The NYT's attempt to blame the Jews for the majority against the Iran nuclear deal
By Michael Barone (@michaelbarone) • 9/22/15 8:05 PM
The New York Times has taken some flak, rightly so, for running an interactive chart showing the Democratic members of Congress opposed to Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, together with an indication (by a yellow line!) of which ones are Jewish and the percentage of Jews in their home states or districts. The plain implication is that these members were voting their religion over their party (and, if you take the view of many of the president's supporters, putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States). This is poisonous stuff. But it's also just plain foolish, for a number of reasons.
First, Jews are not the only Americans who oppose the deal. That means that majorities in most states and congressional districts oppose it. Most polls show most Americans oppose it. It's not remarkable that some members of the president's party would oppose the president's policy in these circumstances, any more than it's remarkable that almost all members of the opposition party would do so (one Republican member voted present rather than against the deal).
Second, only 2 percent of Americans are Jewish, as the data relied on by the Times interactive team indicates. And, as the data indicates, Jews are spread very unevenly across the country. Only 10 states and the District of Columbia have a higher Jewish percentage of population than the 2.2 percent national average: the Acela states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and D.C.), Florida in the South, Illinois (barely over the national average) in the Midwest and California and Nevada in the West. Only two states have a Jewish percentage over 4 percent: New York (9 percent, down from 14 percent in 1971) and New Jersey (6 percent, unchanged from 1971).
Third, not all Jews strongly support Israel and many, perhaps a majority of American Jews, look askance at Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. And there are other demographic groups whose members tend to support Israel by margins similar to or greater than those among American Jews, mostly notably white evangelical Protestants. In 2012, 2 percent of voters were Jewish and 26 percent — 13 times as many — were white evangelical Protestants. The Times, for whatever reason, did not grace us with an interactive graphic showing the votes on the Iran deal of white evangelical members of Congress (most of whom but perhaps not all, I'm guessing, are Republicans) and the white evangelical percentages in their states and districts (I'm pretty sure there are no reliable district-by-district data on this).
Fourth, let's have a little historic perspective. The Jewish percentage of the American electorate in the 1940s was 4 percent, double that of today; in part because of low Jewish population growth since, in part because the exclusion of most blacks from voting in the 1940s resulted in higher-than-population-average percentages for most non-black groups. According to the data used by the Times, the Jewish percentage of the American population has declined in recent decades, from 3.0 percent in 1971 to 2.1 percent in 2014. Interestingly, while the Jewish percentage in all but one Western state has increased in that period, often very marginally, the exception is California, where it declined from 3.6 to 3.2 percent. Outside the West, the Jewish percentage has declined in all but seven other non-Western states plus D.C. Where has it risen? In the three northern New England states (Bernie Sanders was not alone in moving there), the South Atlantic states of Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia plus D.C. (Northeasterners moving south on I-95), and Kansas (I'm guessing that Jews moved from Kansas City, Missouri, to its affluent suburbs in Johnson County, Kansas).
Fifth, as the Times notes, some Democrats voting against the deal have very few Jewish constituents — 1 percent or 0 percent, rounded off. Why did Senator Joe Manchin (W.V.) or Congressmen Gene Green (Texas 29), Daniel Lipinski (Ill. 3), Brad Ashford (Neb. 2), Juan Vargas (Calif 51) and David Scott (Ga. 13) join the Republican majorities in voting against the deal? Out of conviction, I suspect, for the reasons given in their public statements. Nothing remarkable in that. What is remarkable is that bipartisan congressional majorities oppose an important foreign policy agreement of this president. Trying to explain that by suggesting that the Democrats in that group were bowing to pressure from Jewish voters is an attempt to distract readers from what is in fact the genuine big story.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-nyts-attempt-to-blame-the-jews-for-the-majority-against-the-iran-nuclear-deal/article/2572641
