[NRO]
Within
the last hour, the first exit poll of 817 Americans in Israel, who
attended U.S. election voting events in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on
Tuesday evening to vote by absentee ballot, has been released.
A startling 76 percent of those polled said that they had voted for John McCain. This contrasts sharply with pre-election polls of American Jews in the U.S., which indicate a strong preference for Obama.
The exit poll findings of American voters in
Israel are all the more surprising because less than one in four were
registered Republicans, and 46% of registered Democrats living in Israel said they had crossed party lines to vote McCain. By contrast, the Republican crossover to Obama was minimal – just 2%.
The votes are significant as almost half of the
42,000 registered U.S. voters living in Israel come from key swing
states including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In the 2000 and 2004 elections, Israel had the third-largest group of American voters abroad, after Canada and Britain.
The
exit poll was commissioned by Votefromisrael.org, an independent,
non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting voter registration and
participation amongst American citizens living in Israel.
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