Jennifer Rubin, the conservative "Right Turn" columnist at the Washington Post, advises all of us to take a deep breath when it comes to considering polling of Jews.
She interviews Peyton Craighill, The Post’s polling manager:
[Craighill] offers some important cautions about efforts to poll a very small segment of the electorate. He told me yesterday, “It’s extremely difficult to find timely, reliable polling of Jewish samples. I know what Pew and Gallup have are based primarily on very large aggregations of Jewish respondents from their typical [random] samples. They basically pull together lots of interviews from their monthly or tracking polls.” There have been efforts to do more exact sampling, he says: “I know that the Pew Forum on Religion did a major poll in 2007 called their Religious Landscape Survey where they drilled down to a variety of denominations. They conducted over 35,000 interviews for that survey and got somewhere around 680 Jews using rigorous [random] sampling procedures.” Of course, this is “very expensive and time-consuming,” he notes.
So the bottom line is that all of these polls should be taken with a grain of salt. Peyton tells me: “The short answer is that the Jewish population is small enough that it is very expensive and time-consuming to conduct a poll using the highest methodological standards.”
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