WASHINGTON — Despite a Jewish vice presidential candidate, Democrat Al Gore garnered only a bit more support among Jews than President Bill Clinton received when he ran for re-election four years ago.
According to exit polls compiled by Voter News Service, Gore and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) captured 79 percent of the Jewish vote — 1 percent more than Clinton in 1996 and 1 percent less than Clinton received in 1992.
But, both times, Clinton faced not only a Republican candidate but independent Ross Perot, who got 9 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992 and 3 percent four years later.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush came away with a larger share of the Jewish vote than other Republican candidates have in recent elections.
Bush received 19 percent, compared with 16 percent in 1996 for Bob Dole and 11 percent for Bush’s father in 1992.
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who ran on the Green Party ticket, garnered 1 percent of the Jewish popular vote Tuesday.
Popular wisdom had predicted a larger share of the Jewish vote for Gore, given the traditional Jewish inclination to vote Democratic combined with the assumption that some Independent or Republican voters might switch parties to see a Jewish vice president.
When Lieberman was tapped as Gore’s running mate this summer, the political talking heads saw visions of palm trees and Jewish retirees.
The personable Orthodox Jew, they agreed, would be a big plus for the Democrats in Florida, a state previously considered a lock for Bush. Florida, they predicted, could easily be the key to the presidential election.
They didn’t know how right they were.
At press time, it was still not certain who had won the closest presidential election in U.S. history, and the tight race in Florida was the reason why. Lieberman, political experts say, was the reason the Democrats were even in the Florida race.
But nationally, the Lieberman factor had a less pronounced impact.
Bush’s Jewish totals came despite widespread excitement about Lieberman’s status as the first Jew on a major party ticket.
“What it shows is that Jews remain overwhelmingly Democratic, but that the Republicans have a Jewish core of about 20 percent that will stick with them no matter what,” said a prominent Jewish Democrat. “Nationwide, Jewish excitement over Lieberman didn’t really affect that balance.”
If the presidential outcome was uncertain Wednesday, one thing was clear: The unprecedented electoral drama is a prescription for more of what has frustrated and thwarted Jewish lobbyists for six years — partisanship, rancor and legislative gridlock.
“We may well see a continuation of the politics of stalemate, which we’ve had now for four years,” said political historian Allan J. Lichtman of American University. “The intense partisanship made it very difficult for Clinton to act on his agenda; the narrow margin in Congress means we are likely to see much more of that.”
At press time, it was still unclear whether mostly liberal Jewish groups will face their nightmare scenario: a Congress dominated by conservative Republicans such as House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), teamed with a Republican president who will be much less inclined to veto bills that reflect the religious right agenda.
If he does survive the mandatory Florida recount, Bush is likely to be “more of a follower than a leader with respect to Congress,” Lichtman said.
But even if the landscape is purely GOP next January, the razor-thin GOP margin in both houses and the record closeness of the presidential race mean that drastic policy changes are unlikely, at least in the short term.
“You’ll either have total gridlock or you’ll have to find ways to govern from the center,” said Nathan Diament, director of the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs. “In this environment, if you want to get anything done, you have to do it in the middle. An extreme conservative or liberal agenda can’t succeed.”
Marshall Wittman, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said this week’s surprising developments “mean that the moderates in both parties will hold the balance of power. There is no mandate, so the only way to govern is to extend an olive branch to the other party.”
But Wittman conceded that “in the end, it may be easier to make peace in the Middle East than to do that.”
If Bush is declared the winner, he said, “I expect he will push aggressively for his tax cut proposals in his first year, and some kind of prescription drug plan and HMO reform. He will probably move very slowly on the conservative social agenda. He realizes that these issues are divisive, not only in general but among Republicans.”
Reva Price, Washington representative for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that continued GOP control of Capitol Hill and the possibility of a Republican president means “we will have to prioritize our agenda; we will have to try to decide what has a reasonable chance of succeeding in this new environment, and which issues we can afford to put off.”
Price said that Jewish groups will have to work even harder than they did in the 106th Congress to develop bipartisan coalitions on their top issues — no matter which presidential candidate emerges from the political fog in Florida.
Similarly, experts predict no major lurches in U.S. Mideast policy, but a likely change of emphasis.
“Bush is quite hard to predict,” said Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum and a persistent critic of the Clinton administration’s active Mideast efforts. “So far, in the name of national unity, he has simply joined with the administration on the Arab-Israeli question. There could be a real rethinking of U.S. policy in the region, but at this point it’s just speculation.”
But he said Bush is unlikely to invest the same kind of time and energy in Mideast negotiations than Clinton did.
Jewish Republicans point to a strong Jewish presence on Bush’s foreign policy advisory team; some, including former Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz and Dov Zackheim, are likely candidates for jobs at the Defense Department or the National Security Council.
But Jewish leaders also worry about what some say will be the return to influence of some of the leading figures in the foreign policy team of Bush’s father — including former Secretary of State James Baker III and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.
“Gore is a known quantity; Bush is a blank slate on foreign policy and the Middle East,” said a longtime Jewish activist here. “We have to assume that the real character of his policy toward Israel will depend on who he appoints to key foreign policy slots — and at this point, there’s a lot to worry about.”
Most observers say the likeliest candidate for Secretary of State in a Bush administration is former Gen. Colin L. Powell, who is regarded as strongly pro-Israel but whose primary focus will probably not be the Middle East.
But pro-Israel forces also worry about the influence of Bush’s running mate, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, whose record on Israel is mixed.
On the third party front, Reform party nominee Pat Buchanan — or at least one of the fractured party’s nominees — garnered less than 1 percent of the vote, which means his party will not get federal matching funds for the next election cycle.
That could effectively end the brief run of the party created by Ross Perot in the early 1990s, and consign Buchanan — the fiery conservative who never fails to raise the hackles of Jewish leaders — to the status of perennial political eccentric.
Green Party candidate Ralph Nader also failed to reach the 5 percent threshold but succeeded in playing the “spoiler” role for Gore in several states, possibly including Florida.
Nader, according to exit polls, received about 1 percent of the Jewish vote.