It was all those rich old white guys, right?
Well, no. Mr. Trump actually made significant gains among those groups that allegedly comprised Hillary Clinton’s core constituency.
In the following video, Ezra Levant of TheRebel.media highlights these under-reported statistics, basing his discussion on exit polls published by The New York Times:
There was one notable exception to the general trend. Mr. Levant didn’t mention religion, but according to the NYT, 8% fewer Jewish voters chose Donald Trump than had chosen Mitt Romney in 2012.
Since Hillary was all but certain to have continued Mr. Obama’s policy of throwing Israel to the wolves — and might have even accelerated it, given how much Gulf Arab money had poured into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation — why would American Jews prefer her over Donald Trump? After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted that Mr. Trump has been elected president.
However, American Jews are notoriously progressive, and many of them are not at all fond of the State of Israel. That may be one of the explanations, along with Hillary’s vehement support for other issues that are dear to a progressive’s heart: abortion, open borders, bigger government, higher taxes, environmentalism, the New World Order, etc.
It’s hard to fathom. One of the perpetual conundrums of American politics is that Jews vote so consistently against their own interests. As Milton Himmelfarb famously said: “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Hat tip: NorseRadish.
The Pew Foundation has an interesting analysis on the religious vote:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/
It shows interesting swings in all faiths and political support
Roman Catholics make up 23% of the voters and there was a sizable shift to Trump. He won Catholics 52% to 45%, whereas Obama won them 50:48 in 2012. The anti-Catholic attitude of the Clinton machine revealed in WikiLeaks may have had something to do with this.
He also got 80% of white Evangelicals (and probably a respectable slice of Asian/Pacific ones, too). We feel our First Amendment rights threatened by the Dems.
Ashkenazi Jews in general tend to have self-destructive voting tendencies. It’s enormously frustrating. It’s some sort of deeply ingrained diaspora mentality. I listen to it in my own family, where a few of us right-wingers regularly argue with the hopeless “progressives”.
We’re not *all* like that, but it’s sadly the majority in North America. Ezra Levant would be a good example of one who isn’t, obviously. The more religious ones also tend to be more right-wing, nowadays. “Recent” Russian Jews are also an exception. French Jews also tend to be more right-wing. On the bright side, the right-wing components are the ones currently favoured by their demography.
What saves Israel is that is has a majority of Mizrahi, Russians, etc. That’s why it’s a decent country. I can relate easily to people there, even with my broken Hebrew. I can’t relate to North American Jewry very well. They’re the kinds of people that want to open the synagogue basement to house Muslim refugees, not for a few days, but with no end in sight. I’d almost go as far as to say that sometimes it feels easier to find right-wing *Arabs* in Israel, than right-wing Ashkenazi North American Jews!
Don’t get me wrong: Israelis in general aren’t wantonly cruel, but they’re not charitable to the point of being stupid.
It’s a diaspora mentality. It needs to end. I hope.
Thanks for your letter. It’s nice to have someone write who shares the deep feeling of frustration of someone with a Jewish background who sees such insanity in the Jewish population.
I personally think the days of strong support for Israel by the liberal Jewish community is numbered. All their progressive allies are either already on board for the BDS movement against Israel, or are chomping at the bit, held back only by their desire for Jewish coalition partners on the rest of the progressive, far-left agenda.
I predict that the next big conflict between Israel and some neighbor, Israel is going to choose to protect its soldiers and civilians rather than tie the hands of their military. There will be loads of pictures of dead and wounded children, which may or may not be directly associated with the conflict. The liberal Jewish community will declare themselves “shocked, shocked”, they can no longer support such barbarity. They will then jump into full alliance with their natural partners, the far-left, BLM, BDS, Code Pink and all the rest, and throw Israel to the wolves.
Of course, Israel can take care of itself, and is developing cozy relations with Russia, anticipating just such an occurrence. However, it would be nice to have Israel’s back when international bodies such as the UN, EU, International Court of Human Justice (kangaroo court for European nationalists) universally condemn Israel.
I suspect the Mizrahis know something about living as Dhimmi under Islam that the rest of us would be wise to heed.
I am a 54 year old Jewish woman from Los Angeles (born and raised) an inner city teacher. I voted for Trump as did my 81 year old mother and my 49 year old brother. All my Jewish friends (mostly middle aged and elderly women in my knitting group) voted for Trump. Just like I knew he would win (and predicted it) and others were mistaken, you are very mistaken on the Jewish vote. I am sick to death of the stereotypes of all kinds I’ve been battling my entire life. Oh, I’ve been a registered Republican for about 20 years.
I’m not mistaken. If there is a mistake, the New York Times made it. Their exit polling supplied those figures for the Jewish vote for Trump — down 8 points from the Jewish vote for Romney.
Maybe the methodology of the exit polling is faulty. But I am not mistaken, and I’m not stereotyping — that’s what the data said.
I’ve lived 54 years as a Jewish woman with entirely Jewish relatives and many Jewish friends but you seem to know better. Or rather the NY Times and the polls etc. Perhaps it’s time to stop stereotyping.
Data do not stereotype. Carefully collected data are the raw material of facts. American Jews vote overwhelmingly for liberal Democrats; this is a statistical fact, not a stereotype. They voted more overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton last Tuesday than they did for Barack Obama in 2012.
These are simple facts, attested my many polls over many decades.
I did notice an assumption in your article Baron – that all Jews are pro-Israel. Many liberal Jews are not and dislike Israel as much as liberal non-Jews. Liberal Jews are liberals first and foremost, and form their opinions accordingly.
Why so many Jews in N America are liberals I don’t know. In the UK a poll before the last GE found that Jewish voting intentions were almost the same as those of non-Jews, ie, tilting towards the Conservatives.
You failed to read my text closely. I said: “However, American Jews are notoriously progressive, and many of them are not at all fond of the State of Israel.”
It is to your credit that you, your family, and your friends vote sensibly, and not with the crowd. But that doesn’t alter the statistical evidence for what the “crowd” does in the voting booth.
Living where I do, [You and Dymphna have each commiserated.] I can attest that the NYT statistical evidence could have been even more more ‘faulty’ if it had been collected anywhere around here.
The NYT data was supposedly collected via nationwide polls. But I don’t know their exact methodology.
I never understood this voting trend, because the left totally hates Jews and Israel, and if given power would use them in exactly the same way Hitler used Jews as scapegoats to further his ends. Other than your local mosque, the university campus is the most anti sematic place in America. I have socialist friends that also just can’t seem to grasp that they are voting for their own doom.
Speaking as a more qualitative than quantitative political scientist, I believe OP rather than the pollsters. They got it wrong.
Baron,
OP is giving you experiential, rather than statistical, data. She has experienced conservative Jews and nothing but conservative Jews, so the data showing overwhelming liberal Jewish support for Hillary is somehow not accurate.
For an experiential datapoint, here is a page from the Union for Reform Judaism, representing the largest group of US Jews. They don’t just come out and say it, but the subtext is, they are wearing sackcloth and rending their clothes because Trump was elected, but maybe life will go on in spite of it.
https://www.urj.org/blog/2016/11/09/reform-jewish-community-reacts-2016-us-presidential-election
Yes, I know she is reporting her own experience, which is fine with me. But she also characterized my reporting on this as “stereotyping”, which is hardly the case.
Dear Op.
Firstly, thank you for your vote.
Speaking as myself, someone who dedicated his life to the fight for truth, I have to accept the ones I also find unpleasant.
I find it unpleasant that a disproportionate number of ethnically Jewish people tilt left. But it is the truth. Imagine Diana West’s distress at this fact when she researched her book on the history of communist infiltration and subversion in the US, as a disproportionate amount of them are Jewish.
Diana West is Jewish herself, even if not observant.
So lets dig a little deeper.
When women vote for Hillary “because she is a woman”, the reason is the lack of a Y chromosome or having an extra X one. You cannot escape this because they state it themselves. Many women voted from Trump though and managed to avoid that absurd motive for a bad vote.
Many many black people voted for Obama because they had similar melanin levels and for that reason alone.
So it might be fair to blame those specific blacks for voting for such a racist reason.
The Jewish vote is a little more nuanced.
Jews do not vote left because they are ethnically or scripturally are leftist. So attaching that aspect of those people’s identity may not mean the same thing.
If Jews voted for Sanders because he was Jewish, that would be a perfect analogue. But I am confident it wouldn’t have played out that way as Sanders was anti-Israel to say the least and was very very far to the left.
Still, Jews, as a group, did vote for Clinton in large numbers. Extracting the meaning out of that is a worthy discussion but it remains a fact.
I have a few theories of my own which range from the fact that you will also find a disproportionate number of Jewish people at the forefront of every intellectual movement. This is because those kind of pursuits are to Jews what certain sports are to African Americans.
Also Jews, like any other ethnic group, often do not look that deeply into a subject and make up their minds fast and stick to it. And Jews have been convinced that the left represents not just Jewish interests, but in general are the voice of the victim while classical liberals are “far right extremists” and want white supremacy or what have you.
This has been an effective tactic by the Democrats. Watching De’sousa’s movie, Clinton’s America, is a fantastic expose on that.
OP no problem can be solved if it cannot first be faced. Jews tilt left at this point in political history, again, not because of religious or even ethnic collectivism, but for some other reason. And if this is to change, we had better recognize the facts of it and work at changing it.
It is likely that Trump will do this himself. I have already read articles where various Jewish groups have come to recognize him as being a near ideal leader in terms of fairness to all and a good relationship with Israel.
Perhaps sending people you know on the other side of this issue, the following video and ask them to scroll to 17 minutes might help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHmINZRwiZU
I’m a Jew. Which doesn’t give what I’m about to say more weight than a gentile’s view regarding the extraordinarily leftist tilt of Jewish voting. Anyway, from what I’ve experienced it is extremely easy to fill Jews with terror – no less – by labeling any politician who is even mildly conservative a right winger. And of course the same applies to the GOP, which, though essentially a party of the muddled middle, is labelled right wing. When a Jew hears right wing or right winger, Nazi clicks in his head. And in fact as you all know there is no such thing as a right winger, only extreme right wingers exist to hear the MSM tell it. Even more frightening to a Jew. This is how Jews are kept on the reservation. Oversimplification? Not all Jews can be so easily corralled. But enough can be. Most can be.
The right supports Israel as all my friends and family know. It’s the left that puts the fear in our hearts.
yes right-winger probably does scare the jews. that is because the Nazis are falsely labeled as right-wingers. the jews associate right-wingers as Nazis, but the truth is the Nazis were as leftist as the communists. you couldn’t find a smidgen of difference in the government of Nazi Germany and the government of communist Russia. the lie that nasism and communism are the opposite ends of the political spectrum is a lie that has been taught in American higher education for 75 yrs. mostly by leftist jewish teachers.
I cannot let your final assertion go unchallenged.
I went through 12 years of primary and secondary schooling here and in England, and like everyone else I was taught that Nazis were right-wing. None of my teachers was a Jew. Not a one.
Do you have any source for your insulting assertion, other than further assertions that restate the same premise?
I didn’t live in England I lived in the united states and yes a lot of the jewish teachers in high school and college were leftists. a lot of jews have supported and were/are communists I guess because the communists deposed the czar. and if you were taught that Nazis were right wingers you were taught a lie. how many of your teachers were pro-communist?
So YOUR teachers were Jewish leftists, right? I’ll bet you lived in New York or L.A., or one of the other major metropolises.
The rest of the country was (is) considerably different. Before going to England, I spent most of my school years in the outer suburbs of Washington DC. I, too, learned that Nazism was right-wing, and NONE of my teachers was Jewish.
And none of-them was pro-Communist, either. This was the 1950s and early 1960s. You didn’t see any overt pro-Communists in the schools until the second half of the 1960s. But like everyone else, my teachers had picked up the meme of “right-wing” Nazism because of how deftly it had been inserted into the cultural matrix from 1941-1945 by American Communists acting as Soviet agents. That little sleight-of-hand was one of Stalin’s greatest successes.
But my issue wasn’t with whether the teachers who taught YOU that communism was right-wing were Jewish. If you lived in Brooklyn, for example, that would be quite plausible. My beef is that you referred to that meme as, and I quote: “a lie that has been taught in American higher education for 75 yrs. mostly by leftist jewish teachers.”
Where is your evidence that the idea of Nazism as right-wing was taught “mostly” by Jewish teachers in the USA? If you have none, then cease asserting it.
ricpic – If you haven’t, I suggest reading David Mamet’s 2012 book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
http://amzn.to/2eQZTFA
Flawed but brilliant. He admits that he never met a conservative until he was 60 years old (I think that was his rabbi).
One Amazon reviewer said:
David Mamet made a stir in 2008 with his Village Voice essay, “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.” This book is a fuller, wittier, and more scathing treatment of the same subject–a liberal screenwriter who has “seen the light.”
Like other big media apostates, Andrew Breitbart, Tom Wolfe, John Stossel, Ben Stein, and Dennis Miller, Mamet realized the liberal assumptions that capitalism was evil and that Republicans were corporate lackeys had serious holes. When he began to investigate the logic behind free markets, he realized that it actually made sense. As Mamet puts it, modern liberalism is nothing more than a religion that its practitioners preach blindly on faith.
To examine the inanity of modern liberals, Mamet offers 39 entertaining essays that cover the gamut of modern living, including “Adventure Slumming,” “Cabinet Spiritualism and the Car Czar,” and, my favorite, “Oakton Manor and Camp Kawaga.” Throughout the expose, Mamet makes use of his excellent perspective in the arts. With examples from his theater class, he shows exactly how absurd political correctness and the liberal agenda can be.
———-
Mamet is so big in Hollywood that they couldn’t touch him, couldn’t shun him, couldn’t build a cordon sanitaire around him. For a brief while he made it easier for other conservative Jews to come out of the closet.
We are fortunate at Gates of Vienna. We have a number of conservative-minded Jews among our readers, authors, and donors. And unlike some liberal American Jews, we love Israel – warts and all. Israel comes as close to being part of the American Dream as it is possible to be while still preserving its own identity.
Would that the GOP(e) were right wing. It’s not. Republicans have become mini-me leftists, wanting only to be included, allowed to play with the big boys. No one can be called “right wing” who believes in open borders or amnesty for illegal aliens as, for instance, Paul Ryan is. No one can be right wing and pro-abortion to the point of legally killing a fetus while it struggles to be born. But we have such Republicans.
Trump made many pleas to Jews, as he also did with Catholics. He was straightforward about it. Clinton didn’t have to do any of that. She owned the media and the “intellectuals”…
…I’m a Judeophile; always have been. Considering the very real existential harm/risk Israel now faces thanks to Hillary’s shenanigans in MENA (and Obama’s with Iran), it is appalling to think *any* Jew could vote for her, much less turn out in droves.
Plato’s Cave is over-crowded. It’s past time for the victim mentality of wealthy Jews and impoverished blacks to be set aside in favor of a more life-giving zeitgeist.
This is an interesting perspective on the use of the word “conservative”.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-american-conservative-movement-has-ended-the-american-right-goes-on
Brimlow argues that “conservative” now describes a philosophy that is not conservative at all, but which is expansionist: spread American government and democracy to all countries and cultures, whether appropriate or not. Also, “conservatism” has come to mean the support of large corporations through government favors, subsidies, and expensive regulations.
So, the neocons are now the conservatives, and American nationalists are those who wish to preserve our culture and people as a specific entity.
ricpic
Here is a nuanced view on the tendency of some Jews to panic leftwards:
On a personal level, I have a friend I’ve known for a long, long time. I have access to his webpage, although he no longer talks to me. When Trump was elected, this guy said he couldn’t sleep at night, and thought that after Trump got through persecuting the other minorities, he was going to deport the Jews.
This sort of Pavlovian reaction is simply not susceptible to reason.
A good quote RonaldB and I think it hits the nail on the head.
After Trump announced his candidacy, I received an hysterical email from a lefty Jewish friend after I asked here about something he said about Trump. The email said, in part:
“Trump wants to round up all the Mexicans and deport them. Spend our tax dollars on a wall that will be totally impractical – there’s the whole Gulf of Mexico out there, you know, they can come in by boat – should they want to. He’s going to surveil the Muslims and deport them. He wants to make America great again by bombing the Middle East. Who do you think he’ll be after next? It’ll be the Jews. Count on it. Sheldon Adelson who spent $100 million on the Republican campaign last election cycle cuz he hates organized labor speaking to his precious casino workers, will have everything taken from him. Remember what happened to the Rothschilds. David Duke is telling his followers to make room for Trump to eliminate the Jews, who control all the media, the banks and the country. When asked about it, Trump said he didn’t hear about it. The woman who wrote the article about Melania Trump is getting tons of antisemitic tweets and emails. Trump told Wolf Blitzer she was wrong to write an inaccurate article about his wife, and he didn’t know anything about the tweets. Jews are being and will be vilified, and you can count on another shoah or worse with trump. Nuclear war, the end of the world, etc.”
My “friend” stopped speaking with me after I responded to this nonsense, so I don’t know what her source or sources were for this garbage. I realized then that this disinformation was an opening salvo of the Hillary Clinton campaign although I still don’t know how it was disseminated and to how many Jewish voters it went.
The Democrats specialize in spreading defamatory and false rumors. They make the Republicans look like a bunch of boy (or girl) scouts.
If Jewish votes went down, this is probably the reason why.
I think it’s a small miracle he won.
Correction: . . . after I asked her about something SHE said about Trump . . .
Independent-
This email is just another small example of the leftists in this country showing how truly childish and insane they are.
My recommendation is to go chill out and make some new, adult acquaintances.
I live in the San Francisco Bay area. Wish me luck.
p.s. I’ve know this woman for 30 years. Apart from politics she is reasonable and intelligent. I just don’t understand these people!
But I can remember when I was a liberal when in college. But I grew up.
This is a poor excuse for voting Hilary. It is also a very patronizing one.
By voting Hilary, the jews of America have brought shame on themselves. Only religious jews had enough common sense to vote Trump.
It is difficult for me to understand the reason for american jews to trust Hilary more then Trump. In Australia, Hilary would have got very few votes, as most australian jews are conservatives.
E. Sevela said that the jews mostly are clever people, but if a jew is stupid, he gets to such high levels of stupidity, which is unreachable for the stupid ones of other nations, so a village idiot of any nation looks like a renouned intellectual next to him.
Independent,
My experience exactly. When I bring reason into a discussion of protecting the borders, not accepting Muslims, or anything else, their reaction is exactly as you observed: they shut down, and either won’t talk to you about the subject, or stop talking to you altogether.
To Pong: believe me, it is not just the Hillary communications that bring about this mindset. The mindset is there: the communications simply confirm the opinions they already hold with an iron grip.
120 years ago Jews were accepted by Democrats for the same reasons that Muslims are now acceptable, and eventually Jewish immigration was curtailed by Republicans as undesirable so there is a Jewish shaped place in the DNC which does not exist in the RNC.
The Democrats are much more ‘racially’ aware and ‘racially sensitive’, and will keep that welcoming smile all the way to the extermination centre. Republicans tend to be more racially ‘blind’ they have not really got much truck with ‘identity politics’ and minorities.
To make America great again one must bring back American manufacturing not enhance minority ‘race’ politics, the Dems played the same old ‘race’ card and lost. Trump presented a vision of a post PC America, and it was more attractive. Many Jews see themselves as automatically ‘important’ to the DNC whereas in Republican circles they actually have to do something to ‘earn’ that accolade.
I recall (Republican candidate) Barry Goldwater being branded as “racist”, entirely without foundation.
Impressive that you remember Goldwater that well. Most liberals spit on him.
I once spent a year in Israel and didnt find much difference between Israeli jews and the protestants of my own country Denmark, except maybe that Israelis have what I would call a no nonsense pioneer attitude, whereas danes are mostly quite private, a bit timid and have a decidedly small town provinsial attitude that sometimes alows them to see through the [claptrap], but at other times make them confuse ignorance with brilliance.
I have my own private theory why jews as a Group can at times be very confusing to protestants of european descent, but if I am completely wrong or being rude, please dont hesitate to say so.
I think the solution to this conundrum is the simple fact that jews generally speaking score quite a bit higher on tests of Intelligence than the rest of us, and thus often excell at a number of things when they put their minds to it. When they put their mind to science they excell at science. When they put their mind to the creation of wealth they excell at that, and yes, when they put their mind to being stupid they excell at that too. Being stupid is not so much an empirical fact as it is a state of mind.
I have liked most jews I have met, but I admire the israelis, because they for most parts, have left their bagage behind them and decided to live in This world, warts and all, whereas lefties, lefty jews as well, prefer life in an imaginary world of shadows and never to be realised utopian ideals.
About excelling at things: some years ago we knew an Orthodox Jew who lived on the banks of the James River. He raised a herd of cattle, grass-fed, and we used to buy what we could from him. He mostly sold his beeves to butchers but had some set aside for people like us without the room to store a lot of food. His farm was beautiful.
He regretfully moved on to a place nearer an urban area since there were no synagogues here, thus no fellowship. Farms nearer the city are much more costly to buy and then to pay taxes on, but I could see his point…
…sometimes exotic birds wash up on our shores, but they usually leave for more familiar environs.
The clearest example of this was when Obama, around the time the Iran nuke deal was completed (though I understand it’s still unsigned), jetted out to LA and was doing his usual schmoozfest with Steven Spielberg et al. Apparently nobody in Hollywood gave a fig for the President’s horrendous targeting of Israel. That opened my eyes about Obama & American Jews readiness to betray Israel.