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Orthodox Jews: Key New York-Area Swing Voters?

Ortho Union points out role observant Jewish voters played in several area races

by
Allison Hoffman
November 06, 2009

Orthodox Jews are apparently the “long-suffering swing voters of the Jewish world,” at least according to the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs, which posted an unsigned blog item this morning rounding up various races in which Orthodox voters may have made a difference to the outcome, all of which were won by Republicans: Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral victory in New York City, Chris Christie’s gubernatorial win in New Jersey, and even some local county races in Long Island’s Five Towns area. All the races cited in the post put the Orthodox voters on the winning side, so we’re not sure how exactly they suffered—but we did notice that it overlooked the results of an election in the upstate New York town of Monroe, where voters in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Kiryas Joel helped oust a pair of longtime Republican local board members by throwing their support to the victorious Democratic challengers, apparently under the influence of “the Karl Rove of Monroe politics,” the local Times Herald-Record reports. (That guy, we should note, is a Democrat, so probably not really the Karl Rove of anything.) So it would seem they didn’t suffer there, either—but they did become a key swing vote.

Correction, November 10: This post originally credited the blog item posted by the Institute for Public Affairs to the organization’s director, Nathan Diament. It has been updated to reflect that the item was published unsigned.

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.