Democrats More Likely Than Republicans to Blame "The Jews"

The Boston Review reports the data:

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to “blame everything” thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford” were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame.

The story does not give us a link to the original study with the raw data (a search through Google Scholar using the authors' names yeilds nothing), does not tell us how jews responded, nor does it tell us how people assesed the blame of other ethnic or religious groups.  Nevertheless, it is striking that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis -- by a wide margin. 

The General Social Survey asked respondents to asses their feelings toward jews using a thermometer from 0 to 100. We can sort those assesments by party identification.

The middle column reports the responses of Independents. The left wing of three columns reflect the opinions of people who lean Democratic. The right wing of three columns reflect the opinions people who lean Republican. We can see that "50" was the most popular response by a plurality among all of the catagories of political identification. Republicans, however, were more likely to report warmer feelings toward jews (greter than 50.) Democratic respondents were more likely to report colder feelings (less than 50.)

The two lines of evidence point in the same direction.

One might say this is just a reflection of black anti-semitism. Blacks identify with the Democratic Party at a rate of around 80%. But if you exclude blacks from the mix, the results are still largely the same. Republicans are still more likely to report warm feelings. Democrats are still more likely to report cold ones. 

Source: Boston Review 

Source: GSS