Bill De Blasio was elected New York City’s mayor by a landslide. He appears to have won the Jewish vote, too, but perhaps just barely.
An exit poll suggests that New York Jews, as a group, are no longer the pillar of liberalism that they once were.
Whereas De Blasio took 73 percent of the overall vote, the exit poll found him winning just 51 percent of the Jewish vote to Republican Joe Lhota’s 45 percent. The Jewish proportions roughly approximate the breakdown of the larger white vote (52-43).
One big caveat: The Jewish stats need to be taken with a grain of salt. Only 2,122 voters were surveyed. That gives the exit poll a margin of error of only plus or minus 4 percent overall. But for small subgroups like Jews — who were only 16 percent of the respondents — the potential for sampling error is much greater, as the footnote at the bottom of The New York Times analysis acknowledges.
UPDATE: For another angle on how the Jewish vote might have gone, a pre-election NBC 4-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll found 52 percent of registered Jewish voters saying they were leaning toward De Blasio, with 38 percent for Lhota and 7 percent undecided, which is almost identical to the breakdown the survey yielded among whites in general. (Among all registered voters, the poll had De Blasio beating Lhota by a 63-21 margin with the rest either undecided or backing minor-party candidates.)
UPDATE 2: The New York Jewish Week took a look at the election results with an article titled, “Jewish Voters More Divided Than Other Groups.”
