WASHINGTON (JTA) — Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have virtually the same high approval ratings among American Jews.
Gallup said in a March 24 article on its website that an aggregation of Jewish respondents to its daily polling showed Jewish voters favor Sanders, an Independent Vermont senator, at 61 percent favorable, and Clinton, a former secretary of state, at 60 percent.
Sanders’ unfavorable ratings are 30 percent and Clinton’s are 35 percent.
Among Republican presidential candidates, only Ohio Gov. John Kasich has higher favorable than unfavorable ratings among Jewish voters, 45 percent to 28 percent. Kasich is last among candidates with delegates accumulated in the primaries.
The GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, a real estate magnate, scores 72 percent unfavorable to 24 percent favorable, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, 72 percent unfavorable to 20 percent favorable.
Gallup did not publish a margin of error, but said it had aggregated “a large sample of interviews” with Jewish respondents since January.
In the same article, Gallup said that among the general population, 24 percent agreed that the United States should move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, 20 percent disagreed and 56 percent agreed that they “don’t know enough to have an opinion.”
That was based on polling from March 9 to 14. Gallup did not publish a margin of error, but generally its daily election polling has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
All three Republican presidential candidates have said they would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Separately, a poll by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that Jews and Muslims are more likely to identify as Democrats rather than Republicans.
The January poll by the institute, which assesses issues of concern to American Muslims, found that Muslims are 44 percent likely to declare as Democrats, 41 percent as Independents and just 6 percent as Republicans. Jews, the poll found, are 50 percent likely to declare as Democrats, 29 percent as Independent and 16 percent as Republicans.
Catholics are equally split among the three categories — 34 percent Democrats, 34 percent Republicans and 31 percent Independents — and Protestants identified as Republican at 47 percent, Democrat at 25 percent and Independent at 24 percent.
The poll’s margin of error was 7 points for Muslims and Jews. The source of its data for Catholics and Protestants was not clear.
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