Mitt’s Pilgrimage: Can Romney swing American Jewish voters to the GOP ticket with his trip to Israel?
The U.S. presidential race might be deadlocked, but when Mitt Romney visits Israel on Sunday, July 29, the presumptive Republican nominee can reasonably expect the most heartfelt welcome he’ll receive anywhere outside Utah.
Israeli enthusiasm for Romney is not necessarily the result of a carefully cultivated relationship — as a former governor and business executive he had little time for foreign policy. Instead, affection for the candidate appears to be a clear case of ABO: Anyone But Obama.
The proof is in the polling. Thirty percent of Israelis surveyed think U.S.-Israel relations would improve under Romney, while a mere 8 percent said the same about a second Obama term. Among the 300,000 Americans living in Israel (half of whom are eligible to vote), support for Romney is twice as high as it is for Obama.
Romney’s two-day visit — during which he will also meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — is his fourth ever to Israel, and it’s his first foreign trip since clinching the Republican nomination. The stop is aimed at two constituencies the candidate is desperate to woo: evangelicals — reliably Republican but leery of his Mormonism — and Jewish Americans, heavily concentrated in swing states like Ohio and Florida and vexed, his campaign believes, by Obama’s policies toward the Jewish state.
“A lot of our members moved here as registered Democrats,” says Kory Bardash, co-chair of Republicans Abroad Israel, a partisan advocacy group that claims to mobilize upwards of 4,000 volunteers during election season. “A lot of people are now saying, ‘I’ve never voted Republican, but there’s no way I’m voting Obama.’ That includes many who voted for him in ‘08.”
There are now “tens of thousands” of Republican voters in Israel, according to Bardash, but the real purpose of Romney’s trip is to signal his commitment to Israel to voters back home — a cause that is aided by Obama’s apparent inability to connect with Israelis.