Six short political comments for Super Tuesday

1.

What are Jewish Republicans going to do if Donald Trump wins the primaries and becomes the party’s nominee? I have had conversations – or exchanged emails – with several such friends, that is, American friends who tilt heavily rightward, and all but one of them seemed either torn or in denial.

That one friends said: ‘Yes, I see the problems with Trump, and I would not vote for him in a primary, but in a general election match against Clinton I will not have any problem voting for him. Clinton means another Obama term. I can’t stand for that.’

Some of the other friends said: 'he is not yet the candidate.' Others said: 'we still hope something will come up.' Or they said: 'we don’t know what we are going to do.' There were also those who said: 'we can’t vote for him, and we don’t know what we will do.'

2.

Jacob Heilbrunn is a little obsessed with the “neocons,” but this does not discount his prediction that many of them are going to abandon the GOP and vote for Clinton in the coming election. I say this not because all neocons are Jews or because all Republican Jews are neocons. I say this because some of the friends from my previous point are Jews and neocons and might fit Heilbrunn’s description:

If Donald Trump, as seems more than likely, prevails in the GOP primary, then a number of neocons may defect to the Clinton campaign. Already Robert Kagan announced in the Washington Post on Thursday that he intends to back Hillary Clinton if Donald Trump receives the GOP nomination. The fact is that the loyalty of the neocons has always been to an ideology of American exceptionalism, not to a particular party.

3.

Really? Clinton?

The more you read from these Clinton emails, the more you realize that, like or hate Trump, Hillary is not what Prime Minister Netanyahu was hoping for.

My friends at the Jewish Insider have the one in which she was “advised to assail Netanyahu for abandoning his commitments to the peace process and publicly acknowledge J Street during a 2010 speech at AIPAC’s Policy Conference in Washington, DC.”

It is important to note that she did not heed to that advise, and that many of the supposedly damning Clinton emails on Israel originate from one source: Sid Blumenthal. But some aren’t, and In Politico you can read one of them – the one in which she says: “even the allure of Mother Moon in all her glory is unlikely to impress the PM.” That is, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

4.

So far, we have no clue how Jews voted in the primaries (in Nevada, for which we do have data for 2008, the religion question was not asked this time). Hopefully, today we will get a first glimpse of the Democratic Jewish vote in Massachusetts and maybe Colorado. Clinton or Sanders? In 2008, more Massachusetts Jews voted for Obama than for Clinton.  Stay tuned.

5.

It is also time to wonder about the 2016 Jewish vote in the general election and, more specifically, whether Clinton has a chance to set a new record by getting more than all Presidential candidates before her – thanks to Trump.

The record would not be a small feat: 90% for Johnson in 1964, and 90% for FDR before him. Maybe a record of the last 50 years, in which Humphrey had the highest number with 81%, followed by another Clinton with 80%.

There are really three questions that will determine whether a new record is feasible: Is Hillary Clinton as appealing to Jewish voters as were Humphrey and Bill Clinton were at the time? (I assume the answer is no.) Has the Jewish community changed in its voting habits? (The answer is: maybe a little, but not much.) And is Trump more threatening than Nixon in 1968 and Bush in 1992? (I think he probably is, but I was too young when Nixon was elected to remember.)

6.

Amid all the talk about Israel's growing popularity problems, it was refreshing to see that Gallup's update found no serious trouble with Israel's image in the US.

Americans' views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained steady over the past year, with 62% of Americans saying their sympathies lie more with the Israelis and 15% favoring the Palestinians.

Our Favorability Tracker shows that the gap between Israel and the Palestinians, when it comes to American support, has been growing in recent years. And this trend continues this year with the gap climbing from 46% to 47%.

The gap that somewhat narrowed this year is the one between Republicans and Democrats. Israel “gained back” some Democrats – or maybe it was the other way around and Democrats came back to Israel – and lost some Republicans. While many Jewish media outlets (JJ included) tended to emphasize the former (Democratic support), I think the latter is more interesting in lieu of today's elections. The GOP is clearly going through change, and whether a change in GOP voters' sympathy for Israel is changing with it can become a serious question in the coming months and years.