Thai women use pro-democracy protests to challenge sexism
by Nanchanok Wongsamuth | @nanchanokw | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 3 November 2020 01:00 GMT

At protest sites throughout the country, people are being asked to sign petitions calling for abortion and prostitution to be decriminalised

By Nanchanok Wongsamuth

BANGKOK, Nov 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Napawn Somsak took to the stage in her school uniform, her hair in pigtails, to denounce sexism in Thai society and question the treatment of a royal princess - an act unthinkable before the protests that have roiled the country in recent months.

Before a cheering crowd of more than 2,000 people in the northern province of Chiang Mai, the 18-year-old demanded to know why women are paid less than men and cannot be ordained into the influential Buddhist monkhood.

Somsak is among the large numbers of young Thai women calling publicly for change, emboldened by widespread demonstrations to demand the departure of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and reforms to the powerful monarchy.

"If we believe that everyone is equal and there is a need to reform the value of patriarchy in Thai society, then no one, including the monarchy, should be exempted," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

The protests have swept away a longstanding taboo on discussing the royal family, allowing Somsak to refer in her address to a royal princess who was stripped of her titles after marrying a foreigner - although she stopped short of naming her.

Princess Ubolratana Rajakanya Sirivadhana Barnavadi was required to give up the title Her Royal Highness after marrying an American fellow student while studying in the United States.

The Royal Palace and the Department of Women's Affairs and Family Development declined to comment on the protests, which began as political but have expanded to cover everything from corruption in the military to women's rights.

The Palace has made no official comment on the protesters, but on Sunday, King Maha Vajiralongkorn said "we love them all the same" in his first direct public comments on months of demonstrations.

Protesters say they do not seek to abolish the monarchy, only reform it. But the Thai constitution says the monarchy is "enthroned in a position of revered worship" and conservatives are horrified by such attacks.

Chumaporn Taengkliang, co-founder of Women for Freedom and Democracy, speaks on stage at a protest site in Bangkok on September 19, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Karnt Thassanaphak

SUPPRESSION

Many of the young protesters are students who also complain of a school system that emphasises obedience and tradition, from lining up daily for the national anthem to strict rules on uniforms, haircuts and behaviour.

Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of Ubon Ratchathani University's Faculty of Political Science, said women faced more suppression than men in schools.

"The political space is opening up for young girls, who have long been suppressed," he said.

At protest sites throughout the country, people are being asked to sign petitions calling for abortion and prostitution to be decriminalised.

Women for Freedom and Democracy, a pressure group that formed in August, distributes sanitary pads and has also developed an online system to report sexual harassment.

More than 40 cases have been reported and it is providing legal advice on some.

But it is the group's organised "pussy painting" - colouring in an image of a vagina - that has garnered the most attention.

"People are excited because normally we don't talk about the vagina in public," said Kornkanok Khumta, a member of the group.

"As time goes by, people are getting better at colouring and they feel empowered that their sexual organ is mentioned in a protest site."

Anti-government demonstrators colour drawings of vaginas at a protest site in Bangkok on September 19, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Women for Freedom and Democracy

DEMANDS FOR CHANGE

King Vajiralongkorn was officially crowned as constitutional monarch in May last year after first taking the throne following the 2016 death of his widely revered father, who reigned for 70 years.

He has been married four times and his relationships with women have been the subject of scrutiny.

Last year, he stripped his royal consort of her titles and military ranks for being "disloyal", only to reinstate them in September.

Thai student groups have laid out 10 demands for change, including reducing the king's constitutional powers, personal control of the royal fortune and of some units of the army.

Chumaporn Taengkliang, who co-founded Women for Freedom and Democracy, wants them to add one more demand - that impunity for domestic or sexual violence should end.

"The monarchy is an important role model for the country, and if they have impunity when it comes to domestic or sexual violence, it is not surprising that a husband or father has impunity when they use violence among family members," she said.

"In a society in which people of all levels are oppressed, women are oppressed even more. They can't stand it any more."

Related stories:

Thailand's sex workers petition to decriminalise prostitution

Thailand pledges to protect women who report sexual abuse

INTERVIEW - Thai model targets 'shocking' gender violence in new U.N. role

(Reporting by Nanchanok Wongsamuth @nanchanokw; Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

ABOUT OUR WOMEN COVERAGEWe focus on stories that help to empower women and bring lasting change to gender inequality

Biden wins most votes of any presidential candidate in history
Joseph Choi 

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has won the most votes out of any candidate in history, with the former vice president notching over 70 million votes nationwide as of Wednesday afternoon.

© UPI Photo Biden wins most votes of any presidential candidate in history

Former President Obama previously held the record for most votes cast for a presidential candidate in 2008, garnering over 69.4 million votes at the time.

Biden currently has registered 70,170,626 votes nationwide and counting, according a tally from The Associated Press.

President Trump, by comparison, has garnered 67.3 million votes nationwide and counting, according to tallies from the newswire.

The 2020 election saw a record turnout of early and mail-in voting in what has shaped up to be a high-stakes presidential race. Over 100 million votes were cast this year before Election Day.

The news comes as both Biden and President Trump remain locked in a tight race for the White House. On election night, the president made early gains in Florida, Texas, Ohio and Iowa - states that he needed to win in order to contend for the presidency.

Biden and Trump are currently competing in close races to clinch the Electoral College victory in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden has moved to the lead in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, though the races in those states are still too close to call.

As of Wednesday morning, The New York Times projected 227 total electoral votes for Biden and 213 for President Trump.

US

 2020 presidential election had highest turnout rate in 120 years

Michael McDonald

@ElectProject

·

Nov 4, 2020

I posted PRELIMINARY estimates of the 2020 state and national turnout and voting-eligible population turnout rates 160 million people voted Turnout rate: 66.9% Highest turnout rate since 1900: 73.7% http://electproject.org/2020g

1:00 AM · Nov 4, 2020

Michael McDonald

@ElectProject

That is not a typo. The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout rate in 120 years. There is still a fair amount of guesswork involving outstanding ballots to be counted. I will continue to refine these estimates over the coming weeks

PROVING ONCE AGAIN THAT THE OLD ANARCHIST ADAGE WAS RIGHT

America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis

Our country is breaking down, we have no effective leadership, and we’re lagging behind other rich countries. The left needs to provide an answer

Bhaskar Sunkar
Mon 2 Nov 2020

Quincy Cohen writes the name of a friend lost to Covid-19 on to a tombstone at a memorial for local lives lost in North Miami, Florida. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In 2020, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worst possible ways. No other rich country has such a poor public health infrastructure or such a tattered social safety net. America’s levels of both police violence and violent crime find their closest peers in countries like Venezuela and South Africa, not Canada and Germany. And even Cuba and Bosnia and Herzegovina beat the world’s only superpower in infant mortality and other key social indicators.

In the most powerful country on Earth, 29.3 million people say that they 'sometimes' or 'often' do not have enough to eat

In the most powerful country on Earth, 29.3 million people say that they “sometimes” or “often” do not have enough to eat. Forty million Americans are impoverished, according to the UN. Half a million are homeless.

And all this was true before the full brunt of the pandemic’s economic recession hit.

Given these stark figures, the relative stability of the United States is a wonder. The country has maintained popular suffrage and democratic institutions (for white males, at least) for two centuries and married that form of government with a dynamic capitalist economy capable of creating vast wealth. In fact, American business owners have managed to avoid even the rise of a major social-democratic or labor party; in the US, demands for economic justice are filtered through – and watered down by – a centrist Democratic party and a byzantine system of government deliberately designed to limit popular passions.

But perhaps that muzzling is reaching its limit. The past decade has seen bolder challenges to the establishment order – the Occupy movement, the surprising outsider challenge of Bernie Sanders, the equally unexpected rise of Donald Trump and the populist right, and street protests against police violence. Faced with all of this, as well as its inability to address the Covid pandemic, the American state looks embarrassingly ineffectual and increasingly lacking in popular legitimacy.

Part of the problem lies with the federal structure of the United States. With power split between the local, state, and federal levels and among different branches of government, there are countless “brake” points in the system that stall or stymie attempts at reform.

Of course, this structure has a certain utility for elites. The labor journalist Robert Fitch put it well: “The aim of the right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict – to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically.”

For those on the left who want to change things, the dilemma is not just how to reach power and government (hard enough as that is) but how to reconstitute the American republic in a way that allows us to actually achieve justice. The most important periods of progressive activity in US history – Abraham Lincoln and the struggle against the slaver class; the populist era; the New Deal – have embodied this spirit. For Franklin D Roosevelt, new collective bargaining rights and entitlement programs needed to be safeguarded by more effective government institutions. His administration pushed for new agencies to enforce labor law, reorganized the executive branch, and attempted a sweeping modernization of the US supreme court. Roosevelt even flouted the (at the time, unofficial) presidential two-term limit.

The left must find a way to not just popularize our goals, but secure the means – institutional reform – to achieve them

The success of FDR and his predecessors was ultimately limited. Yet despite our past failures, popular organizing has yielded enough gains, over time, to create a US that is not quite the worst of all possible worlds. We have maintained crucial democratic rights and extended those rights to black Americans, women and other oppressed groups. We have a limited welfare system for the very poor and the elderly and public guarantees to primary and secondary education for all. But we live in the shadow of the failure of our workers’ movement to take root in the US as firmly as it did in the 20th century in other developed countries. The result is a state woefully inadequate to address either slow-moving crises like hunger and poverty or more acute ones like coronavirus and climate change.


Winning mass support for a program of Medicare for All, green jobs, affordable housing, and more seems within reach. But the left must find a way to not just popularize our goals, but secure the means – institutional reform – to achieve them.

Liberal figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren and, yes, the journalist Jeffrey Toobin have trumpeted the need for some of these changes. But we can’t just stop at the abolition of the electoral college and the Senate filibuster, or even full Congressional representation for Washington DC residents. We must more fundamentally fight to transform the pre-modern political system that we’ve grafted on to our modern economy and society. For progressives, that’s a battle far more daunting than just getting Trump out of the White House – but it’s just as necessary.


Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.

Mississippi state flag: Voters approve magnolia design in Ballot Measure 3
By Veronica Stracqualursi


Mississippi's new state flag will feature the magnolia flower after the state in a historic move this summer parted with its decades-old banner that included a Confederate battle emblem.

© Mississippi Department of Archives & History The new flag features a magnolia blossom surrounded by 20 stars, signifying Mississippi's status at the 20th state in the union, and a gold five-point star to reflect Mississippi's indigenous Native American tribes.

Voters on Tuesday approved the "In God We Trust" magnolia design as the new state flag, CNN projected.

The state Legislature will now have to enact into law the new design as Mississippi's official state flag during its next regular session in 2021.

The flag features a white magnolia blossom on a dark blue backdrop, with red bands and gold stripes -- fitting for the Southern state whose nickname is the Magnolia State, whose state flower is the magnolia and whose state tree is the magnolia tree.

The flower is surrounded by 20 stars, signifying Mississippi's status at the 20th state in the union, and a gold five-point star to reflect Mississippi's indigenous Native American tribes.

Mississippi was the last state in the country whose flag, which was adopted in 1894, included the Confederate emblem.

Advocates for changing the flag had argued the Confederate insignia was a reminder of America's war to uphold slavery and a painful symbol for Black Americans. They also argued the 1894 flag hampered the state's economic growth.

Those supportive of the old flag claimed its removal would lead to further erasure of history.

The sentiment toward the 1894 flag appeared to shift this summer amid racial reckoning over the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed in Minneapolis police custody. Floyd's death led to renewed calls nationwide for racial justice and a reexamination of America's Confederate monuments and symbols, including Mississippi's state flag.

Amid the protests, Mississippi state lawmakers passed a historic referendum to retire and replace the flag, a bill that Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law.

"This is not a political moment to me, but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together to be reconciled and to move on," Reeves, a Republican, said at the bill's signing in late June. The 1894 flag flew for the last time July 1, before it was officially retired and handed over to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

The bill, House Bill 1796, called for a new design that "shall honor the past while embracing the promise of the future." It required that the design exclude the Confederate battle emblem and include the phrase "In God We Trust."

The measure also established a nine-person commission selected by the state's top Republicans and tasked with picking a new design by September. Over the month of August, the commission waded through nearly 3,000 flag design submissions from the public, whittling them down to two options.

On September 2, the commission selected the magnolia flag as the new design voters would consider on the November ballot.

Democratic state Rep. Jeramey Anderson, an author of the House bill, celebrated the vote Wednesday, calling the new flag one that "unites rather than divides" and a step in the right direction for his state.

"This was a bold, bipartisan step that shows the world Mississippi is finally ready to step out from under the cloud of slavery and Jim Crow. But it isn't the final step," Anderson said in a statement provided to CNN. "Mississippi and the United States remains plagued by systemic racism that keeps people of color from being truly free and equal."

In 2001, Mississippians had voted overwhelmingly to keep the Confederate emblem on its state flag. Sixty-five percent of voters chose then to keep the 1894 flag with the Confederate symbol instead of adopting a new flag with 20 white stars on a blue background.

An election that lays bare America’s soul — and the rot goes well beyond Trump

Published on November 3, 2020
By Bob Hennelly, Salon- Commentary

Trump supporters (Shutterstock)

As we stand on the precipice of election night, with the shadows of yet another deadly wave of COVID looming over us, our sense of collective dread continues to build.

How did it come to be that our president is himself sowing the seeds of fear and division, turning red states against blue states as the virus’ death toll mounts across them all?

Should we be surprised? He told us, before we gave him the nuclear codes, that he was so adored that he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Perhaps we didn’t think big enough about just how big a body count he would rack up in order to cling to power.

He is protected around the clock by patriotic civil servants who are duty bound to offer their lives for his, even as he willfully puts their lives at risk with his traveling snake-oil sideshow disguised as a presidential campaign.

The Chicago Tribune reports that a “group of Stanford University economists, who created a statistical model, estimate that there have been at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths as a result of 18 campaign rallies President Donald Trump held from June to September.”

Elections have consequences, but perhaps none so tragic as 2016, which gave rise to a megalomaniacal authoritarian who can ignore the loss of 1,000 Americans a day in a pandemic that his vanity forces him to deny. So we hold the thought of our cast ballots like candles in the wind, anxious about just how much we should fear our neighbors and fellow Americans. Just how durable is this democracy to which so many of us paid scant attention for so long?

‘There is a great temptation to blame our deteriorated situation entirely on this one man. This strain of toxic self-regard, when held by leaders, has always been a scourge on humanity that can result in a Jonestown scenario, where one man’s whim results in a mass suicide, or in poverty and disease in a failed state.

In ancient Roman times, it was seen as something to be strenuously resisted and correctly perceived as a dangerous character flaw, particularly if it afflicted military generals into whose hands the fates of so many had been entrusted.

As a seventh-grader struggling through Latin class, I recall textbook pictures of slaves accompanying victorious Roman generals in their chariots and whispering, “Remember, thou are but a mortal,” to the conquering hero amidst the tumultuous adoration of a roaring crowd.

Embedded in that simple phrase was the implication of serving something greater than oneself — a psycho-social planetary alignment in which the celebrated general was not the sun.

Unfortunately for the Roman Empire, there were significant lapses in such humility with ruinous results, when a flesh-and-blood monarch demanded to be worshipped as a living god on earth. As the historian Suetonius tells us, the Emperor Caligula was fond of reminding his subjects often, “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.”

But a bullying autocrat can’t rise to power or hold on to it without a cadre of supplicants and opportunists helping to make it so. Through their proximity to the tyrant, these mercenaries hope to improve their own circumstances by any means required, no matter how high the body count or how widespread the collateral damage.

In our own lifetimes, we have seen this with the 2013 Bridgegate scandal in my home state of New Jersey, where a still unknown number of government officials and law enforcement employees conspired to target a town of tens of thousands with lane closures that provoked crippling traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge during rush-hour. Why? Because that town, Fort Lee, had elected a Democratic mayor who refused to kiss Gov. Chris Christie’s ring.

When the former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, decided to prosecute the Bridgegate scandal, his “pursuit” of the case was a fig leaf of sorts that obscured the true extent of the rot at the heart of New Jersey’s political culture and, in the long run, actually reinforced it.

The manipulation of traffic on the GWB on the anniversary of 9/11 was the masterpiece of David Wildstein, who has gone on to prosper as editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Globe, which has been embraced by incumbents of both political parties.

Wildstein pled guilty as part as a deal with the Department of Justice to take a turn as the star witness in what ultimately turned out to be a very expensive and pointless show trial, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court tossing out the two convictions it did yield.

Incidentally, in June of this year, Wildstein’s conviction on two felony counts was overturned.

As it turns out, the only thing worse than no justice is feigned justice. Over time, those who evade accountability can become stronger, as they burnish their personal brands as can-do players who can take the heat and then can go on to dominate our kitchen.

Fishman’s multi-million-dollar failed prosecution of public corruption gave the appearance of holding the Christie junta accountable. Yet with the way it was resolved, that architecture was left largely intact, including sealing from public view the identities of the “unindicted co-conspirators” — who were on the taxpayer-funded payroll.

And the names we do know, who are closely associated with that Roger Stone-style trans-Hudson dirty trick — Christie and Bill Stepien, now President Trump’s campaign manager — are central figures in Trump’s quest for re-election. Of course it’s the Trump campaign that has sought to undermine Americans’ faith in the democratic process itself, by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the election.

Some might hope that just by turning Trump out of office we can restore our national character. That is ahistorical and ignores our soft spot for the bullies and dirty tricksters who have been in our political soil since Watergate, helping to bring this presidency to fruition.

We can trace the rise of the Living Menace in the Oval Office to America’s failure decades ago to hold Richard Nixon accountable for his crimes, thanks to President Gerald Ford’s pardon, which must be re-evaluated in light of what historians have learned since then.

In addition to his Watergate cover-up, his use of the IRS to punish political opponents and his secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, Nixon had previously intervened as a presidential candidate to sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks with North Vietnam, so he could win the 1968 election.

And while several high-profile Watergate convictions did stick — unlike in Bridgegate — confessed Watergate-era dirty trickster Roger Stone used his proximity to that 1970s betrayal of America to build his own brand and portfolio.

“Using a pseudonym, he made political contributions from the Young Socialist Alliance to the Republican challenging Mr. Nixon for the party’s nomination in 1972, Pete McCloskey,” reported the New York Times. “He then presented the campaign donation to a newspaper as proof that Mr. Nixon’s opponent was a puppet of the left. He also hired an operative to try to infiltrate the campaign of George McGovern, the Democratic nominee.”

After Nixon left office, Stone served as a kind of media concierge for the disgraced former president, who was still important enough to hold court from his comfortable exile in Saddle River, New Jersey, and wield influence.

Stone’s “can and will do anything to win” approach helped him to get campaign work on behalf of former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean and Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bell, who knocked off Sen. Clifford Case in a 1978 primary.

“It was Stone’s years in New Jersey where he tempered his craft and libertarian ideology that defined his career,” wrote Ian Shearn for NJ Spotlight this summer, after Stone’s sentence on federal criminal charges was commuted by President Trump. “It is no coincidence that his time in New Jersey — throughout the 1980s — overlapped the rise and fall of Donald Trump’s casino empire in Atlantic City. It was then that Stone formed a lasting though volatile codependent relationship with The Donald. This was the period when the rising GOP hit man transformed into The Prince of Darkness.”

Through Stone’s role in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, he was given access to Michael Deaver’s rolodex, which included Roy Cohn’s contact information. Cohn, the notoriously ruthless right-wing lawyer who was once chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, had gone into private practice with a dark-side power client list that included Fred and Donald Trump, as well as several reputed mobsters.

“When Stone arrived at Cohn’s Manhattan apartment, the lawyer was sitting with one of his clients, Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese mob family,” the Washington Post reported, based on an interview with Stone. “Cohn suggested Stone go meet a friend: Donald Trump. The dashing young real estate developer, still in his early 30s and building his empire both in business and as a tabloid celebrity, was also busy conjuring the legend that he was a self-made success story, rather than the son of a wealthy man who set him up in business. In Stone, he encountered a bon vivant with a similar gift for grand illusion.”

Stone was also a partner in Black, Manafort & Stone, an infamous Washington lobbying firm that was the public face for dictatorships around the world who received U.S. taxpayer aid, despite well documented systemic human rights abuses.

In 1992, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity published “The Torturers’ Lobby,” which chronicled the role of Black, Manafort & Stone in block-and-tackling for the governments of Kenya and Nigeria, with their “widely criticized human rights records.” The previous year, “Kenya [had] received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black. Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Company, which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991.”

The white paper continued, “Former Reagan political operative, Paul Manafort, oversees foreign accounts; his partner, Charles R. Black, was a senior political strategist in the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Their firm’s fees to represent Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Angola’s UNITA rebel group in 1991, totaled more than $3 million. All four receive U.S. aid and abuse human rights.”

The white paper was prefaced with a quote from Elie Wiesel.

“The greatest evil is indifference,” wrote Wiesel. “To know and not to act is a way of consent to these injustices. The planet has become a very small place. What happens in other countries affects us.”

Now, thanks to the intercession of President Trump, Stone is a free man and back in the trenches, bayoneting for the president.

In a recent interview with Alex Jones’ Infowars, Stone suggested that Trump should actually declare “martial law” to seize power if he loses what, as the Huffington Post reported, “Stone characterized as an already corrupt election. The results will only be legitimate if the ‘real winner’ — Trump — takes office, regardless of what the votes say, Stone declared. A loss would apparently be justification for Trump to use force to take over the nation.”

While the outcome of our election may be blurred by the fog of a civil war that Trump, Stone and their allies are all too eager to foment, let’s never forget the names of the Republicans, in New Jersey and elsewhere, who had a choice of where to stand and stood with them.

And please, this time no pardons.

Over Three-quarters of U.S. Jews Voted for Biden in Election, Poll Finds

Democratic candidate secured 77 percent of the Jewish vote compared to Donald Trump’s 21 percent, according to survey, giving Joe Biden the widest points margin since 2008


A Jewish man walking past a boarded-up store in Los Angeles with the word "Vote" on it, November 2, 2020.Credit: Jae C. Hong/AP

Danielle Ziri New York
Published at 09:12

NEW YORK – A poll of American Jewish voters released by the J Street organization found that over three-quarters of them cast their ballot for Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday, handing Republicans their worst performance with the community since 2008.

American Jews traditionally lean Democrat in elections at about 70 percent, but these figures suggest Jewish voters backed Biden over President Donald Trump by 77 to 21 percent – a 56-percentage point margin that significantly surpassed Hillary Clinton’s +45 point advantage in 2016.

The Election Night poll was conducted by GBAO Strategies for J Street between October 30 and November 3, and included interviews with 800 self-identified Jewish voters who cast their ballots on Election Day or prior to the day itself.

According to the data, Jewish voters also supported Democratic candidates over GOP candidates in congressional races by 78 percent to 21 percent.

When asked their views on the overall direction the United States is headed, 85 percent of respondents said it was on the wrong track and only 15 percent believed the country is going in the right direction. Seventy-seven percent of respondents also said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of his job, while 23 percent approved.

More than half of the people surveyed – 54 percent – said the coronavirus pandemic was their top issue in this year’s presidential race; 26 percent mentioned climate change; and 25 percent cited health care as their priority. Other issues included the economy, the Supreme Court, police reform, and racial justice and national security.

Only 5 percent of Jewish voters participating in the survey mentioned Israel as the issue most important to them. One percent said Iran was their main concern. When asked whether they would like to see the United States reenter the Iran nuclear deal signed under then-President Barack Obama, the vast majority, 74 percent, said they would, while 26 percent said they’d oppose it.

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Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 91 percent of respondents said they’d support the United States playing an active role in helping the parties try to resolve it. In addition, 72 percent of Jewish voters still believed a two-state solution would be the best option.

The overwhelming majority of participants – 89 percent – opposed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

“While Trump touted an ‘exodus’ of Jews from the Democratic Party, the only exodus we saw here was Republicans losing a significant chunk of their already small number of Jewish supporters,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said.

“A strategy built on the myth that Jewish votes can be won with hawkish Israel policy is bound to fail when over and over again American Jews have demonstrated that they are among the most progressive voters in the American electorate, with views on Israel that are pro-diplomacy and pro-peace,” he added.

According to pollster Jim Gerstein, “The 2020 election reinforces long-standing dynamics in the Jewish community, and potentially locks in these dynamics in the aftermath of a president and Republican enablers who Jews found abhorrent.”

With Americans waking up Wednesday morning to find some battleground states still in play, voters in the Jewish community were on tenterhooks.

“After a mostly sleepless night, I am still cautiously optimistic about a Biden win,” Pittsburgh resident Meryl Ainsman, 66, told Haaretz by email. “As the early votes continue to be counted this morning, all of the states that are still in play are moving toward Biden,” she added. Her home state of Pennsylvania was among them. Ainsman noted that because the Republican-majority State Senate mandated that early votes could not be counted early in her state, the count of mail-in ballots has been very slow.

“Assuming a Biden win, hopefully, it is still very concerning how divided we are as a country,” Ainsman wrote. “We must come together as a people if we hope to move forward and flourish as a nation and a leader in the world. We need a uniter and not a divider to get us there.”

In Texas, where Trump prevailed after a relatively close race, Galveston resident and Democrat supporter Jayson Levy, 60, said he was “surprised by the results so far,” given the high turnout.

“In Texas and elsewhere, I believe supporters of President Trump saw ‘promises kept’ to include lower taxes and less regulation. Also, many religious voters saw abortion as a life and death issue for the unborn,” he said, adding: “There are still votes to be counted, and I remain hopeful.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.