Here’s an interesting report from Ben Koons at the Princeton Tory.

In the article below, Koons examines the politics of Jewish students at Princeton and how that relates to national politics.

In the waning months of the 2008 presidential campaign, the Pew Research Center found that then-Senator Barack Obama surged from 62 percent of the Jewish vote as of June to 78 percent on Election Day. In a matter of five months, he went from nearly 20 points behind the last few Democratic presidential candidates in this demographic to nearly even with them by softening his message on Israel. There are less than seven million people in the United States who self-identify as Jewish, but they are also more concentrated in one of the most important swing states in elections for the past decade—Florida. Four percent of Florida’s voters are Jewish, which is one percentage point more than Obama’s 2008 lead in the state.

Despite his May 2011 speech about Israel-Palestine negotiations based on pre-1967 borders, it seems unlikely that President Obama will lose the Jewish vote in 2012. However, the Jewish population of the United States is becoming increasingly conservative. In a 2008 Gallup poll, half of Jews in all age groups identified as liberal, but among those under 35, nearly twice as many (29 percent) identified as conservative as among older Jews (16-17 percent). The younger generation of Jews is still generally liberal, but moderates are losing out to conservatives. The only Jewish Republican in Congress, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), shines as one of the bright lights of conservatism in Washington and represents a hope for more conservative Jews in the Republican leadership.

Conservatives often pride themselves on not falling into the trap of “identity politics.” An article identifying conservatives based on their faith seems to fall into this trap. In my interviews with Jewish conservatives on campus, however, I found that faith plays only a marginal role in forming political opinions, with the notable exception of opinions on American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Read it all at the link below.