Exit Polls Favour McCain – In Israel

Ha’aretz is reporting that American Israelis are coming out overwhelmingly via exit polls for John McCain at a ratio of 3:1.

American citizens who voted in the U.S. presidential elections via absentee ballots from Israel overwhelmingly favored Sen. John McCain, according to exit polls released Thursday. Seventy-six percent said they voted for the Republican candidate, while only 24 percent voted for the Democrat Barack Obama.

The poll was based on data from about 800 voters who attended U.S. election events, one in Tel Aviv and two in Jerusalem, and from among 1,700 citizens who were helped with registering online by VoteFromIsrael.org, the recently-founded non-partisan voter support group who commissioned the poll.

More than two thirds of those polled attended events in Jerusalem; there, 76 voted for McCain and 24 for Obama. Just nine percent of those polled were in Tel Aviv, where votes were split almost evenly: 51 percent voted for the Republican while 49 favored the Democrat.

Seventy percent of those polled defined themselves as either Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox. Four percent said they were not Jewish. Only 52 percent also posses Israeli citizenship, while almost a third of are students. Almost 60 percent said that "foreign policy including Israel" was the most important factor that influenced their decision; only nine percent said that the war in Iraq was the most important factor.

It is still nice to see Obama’s flip-flopping on Jerusalem or his visits and speech to Hamas dominated Al Quds university has not gone unnoticed among Israeli-Americans – even among the latte crowd of Tel Aviv. Now I would be remiss if I didn’t point out most Israelis of American extraction don’t leave American in order to have a more financially stable life but do so out of a need to have a more Jewish life and as such hold traditional Jewish values in high esteem but it will be interesting to see how US Jewry breaks.