Staff Writer

Did the massive and controversial Republican Jewish Coalition advertising campaign work?

Not according to national exit polls.

American Jews last week voted even more overwhelmingly Democratic than in previous congressional races, according to those surveys. But the RJC is arguing that its own Election Day poll showed Jewish support for the GOP holding steady from previous years despite a strong Democratic tide, and that its ads did make an impact on the Jewish electorate.

Democrats received 87 percent of the national Jewish vote for the House of Representatives, compared to just 12 percent for the GOP, according to data collected by the National Election Pool, a consortium of the television networks and the Associated Press. That's up from similar polls in elections during the past 14 years, which put the Democratic vote in the 72-78 percent range and Republicans in the 21-26 point range, depending on the year.

On the other hand, an RJC poll of Jews in New Jersey and in congressional districts in Pennsylvania and Florida in which Republican incumbents lost to Democratic challengers found that 26.4 percent of Jews voted for the Republican candidate. Among the 31.9 percent of those polled who saw an RJC newspaper ad, support for Republicans rose to 35.4 percent.

But an expert on Jewish political behavior, as well as a Jewish Democratic leader, raised questions about the RJC poll's usefulness in accurately measuring the U.S. Jewish vote, noting some problems with the survey's methodology and that it only surveyed Jews in three particular areas of the country.

The RJC poll comes after 2 1/2 months of weekly full-page RJC advertisements in major Jewish newspapers (and some Russian-language publications) around the country, as well as a 500,000-piece direct mail effort, that charged that the Democratic Party's support for Israel was weakening.

The ads used Sen. Joseph Lieberman's defeat in the Connecticut senatorial primary, polls showing stronger support for Israel among Republicans, votes against pro-Israel legislation by two senior Democratic members of Congress and critical comments by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter to argue that Democratic support for Israel is slipping. (The ads also featured people with little connection to the Democratic Party, such as anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.)

Thanks in part to those ads, RJC executive director Matt Brooks said last week that the story of the Jewish vote is "how strongly Jewish support for Republican candidates held firm" despite the electorate's move toward the Democratic Party in 2006.

"There's been some talk in the community about how effective the ad campaign was" and "it's illustrated" by the RJC's findings, Brooks told reporters on a conference call the day after Election Day.

Brooks said his poll, which surveyed 1,000 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, is more reliable than the national exit poll, which surveyed 265 Jews and has an error range of more than double the RJC survey.

He pointed to a New York Times article containing comments by network television executives and political analysts questioning the accuracy of the exit polls on Election Night because they seemed to heavily favor Democrats. Brooks said concerns about the precision of the exit polls during the past two elections led his group to commission its own poll.

But Kenneth Wald, a University of Florida political science professor who has written and taught about Jewish political behavior, said that for a variety of reasons, it isn't appropriate to compare the RJC survey to statistics garnered from exit polls during the past decade.

"It's a comparison of apples and oranges," said Wald.

First, he noted, the RJC survey was by telephone ‹ meaning there is no assurance those who say they voted or would vote actually did; exit polls are done at polling places.

Second, those questioned by the RJC were not selected randomly ‹ which pollsters believe is the best way to get a true depiction of community behavior ‹ but from "commercially available Jewish voter lists," according to Brooks, which identify Jewish names.

Brooks also said the RJC poll surveyed only those who identified themselves as Orthodox, Conservative or Reform Jews, and did not include secular or "non-affiliated Jews," a cohort often classified as "Just Jewish" in other surveys of the community.

"We wanted to measure people who are practicing Jews" and "expressed some level of religious observance," Brooks said.

But eliminating the category of "Just Jewish," which Wald said frequently receives the plurality of responses in other surveys asking Jews their denomination, is bound to affect the results, said Wald. He pointed out that the "Just Jewish" cohort is typically more politically liberal than Jews as a whole.

Thus, the sample in the RJC poll appears to have a heavier representation of Orthodox Jews ‹ generally considered to be more politically conservative than other Jewish denominations ‹ than the community does as a whole.

Almost 17 percent of the RJC poll identified as Orthodox, while only 8 percent did in an American Jewish Committee survey earlier this fall and 10 percent in the National Jewish Population Survey at the beginning of the decade.

National Jewish Democratic Council executive director Ira Forman also argued that Brooks' poll oversampled Republicans as well. The survey sample include 49.8 percent Democrats and 27.6 Republicans, while the AJC poll had a 54-15 percent split.

Perhaps most important, Wald and Forman noted that comparing a poll of the entire country with a survey of just three particular areas just doesn't work.

"Let's say [the RJC poll] was perfect," said Forman. If it were compared to other polls of those three districts, "then it would give a good snapshot" of those three districts," he said. "But it doesn't give a snapshot of the entire country."

On the RJC conference call last week, RJC board member and former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer explained that the organization decided to pick three "battlegrounds" instead of doing a nationwide poll because officials wanted to survey voters "where it mattered the most."

The overwhelming Democratic Jewish vote in areas like the Upper West Side of Manhattan "is not going to determine elections," he noted.

Fleischer and Brooks said that if they had wanted a pro-Republican result, they could have picked better jurisdictions. The Republican candidates for Senate in the three states they selected all lost by wide margins, and the GOP incumbent in the 22nd District in Florida, Clay Shaw, lost to Jewish Democrat Ron Klein. In Pennsylvania's 6th District, the GOP incumbent, Jim Gerlach, edged out Democrat Lois Murphy by about 3,000 votes.

Those areas "would not be [places] to get a result we were looking for," Fleischer said.

Forman responded that while the exit poll numbers may have faults, "they're what everybody looks to."

Brooks, in fact, sent reporters previous national exit polling results.

Wald acknowledged that the exit polls can have a "high degree of sampling error" because of the small number of Jews surveyed, but added that simply surveying more people did not mean a more accurate poll.

"The number is less important that how the number is obtained," said Wald.

Wald said that his criticisms didn't mean the RJC survey wasn't legitimate, but said it might be more useful in its measurement of whether the RJC ad campaign affected one's vote than in measuring the Jewish vote nationwide.

Meanwhile, that ad campaign will continue.

"We believe the ad campaign is good for Israel," Brooks said, because it "highlights the strong support" Israel gets from the GOP and holds "Democrats accountable."

Forman said "it was hard to say" whether the ad campaign made a difference, but believes it was "overwhelmed" by other issues that led the overall electorate to the Democratic side.

He also pointed out that the advertisements may have angered, and motivated, a lot of Jewish Democrats.

But even with the ad campaign, and using the most positive Republican numbers, the GOP only received slightly more than a quarter of the Jewish vote. But Fleischer put a positive spin on that number.

"The name of the game isn't to take the majority, but to win voters in the other party's base," he said. "If the Republicans continue to make inroads, it's hard for the Democrats to win the presidency."

Meanwhile, six new Jewish Democrats will enter the House of Representatives next month, raising the total number of Jewish members of the House from 26 to 30.

Two former Jewish representatives ‹ Maryland's Ben Cardin and Vermont's Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with the Democrats) ‹ moved up to the Senate, bringing Jewish representation in that body from 11 to 13, a record high.

The six Jewish pickups included three state legislators who ascended to Congress: Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona handily won a Tucson-area seat vacated by a Republican; Ron Klein in Florida ousted longtime Republican incumbent Clay Shaw; and Steve Cohen in Tennessee won the Memphis seat vacated by Harold Ford.

The other three Jewish winners were Paul Hodes of New Hampshire, John Yarmuth of Kentucky and Steve Kagen of Wisconsin.

In Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman won re-election as an "independent Democrat" over anti-war challenger Ned Lamont, who defeated the one-time vice presidential candidate in the August Democratic primary.

Lieberman was not universally supported by Connecticut's Jews, however, although he did win a strong 65-35 majority, according to an exit poll.

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), who drew strong pro-Israel opposition, lost his bid for re-election. His opponent, Sheldon Whitehouse, drew funding from the pro-Israel community. Chafee, chair of the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that deals with the Middle East, was strongly critical of Israel's West Bank settlement policy and recently blocked the nomination of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador to protest planned settlement expansion.

Ron Kampeas of JTA News and Features contributed to this report.