A Republican Rainbow?

__"New Bedfellows" by Peter Beinart, in The New Republic (Aug. 11 & 18, 1997), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.__

Many liberal politicians and community activists take it for granted that Jews and "people of color" such as Latinos should stick together in politics. And in city after city, state after state, Jews and Latinos are voting the same way, writes Beinart, a New Republic senior editor. "What they do not do—to the great surprise of leaders in both communities—is vote like African Americans."

Beinart says that the new ballot-box alliance has become evident recently in a number of closely watched elections around the country and been a crucial factor in some of them. In Los Angeles this spring, moderate Republican mayor Richard Riordan, challenged by liberal-left Democrat Tom Hayden, won 70 percent of the Jewish vote, 60 percent of the Latino vote—and only 25 percent of the black vote. In the mayoral contest in Houston in 1991, white businessman Bob Lanier, running against a liberal black state legislator, won 70 percent of the Jewish vote, 70 percent of the Latino vote—and only five percent of the black vote. In New Jersey’s 1993 gubernatorial race, Republican Christie Todd Whitman garnered 45 percent of the Latino vote and 40 percent of the Jewish vote in beating incumbent Democratic governor Jim Florio, who won 75 percent of the black vote. In Illinois in 1994, moderate Republican governor Jim Edgar captured a majority of the Jewish vote and one-third of the Latino vote, to win re-election; his Democratic foe got 85 percent of the black vote.

In many large cities and states, both Latinos and Jews "are proving themselves far more economically conservative than African Americans, and far more conservative on crime," Beinart says. In Houston, for instance, most Latinos "don’t live the same sort of lives" as most blacks, whom they now slightly outnumber. The Latinos (mostly Mexican Americans) are less likely to be jobless, to work for the government, or to be in single-parent families, and more likely to own their own businesses.

Jewish political identity, too, Beinart contends, is no longer as "liberal" as it once was. A recent survey, for instance, shows that 62 percent of American Jews oppose government redistribution of wealth. In New York City, mayoral aspirant and Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger "is articulate, wonkish and compassionate—an embodiment of Jewish left-liberalism," Beinart says. "And, outside of her base on the Upper West Side, she is getting creamed by Republican incumbent Rudy Giuliani—among Jews." Jules Polonetsky, an Orthodox Jew on Giuliani’s ticket, says that people see Messinger as "the kind of liberal Jewish leftist who’s willing to be mugged because the mugger had a bad childhood."

Despite the new reality at the state and local levels, Beinart says, both Jews and Latinos are alienated by Republican attacks on immigration, cultural diversity, and minority rights, and "are refusing to follow white ethnics into the national GOP in significant numbers." Because of their party registration and presidential voting patterns, they still look like anchors of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. In fact, though, he maintains, "they are stranded together in a fiscally conservative, culturally cosmopolitan political no-man’s land. And they are a large part of the reason that growing numbers of candidates who are themselves ideologically stranded between the two parties— Whitman, Riordan, Edgar—have in recent years been elected."