By Joanna Chen
As Democratic candidate Barack Obama continues to lead in polls across the United States, Republican candidate John McCain might take comfort in the results of the first exit poll of the presidential race released last week in Israel. Published by Keevoon Research Strategy and Communications, the poll gives a landslide victory to the Republicans, with 76 percent of the mostly Jewish respondents living in Israel voting by absentee ballot for McCain. That runs counter to a recent Gallup poll of Jewish American voters in the United States, in which 74 percent of respondents favored Obama. Keevoon CEO Mitchell Barak stresses that the Israeli poll, commissioned by the nonpartisan organization Vote from Israel, surveyed "real people, real voters [and] real U.S. citizens."
What do these results mean for the general election on Tuesday?
That's hard to say. Israeli Americans are very different from U.S. voters in general. Orthodox Jews accounted for 70 percent of the respondents, who voted overwhelmingly for McCain; the 8 percent of secular voters went largely for Obama. Whereas the economic crisis is uppermost in the minds of most U.S. voters, Israeli Americans were more concerned with foreign policy--57 percent cite foreign policy as the most important issue influencing their choice, and many admit deep concern about a nuclear Iran. Only 14 percent indicated that the economy was their top worry. Thirty one percent of the respondents are first-time voters, many
under the age of 25.
Although it's easy to dismiss the results of this poll as marginal, there are over 42,000 Americans living in Israel who are registered voters and around half come from key swing states. On November 4, these votes could be critical.
