How many registered Jewish voters in US?

Answer 1

That's a difficult question to answer, seeing that there's no religious test for

voter registration, and there's not even a space to fill in your religion on the

registration forms ... you'd have to write it in the margin.

But if we assume that Jews register in roughly the same proportion as

everybody else, we ought to be able to back into an answer with the help of

data from the US Census Bureau.

For the November 2011 elections, 59.8% of the US general population over 18

years old were registered to vote. That should be a very helpful number. Let's

see what it would mean in terms of Jewish population in the US.

According to one on-line source that I consulted, the 2011 Jewish population of

the states ranges from less than 0.1% in North Dakota to 5.7% in New Jersey.

When the whole USA is put together, Jews total 2.1% of the population.

I see a little problem here with the information that I have: In the Census data,

registered voters are 59.8% of only the population over 18. But all I have for

Jews is the total Jewish population of the country, not the population over 18.

So for purposes of our present interesting but meaningless exercise, I need to

make a best-case/worst-case (depending on your particular bias) adjustment.

I suspect the questioner may be looking for evidence that Jews swing big influence

with the vote in this country, so I'm going to assume that Jews register more than

the general population . . . and that 59.8% of all US Jews are registered to vote,

and not only 59.8% of those over 18.

If that were the case, then there are a few ways to express an answer to the question:

-- One way to look at it:

Jews constitute 2.1% of the total US population.

We're assuming that 59.8% of all Jews are registered to vote.

So Jews registered to vote constitute 59.8% of 2.1% of the total US population,

or about 0.013 of the total population.

-- The other way:

The Jewish population of the USA at the end of 2011 was estimated at 6,588,065 .

If 59.8% of all Jewish men, women, children, and infants in the country are registered

to vote, then that's about 3.9 million Jewish registered voters.

How influential is that ?

In the US presidential election in 2008, there were 69,456,897 votes for the

Democratic candidate, and 59,934,814 for the Republican candidate. That total

is 129,391,711 . The total Jewish voter registration that I estimated up above

is about 3% of that number.

From another angle: If 59.8% of the total American Jewish population were

registered to vote, and every single registered voter turned out on election day

and cast a vote, and all of the Jews in this country voted as a single monolithic

bloc, every last one of them for the same candidate, then their votes would

have amounted to 5.7% of the Democratic popular vote, or 6.6% of the

Republican popular vote.

Spread that out among the 50 states, and it's hard to make a strong case that

the "Jewish vote" made the difference in awarding the winner-take-all electoral

vote of any state.

At least that's how it seems to me. I could be wrong.