Democratic and Republican-aligned groups offered conflicting analysis and spin Wednesday to describe how a newly re-elected President Obama fared among the Jewish American electorate in Tuesday’s polls, after a year in which tens of millions of dollars were spent in Republican ad campaigns depicting Obama as having "thrown [Israel] under the bus," as Mitt Romney put it in September.
Nationwide, Jewish voters went for Obama 70% to 30% for Romney in the 2012 presidential race, according to a survey of 800 Jewish American voters conducted by Gerstein Bacion Agne Strategies for left-leaning J Street. That compared with 74% of the Jewish vote going for Obama in his 2008 race against Republican John McCain. Obama fared similarly among Jewish voters in two key swing states: Florida, where Obama this year won 68% of the Jewish vote, and Ohio (69%), according to the J Street/GBA poll.