As the New Year opens, polls, politicians, and pundits are gathering statistics, mapping strategy, and laying groundwork for the elections of 1986—congressional, gubernatorial, and local. Moreover, they are also keeping an eye out to the horizon, pondering the presidential campaign of 1988. Amid all the vagaries and uncertainties, two certainties can be predicted: Ronald Reagan will not run again, and the Jewish vote will be—despite all the Republican efforts—liberal and Democratic. Will be, that is, if the past is any precedent. For, as Stephen J. Whitfield shows in his essay on "The Jewish Vote," this affluent, educated American minority has never strayed from the Democratic fold in recent presidential elections. For example, even in the Nixon landslide of 1972, Democrat George McGovern won, in Mr. Whitfield's words, "less than a third of the gentile vote and two-thirds of the Jewish vote." In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a rural Southerner, took 72 percent of the largely urban and Northern Jewish vote. And even in the Reagan runaway of 1984, when the Republicans spent four times as much as did the Democrats to attract the Jewish vote, Democrat Walter Mondale took 60 percent of it, a percentage surpassed only among blacks and the unemployed. Thus, Mr. Whitfield concludes: "So long as the Democratic Party continues to present itself as the party of compassion, so long as its version of the rainbow coalition can articulate its respect for diversity," so long will the party hold the loyalty "of at least one group of voters who define their interests as their ideals." Stephen Whitfield is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and author of Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought, published by Archon Books in 1984. The same year, through the same publisher, the prolific Mr. Whitfield brought out a second book, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight MacDonald. In 1983—84 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor of American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.