A heavy turnout of Jewish voters gave Rep. Edward Koch his substantial victory over Mario Cuomo in yesterday’s run-off election for the Democratic Mayoral nomination. A survey of election districts with large Jewish populations showed that two out of three voters pulled the lever for Koch, who is Jewish.
He also did surprisingly well in Puerto Rican and Protestant districts, though less so where Black voters predominated. But it was Koch’s ability to capture the strongholds of both Mayor Abe Beame and challenger Bella Abzug, who were defeated in the Mayoral primaries on Sept. 8, that accounted for his 55-45 percent margin over Cuomo who is of Italian descent.
In the heavily Jewish 28th Assembly District in Forest Hills, Queens, Koch won 72 percent of the vote compared to his 32 percent there II days ago. He also won 60-70 percent in the Boro Park, Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island districts of Brooklyn where Beame made his best showing and in Far Rockaway, Queens. All of those districts are Jewish enclaves with a large number of Orthodox Jews.
But Koch also did well among liberal Jews who had supported Abzug. He received 65 percent of the vote in Greenwich Village and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Abzug had run strongly ahead of her six primary rivals.
Traditionally, more Jews than members of any other ethnic group in the city turned out to vote. Cuomo received the same proportion of the vote among white Catholics as Koch did among Jews but the Catholic voter turnout was not as large. In the November elections, Koch will face two Jewish candidates, State Sen. Roy Goodman, who won the Republican nomination Sept. 8 and radio talk show host Barry Farber, the Conservative Party candidate. Cuomo will run on the Liberal Party line.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
