Irish American, Italian American and Polish American vote: how do they differ?

[King of Kensington]

Any data or suggestive data?  How do Irish Catholic, Italian and Polish voters differ in terms of voting and political liberalism and conservatism?

[King of Kensington]

How does Cheektowaga, NY vote?  Hard to think of a more explicitly "Polish American" place?

[King of Kensington]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-American_vote

Polish Americans also seem to be in somewhat more segregated metros than Italian Americans.  Not sure how they differ in terms of voting on the issue of race.

(Yes, New York is segregated at the census tract level, but you white ethnic and Black neighborhoods bump up against each other more than in say, Chicago where you have a huge cluster of 90%+ African American neighborhoods on the South Side).

In which states (outside New England) did Obama win the NHW Catholic vote?

[King of Kensington]

I pointed to Cheektowaga as an explicitly Polish American place.

Chicago and New Jersey have a lot of post-1980 Polish immigrants, Buffalo doesn't.  I wanted to pick a place which is overwhelmingly American born and more removed from the immigrant experience (though it would be interesting to know how the more recent immigrants vote as well).

I would agree that Polish Americans are to the left of the median white voter.

I don't know a lot about Buffalo, but we get their TV stations in southern Ontario.  It is roughly evenly split between Polish and Italian.  Yet I get the sense the Italians are better represented among the wealthy in Buffalo and the Poles are a bit more working class.

[King of Kensington]

Interesting.  So the Polish American vote for the "party of the working man" has really held up.

[King of Kensington]

I know the late sociologist Andrew Greeley did a lot of work on American Catholics during the 60s and 70s including ethnic group voting patterns.  He was a liberal Catholic who sought to refute the "reactionary hard hat ethnic Catholic" stereotype. Will try to dig it up.

Irish Catholics I believe are the most affluent and educated white ethnic group after Jews and probably have been for half a century.  Which isn't that surprising that they've been in the US a long time and are concentrated in the higher income Northeast.   

In 1960, while JFK of course dominated Irish precincts in his native Boston, in New York he only got small majorities in heavily Irish precincts in NYC.  Part of it was obviously due to him not having "favorite son" status there, but I wonder if had to do with economics too.  The Boston Irish were a much larger percentage of the population in Boston and social mobility took longer than elsewhere.

I think Greeley showed as well that Irish and Polish Catholics were more religious than Italians.  Interesting given that Italians might actually be the most politically conservative of the three groups.

[King of Kensington]

Irish-Americans are hard to pin down: Irish-American identity is very symbolic at this point. There isn't much that distinguishes Irish-Americans from WASPs outside of religious identity. At this point, there's a lot of overlap between both groups. There aren't many "pure" Irish-Americans in the US.

Have to agree.  For all the puffery about Irish American distinctiveness, they're pretty assimilated and very few live in anything that could be called an "enclave."

An analysis of census tracts conducted in the New York metropolitan area in 1990 (meaning it's almost certainly less now), only 4% of people with Irish ancestry lived in "enclaves" (census tracts where an ancestry group made up at least one third of the population) - barely any at all.  In contrast, about a quarter of Italian Americans lived in enclaves. (source: Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, p. 88)

Also, they intermarry with WASPs quite a bit:

"A rigorously constructed random sample of Catholic Americans compiled by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, enumerating over 2,000 people, was analysed by Richard Alba and Ronald Kessler for the indications it could give on inter-ethnic marriage patterns... Kessler found that Irish Catholics were marrying people of English background at more than 8 percent above the expected rate, while they married people of German, Italian and Polish ancestry with a frequency of about 3 percent below the mathematically modelled expected rate.  As a whole, Irish Catholics were selecting against the Germans, Italians and Poles...and selecting for the predominantly Protestant English.  Alba and Kessler express the view that 'Irish Catholics are drawn toward marriage to others from the British Isles, whether Catholic or Protestant.' - Reginald Byron, Irish America (p. 284-285).

Boston seems to be an exception to the rule - presumably given their large percentage, greater representation in the working class and legacy of Irish-Yankee tensions.  In the Boston MSA, 38% of those reporting Irish ancestry are of single Irish ancestry, 45% in Suffolk County.  That's pretty remarkable given they're mostly fourth generation and beyond at this point.  You also have the biggest swath of Irish American suburbia, the South Shore (aka "the Irish Riviera").

Irish Americans as a whole resemble the "quieter" Irish Catholic identity of Canada and Australia than they do the Boston Irish.  

[King of Kensington]

Also notable is that Midwesterner cities don't have "ethnic" neighborhoods, they have white and non-white. There aren't any German/Scandinavian/Irish parts of Minneapolis, on fact we actually have more distinction amongst black neighborhoods because of the African-American vs. African immigrant thing, they tend to be segregated. St. Paul did once have a heavily Irish area but that's mostly diluted now, same with the Eastern European population in South St. Paul (actually a suburb) that came during the boom of the meat packing industry, some are still around but most people there would just be seen as "white" today. Even more so in places like Des Moines and Madison, and as a result I'd imagine there's not much difference in voting patterns amongst different groups of whites.

Except for Great Lakes and rust belt cities like Chicago and Cleveland. 

[King of Kensington]

When I think of Polish-American politics, I think of Kanjorski, Trumpka and Kaptur.

Then there was the fictional Polish American from Chicago on All in the Family, Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic.  Whose surname wasn't Polish, and who spoke with a New York accent apparently.  But he was from a working class background and him becoming an educated liberal wasn't implausible at all.

Far more unbelievable was that Archie Bunker was supposed to a working class white Protestant living in Queens in the 1970s.  But I think of him as Irish American - Irish American Carroll O'Connor (who came from a middle class background himself) gave Archie Bunker an old school working class New York Irish accent.

[King of Kensington]

Here in Canada, the Italians and Poles were big Liberals in federal elections until quite recently but Liberals tanked over the last decade and "white ethnic" Catholics went heavily Conservative in the last federal election.

The social-democratic NDP have never in their history gotten a plurality of the working class vote; hard to say how they did specifically with Italians and Poles.  In Ontario politics, the NDP did quite well among working class Italians and Poles in the 1970s when Toronto was a Conservative-NDP battle and the Liberals weren't much of a factor at the provincial level. 

Should add too that we don't really have big Polish proletarian communities like they do in the US - nothing like Buffalo, Scranton, Detroit, Milwaukee etc.  There are some in the manufacturing cities like Hamilton and Windsor but they are outnumbered by Italians in both.  Toronto has a large Polish community, but probably a majority of it is made up of post-1980 immigrants and their children. 

The Irish Catholics have been here so long and are so mixed it's pretty much impossible to isolate their voting patterns.  However in the Maritime provinces, the Catholic population is overwhelmingly Acadian or Irish, and there is - or at least was until quite recently - a Catholic-Protestant divide in voting with Catholics voting Liberal and Protestants Conservative.

 

[King of Kensington]

Yes, Italian Canadians immigrated later on average.  But socioeconomically the two communities are quite similar.  They've both gone from urban and blue collar to more affluent and suburban.

If anything the post-war, least assimilated Italian immigrants to the US are more conservative than Italian Americans as a whole, judging by voting patterns in enclaves where they make up a large share of the Italian American population (i.e. southern Brooklyn).  

[King of Kensington]

It's interesting in Canada that in the postwar period, Poles and Ukrainians voted quite differently, even though in Toronto they generally lived in the same areas of the city.

Ukrainians are one of Canada's largest ethnic groups, concentrated on the Prairies.  Rural Ukrainians started voting Conservative when John Diefenbaker (from Saskatchewan) "brought the West in."  They didn't embrace Pierre Trudeau's Multiculturalism project that much.  The city of Winnipeg is about one sixth Ukrainian origin and Ukrainians from the working class North End had a long history of voting for the Left (now they live mostly in the northern suburbs and vote NDP provincially, Conservative federally).

In Toronto, in the west end during the 70s Poles voted NDP provincially and Liberal federally.  Ukrainians in Toronto were often postwar Displaced Persons who saw Trudeau as a crypto-communist and voted federally for the Tories, generally the party of WASPs.

Whether on the left or the right, Ukrainians have generally not voted Liberal.

[King of Kensington]

According to the 2008 CNN exit polls, Obama won the white Catholic vote in Michigan and Wisconsin, two of the most Polish American states, and lost it in heavily Italian American New Jersey and Connecticut.

[King of Kensington]

And you can see the declining relevance of "anti-communism" as a major voting factor when you look at the Cuban American vote.  The younger generation that's born in the US is pretty evenly split, while older Cuban immigrants still vote Republican.

There's likely a similar pattern with Vietnamese Americans as well.

[King of Kensington]

Some old data, from Greeley, the American Catholic, p. 94.

Voted for Democratic president, 1952-1968:

Polish Catholics  76%
Irish Catholics  65%
Italian Catholics  60%

Voted for Humphrey, 1968:

Polish Catholics  80%
Irish Catholics  65%
Italian Catholics  59%

[King of Kensington]

According to Greeley, Irish Catholics were the most affluent white ethnic group after Jews, although both the Italians and Poles also had higher incomes than white Protestants.  The Irish took the most liberal views on the Vietnam War, civil rights and civil liberties (i.e. allowing a Communist to speak), but were the most anti-abortion as well.  The Poles were the most conservative on Vietnam, civil rights and civil liberties and abortion - basically "bread and butter" Democrats.  Italians were the most liberal on abortion and in the middle on the other questions. 

Italians and Poles also had higher incomes than their occupations would suggest.  I wonder if this remains true among say, New York area Italians - that may explain their Republican tendencies. 

[King of Kensington]

Did Perot do well in Sterling Heights?  Clinton did no better than Dukakis there?