JTA: “RJC campaign did not make inroads with Jewish voters”

David Streeter — November 8, 2010 – 3:15 pm | Comments (0) Add a comment

JTA’s Ron Kampeas has analyzed the election results from last week and determined that the Republican Jewish Coalition’s (RJC) multi-million dollar ad campaign “did not make inroads with Jewish voters” and that “there has been no real Jewish movement to the GOP.” Kampeas wrote:

I noted earlier that much was being made of the differences between J Street and Republican Jewish Coalition exits—In Pennsylvania, for instance J Street shows a 76-19 breakout in favor of Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) in his run for the open U.S. Senate seat, while RJC’s polling shows it at 62-30. (Sestak’s opponent, former congressman Pat Toomey, eked out a victory.) 

Matt Brooks, the RJC director said those results—and similar takes in Illinois and in selected districts in New York, Nevada and Connecticut—justify RJC expenditures he listed at over $7 million. The drop across the board showed Jews were abandoning Democrats since the 78 percent Obama scored in 2008. ‘It continues to reinforce what we’ve been saying along, that the GOP is making and continues to make inroads among Jewish voters,’ he said.

I’ll split a decision here: The expenses may well have been justified. But not because they show a drop in Jewish support for Democrats. Because they don’t.

There’s a simple reason for this, and for why J Street and RJC polls differ: RJC’s pollster, Arthur Finkelstein, seems to have polled only the affiliated. His respondents divided up only as Orthodox, Reform and Conservative. J Street’s Jim Gerstein included Reconstructionist Jews and the unaffiliated in his poll.

Moreover, J Street’s breakdown matches within the margin of error the 2009 North American Jewish Data Bank breakdown of affiliation in its Jewish Population Study of Philadelphia area Jews. RJC’s poll is heavily weighted to Conservative Jews, by comparison. (Click here to view the chart)

As you can see, ‘Just Jewish’ scores high enough that removing it from a poll will inevitably skew results. This March 2010 poll by the American Jewish Committee casts it much higher—at 37 percent.

Read more about what Finkelstein had to say about the results here. 

Finally, in all of the RJC polls, 100 percent of respondents self-identified as Jewish in the initial screening. That in itself does not make it less representative than the J Street poll: In its national poll, J Street selected respondents from a consumer panel in which Jews had already self-identified. In its Pennsylvania poll, J Street randomly called voters with Jewish names until they reached 600 self-identified Jewish respondents. The latter method is more expensive and more reliable, but more and more firms are using the consumer panel method.

The problem is, Finkelstein did not know what method was used, and could not adequately explain why all respondents self-identified as Jewish. He referred me to his staff, and they have yet to return my call. There’s a reason I need to ask: Four years ago, in the 2006 midterms, the RJC conducted a similar poll in the Philadelphia area—and drew respondents’ names from organizational lists. My former colleague, Eric Fingerhut—working for the Washington Jewish Week at the time—had to pull that admission from Brooks like it was a wisdom tooth.

That 2006 poll, and the fact that all respondents identified as affiliated, makes me suspect that may be the case here. It explains the difference between the J Street and RJC polls—and proves there has been no real Jewish movement to the GOP.

Kampeas concluded:

Which gets me to the reason why the expense may have been worthwhile. In a backhanded way, Ira Forman, the former director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, makes the case here:

The closer we got to Election Day this year, the ‘wackier’” the behavior of some partisans became. Nowhere was this more true than in the hysterical-conservative segment of the Jewish community. For example, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), along with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), ran millions of dollars worth of TV ads attacking Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA) as being anti-Israel and pro-terrorist. I recently pointed out in a Washington Jewish Week article that the organizations running these ads are either very naive or very cynical about this ad campaign. If they are not naïve-and I doubt that they are-they were raising these dollars not to defeat Sestak but to enhance their organization’s visibility and relationships with big GOP donors.

I would add—and I have said previously, analyzing why the RJC and ECI targeted J Street—not just RJC donors. The point is not to make these candidates attractive to all Jewish voters, but to the small coterie of Jewish voters who donate big time based on pro-Israel considerations. The point is to make Democrats—and J Street Democrats, especially—less desirable.

Democrats—at least, so the myth goes—have three pillars among donors: Trial lawyers, unions and Jews. The Republican strategy, outlined years ago by Tom DeLay—at least, so the myth goes—is to impoverish the trial lawyers, neuter the unions and co-opt the Jews.

So why pretend there are inroads into the ranks of Jewish voters? I don’t think it’s a deliberate pretense, first of all—I think it’s self serving to a degree: If you’re a Republican operative, you go to shul, you hang out at the JCC, you take federation trips to Israel—and you want to believe that one day you won’t be in the minority.

The same goes for the Jewish donors that the RJC and other conservatives are targeting: They want the candidate who is ‘best for Israel’ by their lights, but they also want to believe that they have a Jewish constituency.

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