Staff Writer

Despite a multimillion dollar ad campaign by the Republican Jewish Coalition that played on voters' fears of President-elect Barack Obama, when Election Day arrived, Jews chose the Democrat.

"The RJC ran the most expensive, most aggressive, most despicable campaign ... [and] the good news is, it didn't work," said Steve Rabinowitz, a D.C. strategist who advises both Democratic and Jewish groups. "Every four years, my Republican friends say this is the year Jews will vote Republican and then every subsequent November, they're proven wrong."

It was a campaign saturated with rhetoric and negative attacks and experts were uncertain the Jewish community would fully embrace Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois. At one point in the early spring, Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) enjoyed nearly 34 percent of Jewish support, according to past Gallup tracking polls, with experts extolling the inroads he had made in the Jewish community.

By the morning of Nov. 5, however, it was clear that Jewish voters had remained in the Democratic camp, as 78 percent of them voted for Obama, according to multiple network exit polls, giving him more support than Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had received in 2004 and exceeding the expectations of many. McCain received 21 percent of the Jewish vote, according to the same exit polls.

"As hard as that number was for a lot of people to believe ... there's nothing else comparable," Rabinowitz said, explaining that Obama faced a difficult task in wooing Jewish voters away from McCain, a well-known moderate.

Overall, Jews made up two percent of the voting population nationwide, with higher concentrations in several swing states, such as Florida and Virginia. Analysts believe that the state-by-state breakdowns for the Jewish vote mirrored the national number; that is, it is unlikely that one state saw 90 percent Jewish support for Obama while another saw 60 percent.

Those interviewed ran down a lengthy list of obstacles that had the potential to hinder Obama in his presidential push, including vicious e-mail campaigns, controversial RJC newspaper and television ads and Obama's newcomer status, among others.

"I think [the fear] was there," said Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. "The flow of polls over the last six months indicated there were concerns driven by the e-mail campaigns and some of the sharply negative assertions that didn't seem to have much factual basis."

Critics had pointed to an early October Gallup Poll that showed Obama garnering only 60 percent of the Jewish vote, yet he was at 75 percent in the days leading up to the election and ended several points higher than that.

The three presidential debates "really made the community far more comfortable with" Obama, Saperstein said, explaining that the president-elect's steadiness and trust became apparent in response to tough policy and leadership questions. "It was less specific statements and positions he espoused ... as was his command of the issues ... that allowed the community to connect with him."

Rabinowitz, however, attributed Obama's success to the Democratic National Committee and its leader, Howard Dean (Rabinowitz's business partner, Matt Dorf, is an adviser to both).

The DNC "spent 3 1/2 years going after the Jewish community and other people of faith making sure they felt welcome and wanted in the Democratic Party," Rabinowitz said, listing an increase in surrogates, personal appearances by high-profile Democrats and other outreach efforts as major factors in Obama's victory.

Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said Obama's victory hinged largely upon America's failing economy and McCain's perceived incompetence on the issue.

"Some of these numbers rose as the economy dove [and] ... probably had some impact in the Jewish community," Forman said in a conference call with reporters a day after the elections, explaining that in this case, the Jewish vote reflected the general population.

The NJDC trained nearly 100 surrogates to speak around country, according to Forman, ran newspaper ad campaigns in pivotal swing states, sent 350,000 targeted pieces of mail to Jewish households, dropped 35,000 pieces of literature in key Jewish neighborhoods and ran Internet and Google word search campaigns.

"People wanted to feel comfortable voting for" Obama and the "more they heard from him ... the better they felt," Saperstein said of the multipronged effort to push Obama's message.

Like Rabinowitz, Forman also hailed the Democratic operation as "much more sophisticated and extensive than anything I've seen over 35 years."

Discussing the RJC's attempts to delegitimize Obama, Forman held the vote as a clear "repudiation of our opposition's over-the-top campaign."

But in an RJC conference call with reporters, Matt Brooks, the group's executive director, said RJC ads served their goal of creating dialogue on Obama's positions toward Israel and the Middle East.

Brooks did not characterize Obama's election as a pure Republican defeat, saying his party retained important gains they have made in the Jewish community during the past several years.

"Democrats failed to move the needle in a very major way," Brooks said, rationalizing that 78 percent of the Jewish vote -- a slight increase from Kerry's 74 percent -- is not enough to claim a huge victory.

"Obama's share of the Jewish vote lacks significantly in some cases behind other groups in terms of key demographic constituencies," Brooks said, concluding the Democrats failed to deliver record Jewish numbers as they should have. Catholics, for instance, were up seven percent in their support for Obama, as compared with Kerry.

"We were able to maintain our inroads among Jewish voters," he said, offering two key reasons: "Nagging doubts" among Jews about Obama's stance on Israel and "effective outreach and issue efforts" by the RJC.

Instead, the economy was to blame for McCain's fall among voters.

"Every exit poll shows that once the economic crisis started John McCain's support ... eroded as one would expect, like any kind of rising tide lifting all boats," Brooks said.

On the other hand, Ron Halber, the executive director for the Jewish Community Relations Council, said it was McCain's pick of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Ala.) that ruined his chances in the Jewish community.

"She was a disastrous pick for many people in the Jewish community," Halber said, explaining that for many Jews who were "up in the air, that kind of closed the deal" and pushed them to Obama. Though voters may have once viewed McCain as a moderate who would not push a conservative agenda, Halber said, his selection of Palin pushed that agenda the forefront.

Barbara Goldberg, a Democratic political activist from Potomac, was altogether riled by Brooks' statements.

"They failed because 77 percent of the Jewish voters did not believe them," she said. "It's reprehensible that members of the Jewish community would allow themselves to engage in such extreme and negative campaign behavior."

Support for Obama was also shored up by vast, on-the-ground outreach in states like Florida, which Brooks says could not be matched by the RJC.

"The huge amount of surrogate speakers that were down there and the Great Schlep and all that stuff, I'm surprised [the numbers] are not much higher than they actually came out to be," Brooks said.

But Jewsvote.org co-founder and organizer of The Great Schlep Ari Wallach dismissed this "spin," saying the RJC holds a clear financial advantage.

"The RJC's annual catering budget is probably larger than our annual total budget," Wallach said, while also taking credit for Obama's victory in the Jewish community.

"We could say things ... [like], 'He's black; let's talk about it.' Campaigns can't say that, but we can because we're talking amongst the community," Wallach said.

In Virginia, a swing state, Obama won 50.2 percent of the vote to McCain's 45.8 percent. Jewish voters accounted for 35,750 votes of Obama's 202,093 statewide margin, or nearly 18 percent of that margin, according to estimations by the NJDC.

"There's no question that there's a meaningful Jewish population in Northern Virginia," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who spoke about election results in the NJDC's conference call.

Maryland overwhelmingly went to Obama, with 62 percent of voters supporting him to McCain's 37 percent, according to CNN. Jewish voters accounted for 85,728 votes of a 581,000 statewide margin for Obama, or almost 15 percent.