Was there ever one?

From WaPo

The End Of the 'Jewish Vote'

By Peter Beinart

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

No matter who wins on Tuesday, commentators will likely sift through the
exit polling and declare that, in at least one respect, President Bush
failed. Early this year some Republicans boasted that Bush would realign
Jewish American politics -- ending the community's 80-year love affair with
the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, however, with polls showing most Jews
planning to vote for John Kerry, the brash predictions have stopped. Jewish
Democrats are poised to declare victory, to announce that Bush's overtures
have come to naught.

But that won't be true. Because while President Bush hasn't realigned the
Jewish vote, he has done something even more intriguing: He has ended it.

The term "Jewish vote" implies a shared political perspective that binds
Jews more to one another than to gentiles. In this sense, there has not been
an "Episcopalian vote" or a "Catholic vote" for a long time. In the 1950s
Christian denominations meant something at the polling booth. Catholics and
Southern Baptists generally voted Democratic. Episcopalians and other
main-line Protestants, especially in the North, voted Republican. But
starting in the 1970s, religious denomination began to matter less -- and
religious intensity to matter more and more. Catholics who went to Mass
every week started voting more like Episcopalians who went to church every
week than like Catholics who didn't. During the culture wars of the 1990s,
the trend accelerated. This spring a study by the University of Akron's John
Green for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found "that religious
traditionalists, whether Evangelical, Mainline Protestant or Catholic, hold
similar positions on issue after issue, and that modernists of all these
various traditions are similarly like-minded." With the critical exception
of African Americans -- whose religiousness has not generally inclined them
toward the GOP -- traditionalist Christians voted Republican while modernist
Christians voted Democratic.

Jews, however, were different. As late as 2000, Al Gore and his Orthodox
running mate, Joe Lieberman, didn't just win most of the Jewish vote, they
won a large majority among Orthodox Jews -- the "traditionalists" whom
sociologists might have expected to join their Christian counterparts. But
it now appears that, like Jimmy Carter, who won the votes of his fellow
evangelicals in 1976, Lieberman simply delayed his community's migration
into the Republican Party. This year, for probably the first time, Orthodox
Jews will vote like "traditionalist" Christians. Conservative, Reform and
non-affiliated Jews, on the other hand, will vote like secular, or
"modernist," Christians. And the Jewish vote, in a meaningful sense, will
cease to exist.

George W. Bush deserves much of the credit. Some commentators speculated
that his strong support for Ariel Sharon would win over Jewish voters.
Actually, it has divided them. Orthodox Jews are far more likely to vote on
Israel than other Jews. According to a recent American Jewish Committee
survey, 74 percent of Orthodox Jews feel "very close" to Israel, compared
with only 31 percent of Jews overall. And Orthodox Jews are also more likely
to oppose dismantling settlements, which puts them more in sync with Bush
and Sharon's hard-line policies.

If Bush's Israel policy has attracted Orthodox Jews, his domestic agenda has
alienated their non-Orthodox counterparts. In particular, Conservative,
Reform and unaffiliated Jews express a clear antipathy toward the agenda of
the Christian Right. According to the American Jewish Committee, roughly
three-quarters of them oppose government aid to religious schools. But among
Orthodox Jews, who are far more likely to send their children to such
schools, and who often feel considerable financial strain as a result, the
sentiment is almost exactly the reverse. Two-thirds of the Orthodox support
government funding of religious education. When Republican Sens. Norm
Coleman and Rick Santorum traveled to Borough Park in Brooklyn during the
Republican National Convention to meet with a select group of Orthodox
rabbis, school vouchers was among the top issues on the agenda. Gay marriage
also pits Orthodox Jews against their more secular counterparts. As Binyamin
Jolkovsky, editor and publisher of JewishWorldReview.com, recently told the
Jewish Week newspaper, "There are two distinct Jewish communities right now, the general Jewish community and the Orthodox. Our value systems are so different."

Don't expect this to have a dramatic impact at the polls. Orthodox Jews make
up less than 10 percent of the American Jewish population, so even though
they will probably vote overwhelmingly for President Bush, he will still
overwhelmingly lose the Jewish vote as a whole. But beyond Nov. 2, the
Orthodox migration into the Republican Party is part of a larger
transformation: Religion is eclipsing ethnicity as a force in American
politics. To be an Irish Catholic or a German Lutheran used to have real
political meaning. Today those patchwork divisions, which stretch back more
than a century, are fading. Increasingly, America, or at least white
America, has just two political cultures: religious and secular. And next
week Jews -- who have held out longer than their Christian brethren -- will
finally choose sides.