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Newsweek has more on efforts by Bush/Cheney to woo the Jewish vote, which is traditionally quite Democratic. What's going on here? Not a macro strategy, but a micro one:
Though Jews make up only 4 percent of the nation’s electorate, they usually turn out to the polls in droves. What’s more, Jews are concentrated in key battleground states—most importantly Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. A five-point shift in Florida—where, despite Giuliani’s pleas, the victory margin may well be whisker-thin again—could signify more than 20,000 votes...
Virtually no one would argue that a wholesale realignment of the Jewish vote is underway. Instead, the campaigns are battling over slivers of the electorate that could prove decisive in tightly contested states.
Most interesting: That in the AJC poll discussed the other day, a very healthy majority of those polled think Bush is massively failing on key national security issues:
In an American Jewish Committee poll released Wednesday, Kerry garnered 69 percent of the Jewish vote, compared to 24 percent for Bush—a five-point uptick from the president’s performance in 2000 but a seven-point drop from his showing in an AJC poll last December. There were other troubling findings for Bush: 52 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the president’s handling of the campaign against terrorism, 66 percent disapproved of his handling of the war in Iraq and 57 percent think that the threat of terror has grown as a result of the war.
Fifty-seven percent think the threat of terror has grown as a result of the Iraq war. Sixty-six percent disapprove of Bush's handling of the Iraq war. You don't get much higher disapproval than that.