RJC Releases Questionable Poll About NJ Governor’s Race

David Streeter — November 18, 2009 – 11:38 am | Barack Obama | Democrats | Polls | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) released a poll about the New Jersey governor’s race, trumpeting Governor-elect Chris Christie’s (R-NJ) support from 38% of New Jersey’s Jews. However, as noted by JTA’s Eric Fingerhut, the poll employed very questionable methodology and produced a margin of error of 11.5%, a figure deemed unreliable by GOP pollster Frank Luntz.

RJC attempted to demonstrate in their press release that Governor Jon Corzine’s (D-NJ) lower share of Jewish votes, in comparison to President Barack Obama’s 78% from a year ago, amounted to some sort of Jewish buyer’s remorse against Obama. All this bluster though, negates the fact that Corzine received 62% of the Jewish vote, a clear majority according to the RJC’s poll. It does not take formal training in statistics to recognize that 38% of Jews is far from a majority, no matter how much extrapolation and number fudging RJC does to make themselves feel better about their ideological distance from Jewish voters. (Also, this puts RJC at odds with Christie when he told Politico that this election is not about Obama.)

38% also is probably not something to reflect positively on, because it demonstrates that GOP candidates still have issues at nailing down Jewish voters. Concluding that Christie’s gains represent a significant change in comparison to Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) 22% of Jewish voters from 2008, is a very flimsy implication. Especially in a state where nearly 6% of voters are Jewish and where many of whom probably did not vote in the gubernatorial election because, as any basic political science textbook will state, turnout in off year state-wide elections is significantly lower than in national Presidential races.

JTA includes NJDC CEO Ira N. Forman’s succinct response to RJC’s celebration:

Forman said the flawed numbers, particularly because of the small sample size don’t tell us much at all about the Jewish vote in New Jersey on Election Day.

“It’s fairly meaningless,” he said.

Regardless of RJC’s polls or Norman Podhoretz’s ranting, Jews remain loyal democrats. As Allison Hoffman writes for Tablet:

The single best predictor of how a person will vote is how their parents voted, according to Poli-Sci 101. Sure, there’s some give at the margins—and sometimes quite a lot of give, which can produce a permanent realignment—but, for the most part, people stick to the allegiances they learned early on. So we’re a little confused about why, at every election, there’s inevitably a story about whether lots and lots of Jewish voters will switch parties.

Clearly, 2009 was not the year of the big switch.

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