1972 Jewish Voting Pattern is ‘liberal’

Pollster Louis Harris estimated that 57 percent of the nation’s Jewish vote in the Presidential election went to Democratic candidate Sen. George McGovern and 43 percent to President Nixon. Harris’ data differed with a CBS report that 32 percent of Jewish votes went to Nixon and 66 percent to McGovern. with one percent for “others.” With most votes tabulated, the total vote for Nixon is 60 percent and McGovern 38 percent.

Harris offered his statistics on Jewish voting patterns in response to questions at the National Press Club last Friday after he discussed attitudes of the candidates and of the voters on issues in the 1972 campaign. He said that the 1972 Jewish vote for Nixon was triple the Jewish vote for Nixon in 1968.

Harris called the Jewish voting the “most interesting” of the election. He asserted that after the 43 percent of the Jews who voted for Nixon cast their ballots, “like most of the voters, they salved their consciences by voting Democratic” for other candidates. He said 85 percent of Jewish voters were nominally Democrats.

JEWS LESS RACIALLY AFFECTED

According to Harris, his findings indicated that American Jews were “less racially affected than any other group” of American voters. He said that a slight majority of Jews–51 percent–were opposed to forced busing of children for school integration and he compared that percentage to 80 percent of the nation as a whole opposed to such busing.

Warren Metofsk, associate director of the CBS news election unit, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that CBS research had indicated that the Jewish vote on Nov. 7 was four percent of the total national vote. Newsweek magazine reported that 18 percent of the Jewish vote went to Nixon in 1968 and that last week Nixon received 37 percent of the Jewish vote, or slightly more than double the 1968 vote.