eletion 2006

I got a nice email from the Communications Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition in response to my recent diary discussing the Jewish Vote in this election. I want to say I appreciate her response. She claims that the exit polls showing the overwhelming Democratic Jewish vote I mention in the above diary on are inacurate and that Jews are now voting 26% Republican according to exit polls done by her organization rather than the 12% indicated by the media-run polls cited by the National Jewish Democratic Council that I mention in my previous diary.

I am happy to pass along her comment, but I should say that I believe the NJDC numbers to be reasonable and to correspond with my experiences. Both NJDC and RJC are partisan and their numbers should be taken with grains of salt. However the RJC poll is partisan, while the NJDC is citing a non-partisan poll conducted by the media. Doesn't necessarily make the NJDC data better, but the partisanship of the polls must be taken into account.

The Philadelphia Jewish Voice has an interesting and relavent article showing that there are very few Jewish Republicans in office or running for office. When one looks at who is running, there is still a sharp preference for the Democratic Party.

The young are supposed to not care enough to vote...and even if they do, they are supposed to be more conservative than when I was young. And we are always being told that the Jewish vote is going Republican because of Israel, under the insane assumption that killing Muslims helps Israel.

UPTDATED: We are also told that Asian Americans vote Republican...that too proves false.

These are myths. They are myths put out by a conservative media and they were proven wrong in this election.

THE YOUTH VOTE:

From Reuters:

Young Americans voted in the largest numbers in at least 20 years in congressional elections, energized by the Iraq war and giving a boost to Democrats, pollsters said on Wednesday.

About 24 percent of Americans under the age of 30, or at least 10 million young voters, cast ballots in Tuesday's elections that saw Democrats make big gains in Congress. That was up 4 percentage points from the last mid-term elections in 2002.

"This looks like the highest in 20 years," said Mark Lopez, research director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which compiled the data based on exit polls...

Rock the Vote, a youth-and-civics group, said young voters favored Democrats by a 22-point margin, nearly three times the margin Democrats earned among other age groups and dealing a potentially decisive blow to Republicans in tight races.

The Washington Post has just given Jim Webb their endorsement:

[Jim Webb] was prescient in warning, back in 2002, that the war in Iraq risked stranding the United States in a long-term occupation without an exit strategy. An intelligent man with a record of integrity, he has resisted the packaging of political consultants, which can only be a good thing. Those assets, as well as his deep familiarity with military and national security affairs, offer the promise that he would make an able, if unorthodox, U.S. senator. And the fact that his youngest son is deployed as a marine in Iraq gives him a perspective that is rare in today's Congress.

I should note that MANY Democrats, though not enough in Congress, predicted the quagmire and criticized the lack of an exit strategy. So Webb was not ALONE in that, but it still is a major difference between him and his opponet, Racist Republican Allen. Speaking of whom, the Washington Post has this to say about Racist Allen:

Quite simply, he is a mediocre senator whose six years of undistinguished service do not justify rehiring.

...Mr. Allen lacks any comparable independent-mindedness. He has spent his time in the Senate in lock step with the Bush administration, embracing tax cuts that have imperiled the nation's fiscal health; subsidies for oil and gas companies that hardly needed the help; prisoner detention policies that have undercut America's image abroad; and restrictions on embryonic stem cell research despite its medical potential.