Some Thoughts About Pennsylvania, Obama and Clinton, the Jewish Vote and Exit Poll Tyranny
Posted By James BesserPolitical Insider: Some Thoughts About Pennsylvania, Obama and Clinton, the Jewish Vote and Exit Poll Tyranny
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So now it seems that Sen. Hillary Clinton scored a bigger victory with Jewish voters in Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary than the Jewish Week and other media outlets initially reported.
What happened? Once again, exit polls - the only source for information about how the vote breaks down by race, religion, gender and other factors - had to be "readjusted," which is a polite way of saying the pollsters were wrong.
The new numbers , released late Wednesday, showed a much bigger Clinton victory among Jewish voters - 62 percent instead of the 57 percent reported earlier.
That put her Jewish draw significantly above her overall take with Pennsylvania Democrats. But that may be a somewhat misleading figure; more on that later.
First, the exit polls: we report on them because we have no choice, but we fear and distrust them.
Jewish Week readers turn to us not just to find out who won and who lost, but how the Jews voted. And the only source of that information is exit polling.
But more and more, we're finding that the initial results, released shortly after the polls close, are wrong and need to be readjusted- sometimes repeatedly, sometimes with dramatic outcomes.
In California, we reported initially that Clinton won the Jewish vote, but it turned out a few days later that Obama won by a hair.
The Pennsylvania readjustment seemed dramatic - Clinton went up to 62 percent of the Jewish vote, Obama dropped to 38 percent - but that wasn't the whole story.
In fact, Jewish Democrats voted pretty much identically to other white Democrats. While Obama won an incredible 90 percent of black Democrats, he got only 35 percent of white Democrats. So he actually did marginally better among Jewish Democrats than among the overall Democratic population.
Do the numbers suggest that the campaign of rumors, accusations and outright slurs aimed at Obama, especially in Jewish circles, is having an impact on Jewish voting? Maybe -- but it's hard to draw any real conclusions from the available data.
Do the Pennsylvania results suggest Obama will have a big Jewish problem if he runs against Sen. John McCain in the general election in November? Possibly - but there's nothing to indicate that the Jews who voted for Clinton wouldn't stick with the Democrats if Obama is their party's nominee.
It could happen, Jewish Democrats concede - which is why they plan the most active Jewish outreach ever for the general election campaign.
Now we know how Pennsylvania Jews voted on Tuesday; what it means is a whole different story. And the final chapter has yet to be written.