Politico: “Obama fared better than feared with Jews”

Aaron Keyak — November 18, 2008 – 12:12 pm | Barack Obama | Election 2008 | McCain | Polls Comments (0) Add a comment

Remember all those articles that declared that President-elect Obama was not going to do well among Jewish voters? (In case you forgot, here are a few: "Obama's Jewish Problem," "Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters," and "Obama's struggle to secure the Jewish vote.")

Now some of the mainstream press is starting to pick up on the fact that that story didn't happen. Today, David Kuhn of the Politico wrote an article titled, "Obama fared better than feared with Jews."  Kuhn's piece begins as something that might have been written for this blog.

Remember Barack Obama's Jewish problem?

You know, the one discussed in most every outlet, including this one, and that that was going to cost him Florida and the election?

Neither did Jewish voters, it turned out.

Seventy-eight percent of Jews voted for Obama, 3 percentage points more than backed Kerry. Obama won the group by 57 points — greater than his margin with Hispanics or single women without children.

The rest of the article explores the Jewish vote issue in greater detail.

Still, looking back, the problem was hardly as bad as the coverage it received.

Jews did favor Clinton in the primaries and at times, Obama did poorly with them. While he won the Maryland primary, 60 percent of Jewish voters favored Clinton, roughly matching her support among white women.

But in the California primary, Jewish voters split between Obama and Clinton.

A Gallup report in early May showed that Obama did only slightly worse with Jewish voters than Clinton. Jewish voters preferred Clinton to Obama 50 to 43 percent. In a hypothetical race against McCain, Obama was winning 61 percent of Jews and Clinton 66 percent.

When Ira Forman, executive director of the Democratic Jewish group, saw that 5-point gap it “actually heartened me [since] there was no reason Hillary should be that low. What it told me was that McCain’s image was not of the right wing Republican. What it told me is we got work to do, but it's doable."

Click here to read on.

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