During the lead up to both the 2004 election and the 2006 midterms, I spent a great deal of time trying to dispel the notion that American Jews were on the verge of renouncing their historic ties with the Democratic Party after having voted Democratic in every presidential election dating back to 1928. African-Americans were similarly said to be moving away from the Democratic Party to the GOP ahead of the 2004 election, and to this end in 2005, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman apologized for his party's "Southern strategy" in the hopes of bringing more African-Americans into his party.

Of course non of the poppycock about Jews and African-Americans switching their allegiances from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was proved to be founded in reality. According to exit polling from 2004, John Kerry received about 88 percent of the African-American vote and 74 percent of the Jewish vote (the latter figure being estimated to be low by The Solomon Project [.pdf]). Likewise, exit polling from 2006 showed that 89 percent of African-Americans voted for Democratic House candidates nationwide while 87 percent of Jews did so. And new polling indicates that on the issue of greatest importance to the American people today -- Iraq -- African-Americans and American Jews are the most strongly opposed to the politics and policies advanced by this current Republican administration as it relates to Iraq. Gallup has the details.

An analysis of Gallup Poll data collected since the beginning of 2005 finds that among the major religious groups in the United States, Jewish Americans are the most strongly opposed to the Iraq war. Catholics and Protestants are more or less divided in their views on the war, while Mormons are the most likely to favor it. Those with no religious affiliation also oppose the war, but not to the same extent that Jewish people do. The greater opposition to the war is not simply a result of high Democratic identification among U.S. Jews, as Jews of all political persuasions are more likely to oppose the war than non-Jews who share the same political leanings.

For this analysis, Gallup combined 13 surveys from the last two-plus years that measured both support for the Iraq war (using Gallup's "mistake for the U.S. to send troops to Iraq" question) and respondent religious affiliation, for a combined sample of more than 12,000 interviews. Across the time period these 13 surveys covered, an average of 52% of Americans opposed the war by saying the United States made a mistake to invade Iraq, and 46% favored the war by saying it did not make a mistake.

Looking at the specific polling data, by a 77 percent to 21 percent margin, Jews state that they believe that going to war with Iraq was a mistake; Black Protestants say the same thing by a 78 percent to 18 percent margin. Both of these margins are significantly larger than the 52 percent to 46 percent spread among all Americans. Givent he fact that Iraq is THE cleavage within the electorate today -- polling cited here last month showed a 98 percent correlation between views on Iraq and of President Bush -- it's fairly safe to say that the data on the views towards Iraq held by African-Americans and Jews do not augur well for Republican attempts to break these groups away from the Democratic Party any time soon.