New survey shows 22% of American Jews are dumber than dirt.
WASHINGTON (JTA) — For some Jewish voters, the strangeness of Barack Obama was like a recurring dream: unsettling and then settling in, and then, suddenly, revelatory.
Ari Wallach described breaking through to elderly Jews in Florida who had resisted voting for the son of the man from Kenya, the tall black man with the middle name “Hussein.”
“It wasn’t only his policy on Israel and Iran, on health care,” said Wallach, whose jewsvote.org led the “Great Shlep,” an effort to prod young adults to get their Jewish grandparents in Florida to vote for Obama. “His biography feels so Jewish, it feels like an Ellis Island archetype. People felt more comfortable when I talked about where he came from, it resonated so deeply — surprisingly among older Jews.”
For months, polls showed Obama languishing at about 60 percent of the Jewish vote, a critical chunk short of the 75 percent or so Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) garnered in 2004. But exit polls from the Nov. 4 election showed Obama matching those results, garnering about 78 percent of the Jewish vote against 22 percent for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his Republican rival.
texasjewishpost.com
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Did the Jewish vote win Florida?
By Eric Fingerhut · November 14, 2008
The National Jewish Democratic Council did some number crunching, and found that the Jewish vote might have actually provided the winning margin for Barack Obama in one state -- Florida.
Estimating the numbers of Jews which voted in 13 states and then allocating it to the two presidential candidates by the 78-21 percent ratio that exit polls found nationally for the Jewish vote, the NJDC found that the Jewish vote in the Sunshine State for Obama of 238,214 was more than 33,000 votes larger than his overall 205,000 vote margin of victory in the state. In other words, the Jewish vote, according to the estimate, accounted for 116.2 percent of Obama's margin of victory in the state.
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