“The importance of the Jews isn’t their votes,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “They account for a huge share of the activist base of the Democratic Party and account for much of the money available to Democratic candidates. If you are a Republican strategist, it seems fairly obviously that if you can shift Jewish support even a little bit away from the Democrats, it makes the Democratic Party less competitive.”
Historically, Republicans have had mixed success with this strategy. Jewish support for Democratic presidential candidates peaked during World War II; 90 percent of Jews voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944, who won 55 and 53 percent of the overall popular vote in each of those years, respectively. Barry Goldwater, by contrast, was wildly unpopular among the Chosen People, winning only 10 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1964 presidential election. Almost three decades later, George H.W. Bush won only 11 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1992 presidential race. At times, Republicans have also had a bad habit of saying and doing things that seem anti-Semitic—like Bush senior’s secretary of state, James Baker, who infamously said “fuck the Jews” in a private conversation about Israel with a co-worker, or Richard Nixon, who had one of his staff members count the number of Jews who worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistic.
On the other hand, Jimmy Carter only won 45 percent of Jews’ votes in his doomed run against Ronald Reagan in 1980; Walter Mondale won 67 percent of the Jewish vote in 1984. The point is that “the Jewish vote has ebbed and flowed over the years,” said Herbert Weisberg, a professor emeritus at Ohio State and the author of a forthcoming book on historical Jewish voting patterns.
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