GOP sees Iran deal as chance to siphon off Jewish voters
Republicans are making some inroads, but majority of US Jews still tend to vote Democrat in national elections
MIAMI (AP) — Republicans are trying to seize on President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and strained ties with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cultivate Jewish voters, reasoning that a small shift in the margins could help them in battleground states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Democrats dismiss the effort as demagoguery from the right, saying that most Jewish voters will remain loyal to the left. The front-runner for their party’s presidential nomination, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, is among those supporting the agreement.
Congress will have a 60-day window to review the Iran deal and could pass legislation stopping Obama from lifting its sanctions on Iran. Republican debates, which begin next month, give Republican hopefuls a stage to keep the topic on the 2016 radar.
Obama said he hopes the debate on the deal would be “based on the facts, not on politics, not on posturing.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Mark McNulty said the agreement to restrict Iranian nuclear development in exchange for sanctions relief is “the brainchild of Obama and Clinton, so it could be very appealing for a Jewish voter to consider a Republican in the White House.”
Successful candidates, he said, will be able to tie Clinton to the deal, which she helped to initiate as secretary of state by starting secret talks with Iran.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and other Republican candidates are doing just that. “In the end, this should have been a confrontation between a superpower and an illegitimate third-rate autocracy,” he wrote for Breitbart News. “Instead, the Obama/Clinton team settled for trading carrots and sticks and hoping for elusive signs of moderation from cruel theocrats.”
For Clinton, the topic presents fresh challenges as her campaign tries to maintain strong ties to Jewish voters and donors focused on Israel’s security.
The Democratic Party has consistently won broad support from Jewish voters. Since President Bill Clinton’s first White House victory in 1992, Democrats have gained about three-quarters of the Jewish vote in presidential campaigns.
Obama faced tens of millions of dollars in Republican advertising questioning his commitment to Israel in 2012, but he won about 70 percent of Jewish voters. Democrats say most Jews are not single-issue voters: The economy and health care sway Jewish voters in greater numbers than the US relationship with Israel.
Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown said that even if some Jewish voters turn from Democrats, “it’s only going to matter in the swing states of Florida, and maybe Ohio and Pennsylvania,” because of their large Jewish populations.
Jane Eisner, executive editor of Forward, an influential national Jewish publication, said most Jewish voters are “looking for a certain level of commitment to Israel’s security,” then look to other issues to decide who gets their vote.
Eisner said the Republicans are making some inroads on the Jewish vote because of the changing population, not politics. Orthodox Jews, who are conservative, are the fastest-growing segment of the community, she said.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press
The Times of Israel Community.