President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats are anxiously awaiting the decisions of a few thousand Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and Queens in next Tuesday’s special election — between Democrat and Orthodox Jew David Weprin and Republican and Catholic Bob Turner — that some have labeled a referendum on the Obama administration.
If the Republican candidate manages to pull off an upset and defeat his Democratic rival in next Tuesday’s special Congressional election in New York it may well represent a no-confidence vote in the Obama administration. But a strong contributing factor may well be the irony that enough of the district’s Orthodox Jewish voters could not bring themselves to support the Democrat who is also an Orthodox Jew.
The June resignation of Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner left an open seat in the 9th Congressional District which includes several neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. As many as 30 percent of the district’s voters are Jewish and about half of them are Orthodox.
Weiner’s replacement will either be fifty-five-year old state assemblyman David Weprin a Democrat and an Orthodox Jew or seventy-year old businessman Republican Bob Turner a Catholic.
Democrats hold a 3-1 voter registration edge in this district that hasn’t sent a Republican representative to Washington in nearly a century.
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