According to data provided by Sheskin, Jews voted for Republican presidential candidates at an average rate of 32 percent across the 1972-1988 elections, similar to the 30-percent Jewish support for the GOP’s Mitt Romney in 2012.
The same data shows that across the 1992-2012 elections, Jews voted Republican at an average rate of 22 percent, meaning that Jewish support for the GOP is “still well below what it was in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Sheskin.
Dr. Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, both at Brandeis University, said Jews “have always been a group concerned about the general social welfare, because we were the objects of discrimination and prejudice, the target of the horrific actions of the Nazis. We’ve always been social-liberal and that’s been associated in this country with the Democratic Party.”
Sheskin argued that the Republican Party has shifted a great deal to the right over the last 20 years. He said it used to be “possible to be kind of liberal on issues like birth control and abortion, and the death penalty, and then be conservative on economics and be a Republican. It is very difficult to do that today.”
Another reason Jews lean Democrat, he said, is that they “are very pro-science.” For example, many Jews support the scientific consensus on climate change and may dislike when Republican candidates commonly deflect that issue on the grounds that they aren’t scientists.
HUC-JIR’s Cohen said that Israel is generally not a major factor in most Jews’ voting decisions because “each political perspective sees its candidate as doing right by Israel.”
Nevertheless, “if we had a presidential candidate, either Democrat or Republican, who came out and said, ‘I don’t think Israel should exist,’ I think that probably would determine a good portion of the Jewish vote,” Sheskin said.
This year’s primary campaign featured the emergence of a Jewish senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, as a serious candidate. But the demographic experts largely agree that his religion had little bearing on his level of support among Jews.
Sanders’s Jewish identity, said Sheskin, “seems to be predicated on the fact that his parents were persecuted and had to leave Poland…. His Jewish identity might play a bit more of a role if he was active in the Jewish community in some way.”
The Sanders campaign came 16 years after Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, was the vice presidential candidate on Al Gore’s ticket, creating what Windmueller recalls as a huge amount of Jewish communal conversation and concern regarding whether the Gore-Lieberman campaign would lead to anti-Semitism and if Lieberman’s presence on the ticket was a good or bad thing for American Jews.
At the same time, Lieberman’s active Jewish life created more “excitement” for Jews than the Sanders campaign, said Windmueller. “There was a whole degree of excitement about the Lieberman presence on a national ticket. We don’t see that happening…with Sanders,” he said.
Sanders’s religion could have theoretically been a selling point for Jewish voters, but “in some ways it makes his position on the Gaza war stand out even more starkly,” Saxe said.
Similarly, the experts agree that the fact that Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump is a convert to Judaism isn’t likely to motivate Jews to vote for her father, at least not any more than how Chelsea Clinton being married to a Jew would potentially convince Jewish voters to vote for her mother.
The experts say it is difficult to determine how Jews feel about Trump. In addition to his controversial statements on immigration, Muslims, and Mexico, which make him anathema to liberal voters, Trump initially said he intends to be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He later backtracked on that stance, saying he simply wants to appear neutral so that he can make a deal to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.