Now it doesn’t really matter nationally, that difference between what previous candidates have gotten and what Obama was getting, but it actually mattered a lot in Florida.

I did not believe that Obama was going to win Florida, certainly not at the beginning of the year. But as more and more polls were coming out showing the race was competitive in Florida, we did our own poll—a couple polls—in Florida, and Obama was doing very well in places like Miami, and he was very competitive in the I-4 corridor, which includes Tampa and Orlando. That’s always considered kind of the swing area of Florida, and he was actually tied with McCain, which was a very good result. But he was really underperforming in Broward County, Dade County, West Palm—the Jewish parts of Florida.

It might have been a 20-point gap between the percentage who were calling themselves Democrats and the percentage who were voting for Obama. Now my grandmother and grandfather retired to Ft. Lauderdale. I’ve spent a lot of time in those condos in Broward County, and I know what those folks are like. And of course, there was “The Great Schlep” and that sort of thing. Did everyone see the Sarah Silverman video, “The Great Schlep?” I mean, nothing really happened. I don’t think lots of Jews went down to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama, but it was funny. It was very Jewish.

But, anyway, so what was really fascinating about this was at this meeting at the Democratic Convention, it was like a mob of angry, Jewish state legislators from Florida, who were really angry at the Obama campaign because they felt like, we’re going into these condos and we got nothing. We have to convince these old Jewish voters that Obama’s okay, that he’s not a Muslim, that he’s not going to favor the Palestinians in some way and not support Israel. If you looked at the data that I had, it was really clear that the issue was with older Jews, which was not surprising; all of Obama’s issues were with older voters, older white voters. Jews aren’t different—radically different—in some ways than other voters; they’re the same groups.

But this obviously mattered a great deal in Florida. I don’t know exactly what the Obama campaign did. I think some of it was Sarah Palin; I think some of it was the debates. There were a variety of things that happened independent of the Obama campaign, though my understanding is that they put significant resources into outreach in this part of Florida. But what you can see nationally with the Gallup data is that over time Obama went from 62, 61% of the Jewish vote to 74% by the end of the election. And if you look at the exit polls, Obama got 78% of Jewish voters—that’s actually slightly better than Kerry did and it’s about where Gore and Clinton were.

I think if you look at the polls going into Election Day and then you look at the exit polls, the one group where Obama really did worse than Kerry was with older white voters. If you look toward the end, particularly post-debates, which I think were enormously reassuring to voters who had concerns about him and who he was and all the questions that McCain asked, you started to see a slight movement. But when you look at the exit polls, he actually didn’t do very well with older white voters, and what I don’t know is, was that movement real? Was there a pull back on Election Day? If there was a Bradley effect, maybe it was just with that group. But the point is, Jewish voters are the one group where the campaign, in any event, was successful in overcoming some of these doubts about him.

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