The Jewish vote, once pivotal in American politics, is still important, though not as much as it was seven decades ago. Back in the 1940s, Jews cast four percent of the votes in America, twice the percentage they do today. And they cast a much larger share in the state of New York, which in the politics of the first half of the 20th century was a closely fought state in any close presidential election. New York was then also the country’s largest state by far, with 47 electoral votes, and cast 13 percent of the nation’s popular votes (in the 1944 election a full seven percent of the popular votes, one out of every 14, were cast in the five boroughs of New York City).
Jewish voters in New York had little affection for the state’s Republican Party, predominantly upstate-based and Protestant, or for the heavily Catholic machine Democrats of New York City; and Jews stood to the left of both parties on economic and cultural issues. One of their favorite politicians was Fiorello LaGuardia, Jewish on his mother’s side, who was elected to Congress from East Harlem in the 1920s as the nominee of the Republican and Socialist parties and elected mayor in 1933, 1937, and 1941 over the opposition of the machine-run Democratic party, the first time as the Republican Party candidate and the last two times on the leftish American Labor Party tickets as well.
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