Places like Bergen County, Nassau, etc. should be much more Democratic than they currently are. Without knowing the ethnic composition of Whites, Bergen, Nassau, Suffolk, Ocean and Monmouth, and Staten Island should all be 10ish points more Dem than they actually are. It's definitely the Italians voting unusually Republican that boosts the GOP.
Look at Montgomery County, PA. It's 72% White and 62-36 Biden. Nassau is 56% White and 54-44, Bergen is 53% White and 59-39. There's some education differences driving that, but Nassau and Bergen are also quite educated. It's the Italian vote being 20+%
more Republican than the WASPs that causes this. This is despite a much higher reformed Jewish vote that raises the Democratic share among Whites.
I do agree that it seems that WASPs got realigned before Italians went in the other direction though. However, when there are odd shifts in NYC area counties that are heavily Italian, it's probably the Italians that are driving those shifts.
One thing is that Italians aren't really WWC. What makes the shifts odd is that as other wealthier White groups went strongly Dem, Italians shifted GOP. While they aren't as educated as WASPs, they are by no means WWC. They just behave like it, which is very interesting to me.
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=532803.msg8904907#msg8904907
This is a good point. There's something about the Italian vote in the NYC area. And in certain suburbs Orthodox Jews.
Westchester seems to be the exception here, it votes how it "should" given its demographics.
Ancestry:
Montgomery
Irish 21.5%
German 21.5%
Italian 15.5%
English/American 12.2%
Montgomery is the most Jewish county (8.1%), followed by Bucks (6.6%) and Camden (6.2%).
Using Montgomery County as an example of the WASP vote is bizarre. It's ~35% WASP and plurality Catholic, with the Republican vote tending to correspond strongly with the predominately German exurbs and with the lone English plurality town being Bryn Athyn, which is still to the right of the county as a whole. The Irish & Italian vote in MontCo is probably ~62% Biden, while in Nassau the same ethnic groups voted for Trump.
