Fox News reports that the rift between black voters and Jewish voters within the Democratic Party is widening. Frankly, however, I'm skeptical that all this will amount to much this November.

It has long been known--poll after poll has shown it--that the most conservative voters in America are black. On welfare, guns, drugs, crime, abortion, family values, religion, you name it, no one's more conservative than black voters. (As a group, that is. Your mileage may vary.). You can even see it in the culture--pick up Chris Rock's hilarious Bigger and Blacker video some time. Look past the four-letter words and the frank sexual references, and you'll have a hard time not noticing this: the man is more conservative than Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich put together. So's his mostly-black audience.

Yet if you listen to Rock address politics directly, he generally seems to think that Republicans are the source of all evil in America. So, in fact, do most black people I know. This is hardly surprising; the same polls often show that a majority of black voters believe the government created the AIDS and crack epidemics to hurt the black community, and that Republicans are by and large responsible (primarily Reagan and those who came after him). Black voters who don't believe that still tend to believe that most of the bad things in America spring from the Republican Party. Democrats benefit from this as a party on election day, although it leads to a schizoid problem for them, since a huge swath of their party's base is far more conservative than the elites at the top.

Similarly, as Howard Fienberg notes over at Kesher Talk, George W. Bush's approval ratings have gone up 30 percentage points among Jews since his election. Despite this, even after the explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic outbursts by Democrats, the almost complete failure of any Democratic leaders of national stature to condemn it, and even after the staunch, unwavering support for Israel we've seen over the last few years by the much-reviled "Christian Right," Jewish voters have gone from an anemic 17% self-identifying as Republican to a staggering...18%.

Now, there is a hidden problem in this statistic, which Fienberg and others don't address--the phenomenon of "Have To Register As A Democrat." In many large cities, such as New York and Chicago, it is widely assumed that whoever wins the Democratic nomination (for any office: mayor, city council, district attorney, whatever) will likely win the general election. Even Republican-leaning voters will very frequently register as Democratic simply so they can select which Democrat will win the general election. Such people quite frequently vote Republican in the general elections, which is one of several reasons why Republicans can sometimes win in areas where Democrats appear to have them outnumbered 2 to 1 or more.