Italian American vote

[King of Kensington]

Can't find much specfic data after 1984 (as the ''Italian American vote'' to the extent it exists has become less distinctive).  Some scattered data:

1960 (Kennedy):

National:  80%+

1964 (Johnson):

National:  76%

1968 (Humphrey):

National:  50%

1972 (Nixon):

New York State  68%
New Jersey  61%
Pennsylvania  53%
Ohio  52%

1976 (Carter):

National  56%
New York State  35%

1984 (Reagan)

National  61%

Source: Stefano Luconi, ''The Bumpy Road Toward Political Incorporation'' in The Routledge History of Italian Americans

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Interesting!

I agree that the "Italian vote" as such doesn't really exist in most places anymore, and it's kind of nice in a comforts-of-conventional-wisdom sort of way to see actual data for the narrative that back when it did exist it was something of a leading indicator for the rightward drift of "white ethnic" Catholics.

[King of Kensington]

Also provides some evidence to confirm something I've suspected - that Italian Americans in NY are more Republican than elsewhere.

[SevenEleven]

Also provides some evidence to confirm something I've suspected - that Italian Americans in NY are more Republican than elsewhere.

They're only relevant in NY and NJ and maybe CT a little bit

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Also provides some evidence to confirm something I've suspected - that Italian Americans in NY are more Republican than elsewhere.

They're only relevant in NY and NJ and maybe CT a little bit

Rhode Island is more heavily Italian-American than Connecticut. I'm not aware of any history of specifically-Italian bloc voting or machine politics there, but there could be such a history that I just don't know about.

[SevenEleven]

Also provides some evidence to confirm something I've suspected - that Italian Americans in NY are more Republican than elsewhere.

They're only relevant in NY and NJ and maybe CT a little bit

Rhode Island is more heavily Italian-American than Connecticut. I'm not aware of any history of specifically-Italian bloc voting or machine politics there, but there could be such a history that I just don't know about.

You're actually right and that's a good point. I still think the Italian population in Connecticut is more relevant based on the fact that it's...not Rhode Island, but they do have greater proportions in RI. One of my good friends from college was an Italian-American from Connecticut, so that is probably why I assumed that.

[King of Kensington]

The Italian American share in Connecticut and Rhode Island is virtually identical. 

[Indy Texas]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

This is also true for most white people of any discernible ethnicity outside the Northern Cities.

If they moved to the South, the fact that they were white was the only thing that was relevant to their social standing. If they moved to the West, there weren't opportunities to settle in homogenous ethnic neighborhoods with their fellow Italians/Irish/Poles so they lost any sense of ethnic identity within a generation or two.

[King of Kensington]

Yeah outside the Northeast I suspect there isn't really a discernible "Italian American vote" at all.  In the Bay Area they're going to be liberal Democrats, in suburban New Orleans they'd be arch-conservatives, in Macomb County they'd be swingy and so on.

[TDAS04]

Until about the New Deal, the Italian American vote in Philly (and Pittsburgh?) was solidly Republican, and was of great use to the Republican machine that ran the Philly City Government.  I might have read somewhere that while Philly Italians (narrowly) backed Smith in 1928, they went for Hoover four years later.  (Republican presidential candidates carried the city in every single election from 1860 through 1932, and Democrats have every election since).

[King of Kensington]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

Yeah they have big numbers and denser concentrations in the Northeast.  Here's an interesting account about why Italian American identity held out more strongly in the New York area:

But let’s get back to Brooklyn, or more to the point, New Jersey, being that my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between visits to Long Island and New Jersey. Which brings me to Soprano Country—Bloomfield, Clifton, and North Caldwell. I saw it all. But what really stuck with me is how ubiquitous Italian American life is in the area (not just New Jersey or Long Island, mind you; I took a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street and Avenue U, too, and saw plenty of pasticcerie and salumerie, not to mention other subtle, or not so subtle, signs of Italian American existence).
 
What struck me is the way a small town, like, say, Nutley, New Jersey, seems to have become (or always was?) a kind of Little Italy all its own. That when Italian Americans did their part in the great white flight to the suburbs in the decades following the Second World War, those in the New York area appeared to have taken a good part of the commerce and culture of their urban neighborhoods with them. (I realize I’m making some broad generalizations here.)
 
This phenomenon did not happen in California, even though the state had a number of Italian American urban neighborhoods that disappeared or drastically changed when Italian Americans moved out of the cities. Why does Italian American identity remain intact more recognizably in Eastern suburbs?
 
There are two straightforward answers: demographics and geography. California’s 1.5 million Italian Americans just don’t compare to the nearly 4.5 million in New York and New Jersey. Plus, New York’s relative nearness to Italy arguably allows for commerce and culture to move back and forth more easily.
 
However, there’s a more interesting possibility, one that requires much more careful study than is called for in a simple blog post: that is, the role of the (often-overlooked) second major wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. after the Second World War. Sure, California received its share of post-WW II immigrants (and they’re still coming today—Silicon Valley is full of Italians with H1-B visas), but not to the same degree as on the East Coast. Further—and yes, I’m being a little coy here—but I’ll take a wild guess that the influx of new immigrants in the post-war decades reinvigorated Italian American communities in greater New York in multiple ways: from customs around food, to the use of Italian and dialects, to all sorts of vernacular displays of culture.

http://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east


 

[Indy Texas]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

Yeah they have big numbers and denser concentrations in the Northeast.  Here's an interesting account about why Italian American identity held out more strongly in the New York area:

But let’s get back to Brooklyn, or more to the point, New Jersey, being that my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between visits to Long Island and New Jersey. Which brings me to Soprano Country—Bloomfield, Clifton, and North Caldwell. I saw it all. But what really stuck with me is how ubiquitous Italian American life is in the area (not just New Jersey or Long Island, mind you; I took a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street and Avenue U, too, and saw plenty of pasticcerie and salumerie, not to mention other subtle, or not so subtle, signs of Italian American existence).
 
What struck me is the way a small town, like, say, Nutley, New Jersey, seems to have become (or always was?) a kind of Little Italy all its own. That when Italian Americans did their part in the great white flight to the suburbs in the decades following the Second World War, those in the New York area appeared to have taken a good part of the commerce and culture of their urban neighborhoods with them. (I realize I’m making some broad generalizations here.)
 
This phenomenon did not happen in California, even though the state had a number of Italian American urban neighborhoods that disappeared or drastically changed when Italian Americans moved out of the cities. Why does Italian American identity remain intact more recognizably in Eastern suburbs?
 
There are two straightforward answers: demographics and geography. California’s 1.5 million Italian Americans just don’t compare to the nearly 4.5 million in New York and New Jersey. Plus, New York’s relative nearness to Italy arguably allows for commerce and culture to move back and forth more easily.
 
However, there’s a more interesting possibility, one that requires much more careful study than is called for in a simple blog post: that is, the role of the (often-overlooked) second major wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. after the Second World War. Sure, California received its share of post-WW II immigrants (and they’re still coming today—Silicon Valley is full of Italians with H1-B visas), but not to the same degree as on the East Coast. Further—and yes, I’m being a little coy here—but I’ll take a wild guess that the influx of new immigrants in the post-war decades reinvigorated Italian American communities in greater New York in multiple ways: from customs around food, to the use of Italian and dialects, to all sorts of vernacular displays of culture.

http://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east

This is definitely a good point. Though I've always thought it was odd that the brief spurt of post-war European immigration to the US seemed to be mostly confined to Italy (and sort of to Ireland). Why didn't more, say, Britons move to America? (Especially since many of them actually did emigrate to other Anglophone countries like Australia.)

[King of Kensington]

There were similar numbers of immigrants from Germany and the UK as Italy in the postwar years, but they probably went more unnoticed because they didn't settle in ethnic neighborhoods and dispersed across the country. 

[Sol]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

Yeah they have big numbers and denser concentrations in the Northeast.  Here's an interesting account about why Italian American identity held out more strongly in the New York area:

But let’s get back to Brooklyn, or more to the point, New Jersey, being that my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between visits to Long Island and New Jersey. Which brings me to Soprano Country—Bloomfield, Clifton, and North Caldwell. I saw it all. But what really stuck with me is how ubiquitous Italian American life is in the area (not just New Jersey or Long Island, mind you; I took a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street and Avenue U, too, and saw plenty of pasticcerie and salumerie, not to mention other subtle, or not so subtle, signs of Italian American existence).
 
What struck me is the way a small town, like, say, Nutley, New Jersey, seems to have become (or always was?) a kind of Little Italy all its own. That when Italian Americans did their part in the great white flight to the suburbs in the decades following the Second World War, those in the New York area appeared to have taken a good part of the commerce and culture of their urban neighborhoods with them. (I realize I’m making some broad generalizations here.)
 
This phenomenon did not happen in California, even though the state had a number of Italian American urban neighborhoods that disappeared or drastically changed when Italian Americans moved out of the cities. Why does Italian American identity remain intact more recognizably in Eastern suburbs?
 
There are two straightforward answers: demographics and geography. California’s 1.5 million Italian Americans just don’t compare to the nearly 4.5 million in New York and New Jersey. Plus, New York’s relative nearness to Italy arguably allows for commerce and culture to move back and forth more easily.
 
However, there’s a more interesting possibility, one that requires much more careful study than is called for in a simple blog post: that is, the role of the (often-overlooked) second major wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. after the Second World War. Sure, California received its share of post-WW II immigrants (and they’re still coming today—Silicon Valley is full of Italians with H1-B visas), but not to the same degree as on the East Coast. Further—and yes, I’m being a little coy here—but I’ll take a wild guess that the influx of new immigrants in the post-war decades reinvigorated Italian American communities in greater New York in multiple ways: from customs around food, to the use of Italian and dialects, to all sorts of vernacular displays of culture.

http://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east

This is definitely a good point. Though I've always thought it was odd that the brief spurt of post-war European immigration to the US seemed to be mostly confined to Italy (and sort of to Ireland). Why didn't more, say, Britons move to America? (Especially since many of them actually did emigrate to other Anglophone countries like Australia.)

The 1924 immigration act was in effect in that period, limiting Eastern and Southern European inflow. Australia was likely a lot more attractive to British people to due closer cultural ties as large-scale emigration to the Antipodes had been going on for like 150 years at that point.

[King of Kensington]

The postwar Italian immigration also was very skewed toward the New York area, less national in scope. From the 1980 census (metro areas)

Born in Italy (arrived 1950 or later)

New York  170,110
Chicago  27,611
Boston  21,565
Philadelphia  15,840
Los Angeles  11,553
Detroit  10,944

[King of Kensington]

The NYC outer borough Italian neighborhoods still have sizable numbers of (obviously, aged) Italian immigrants from the postwar immigration:

Rossville, Staten Island  615  5.7%
Whitestone, Queens  1,763  4.4%
Howard Beach, Queens  1,121  4.3%
Middle Village, Queens  1,320  4.1%
Dyker Heights, Brooklyn  1,286  3.7%
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn  3,376  3.4%
Pelham Bay, Bronx  753  3%

Some suburbs have concentrations as well:

Totowa NJ  492  4.5%
Franklin Square NY  1,218  3.9%
Harrison NY  904  3.2%
Mamaroneck NY  561  2.9%
Eastchester NY  559  2.8%
Glen Cove NY  747  2.7%

[Sam Smith]

Italian Americans didn't vote over 80% for JFK.
JFK almost lost New York & New Jersey.

[King of Kensington]

Some pockets in Chicago too:

Born in Italy

Norridge  769  5.1%
Harwood Heights  227  2.8%
Schiller Park  321  2.7%
Elmwood Park  538  2.2%
Addison  551  1.5%

[King of Kensington]

Italian Americans didn't vote over 80% for JFK.
JFK almost lost New York & New Jersey.

NY Italians are more conservative than Italian Americans nationally.  Perhaps due to less assimilation?

[Lechasseur]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

Yeah they have big numbers and denser concentrations in the Northeast.  Here's an interesting account about why Italian American identity held out more strongly in the New York area:

But let’s get back to Brooklyn, or more to the point, New Jersey, being that my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between visits to Long Island and New Jersey. Which brings me to Soprano Country—Bloomfield, Clifton, and North Caldwell. I saw it all. But what really stuck with me is how ubiquitous Italian American life is in the area (not just New Jersey or Long Island, mind you; I took a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street and Avenue U, too, and saw plenty of pasticcerie and salumerie, not to mention other subtle, or not so subtle, signs of Italian American existence).
 
What struck me is the way a small town, like, say, Nutley, New Jersey, seems to have become (or always was?) a kind of Little Italy all its own. That when Italian Americans did their part in the great white flight to the suburbs in the decades following the Second World War, those in the New York area appeared to have taken a good part of the commerce and culture of their urban neighborhoods with them. (I realize I’m making some broad generalizations here.)
 
This phenomenon did not happen in California, even though the state had a number of Italian American urban neighborhoods that disappeared or drastically changed when Italian Americans moved out of the cities. Why does Italian American identity remain intact more recognizably in Eastern suburbs?
 
There are two straightforward answers: demographics and geography. California’s 1.5 million Italian Americans just don’t compare to the nearly 4.5 million in New York and New Jersey. Plus, New York’s relative nearness to Italy arguably allows for commerce and culture to move back and forth more easily.
 
However, there’s a more interesting possibility, one that requires much more careful study than is called for in a simple blog post: that is, the role of the (often-overlooked) second major wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. after the Second World War. Sure, California received its share of post-WW II immigrants (and they’re still coming today—Silicon Valley is full of Italians with H1-B visas), but not to the same degree as on the East Coast. Further—and yes, I’m being a little coy here—but I’ll take a wild guess that the influx of new immigrants in the post-war decades reinvigorated Italian American communities in greater New York in multiple ways: from customs around food, to the use of Italian and dialects, to all sorts of vernacular displays of culture.

http://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east

This is definitely a good point. Though I've always thought it was odd that the brief spurt of post-war European immigration to the US seemed to be mostly confined to Italy (and sort of to Ireland). Why didn't more, say, Britons move to America? (Especially since many of them actually did emigrate to other Anglophone countries like Australia.)

For Britons, it's simply because they had places within their own empire/commonwealth to immigrate to.

Canada and the Antipodes simply we're much more attractive destinations for them.

I believe in Canada, Canadians were technically British subjects until 1948 and that British subjects from elsewhere had the right to move there.

While when it comes to the US, they'd be leaving the Empire and it would be much harder for them to immigrate.

Plus, beyond the legal hurdles and loyalty to the Crown, the Antipodes and to a lesser extent Canada are just way more similar to the UK than the US is. Most British people would probably feel more at home there than in the US. So even just for cultural reasons it makes sense.

Then for the French, France simply was not a country of emigration until fairly recently (that would have started at the earliest when France started having real economic problems in the 1970s, but probably later) due to France being a fairly large country with a fairly low population due to low population growth in the last few hundred years (due to a very early demographic transition).

And even once the French did start leaving due to a lack of opportunity here (most of the people I know who actually want to get ahead in life want to move to Paris, to Lyon or to outright emigrate), America just wasn't appealing to them because
1) Freedom of movement in Europe allowed them to move elsewhere in Europe easily
2) you have other French speaking places, even within North America, they can immigrate to
And last but not least
3) there's a clash between French and American values on what a good quality of life means. Most French people don't see the work conditions, the lack of work/life balance and the lack of a welfare state in the US as a good quality of life, and better pay and a higher likelihood of getting a job doesn't make up for that.

An awful lot of French people emigrate: their top destination is probably Belgium, followed by the other French speaking countries in Europe (Switzerland and Luxembourg) and Quebec; then after that you'd have Germany and the UK probably..

But yeah they don't really have much of a reason to go to the US, especially given Quebec when you get down to it is quite similar to the US all things considered so they get the upsides or the American Life without the downsides by going to Quebec instead (including being able to live in a place that speaks French).

The only places I know of in the US with any considerable amount of French people are NYC and South Florida (and the only French people I know IRL who moved to the US moved to South Florida).

Then if the US still got a lot of Italian and Irish immigrants, it's simply because they have pretty much always been countries of emigration.

The Irish still move to other English speaking countries in large numbers; while the Italians moved to Wallonia en masse after the war and historically have emigrated in fairly large numbers to France as well.

In Wallonia I believe Italian is the second most common ancestry after Walloon.

I will precise that the phenomenon of emigration is particularly pronounced in the North of France, it's probably not the case anywhere to the same degree elsewhere in the country.

[Sam Smith]

Italian Americans didn't vote over 80% for JFK.
JFK almost lost New York & New Jersey.

NY Italians are more conservative than Italian Americans nationally.  Perhaps due to less assimilation?

I'm Italian American from NY. Most Italian Americans vote Republican because they are for law & order & they are socially conservative,pro Gun & anti taxes.
What do you mean by less assimilation? 90-95% don't speak even italian.

[King of Kensington]

Distinctive Italian American identity, higher percentage of Italian single ancestry, concentration in enclaves etc. 

Italian immigration over the past 50 years has been minimal, and it's not so much an "immigrant" based identity any more, but in the Northeast at least they're still far from Generic White Americans.

[King of Kensington]

Outside NY/NJ, probably lean a bit more liberal than the average white American because they're more concentrated in metropolitan areas and in more liberal states. 

[Sol]

Isn't a fair amount of NYC Italian conservatism from the Irish dominating city politics, or am I misremembering?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Remember that the Italian-American vote is largely not a thing outside the Northeast because Italian-American as an identity is largely not a thing outside the Northeast.

You'll find people with Italian surnames, but they are by and large simply Generic White People in their lifestyles and cultural and social preferences. They often have non-Italian ancestry mixed in and aren't marrying people from Italian backgrounds. They may not even be Roman Catholic anymore.

This is also true for most white people of any discernible ethnicity outside the Northern Cities.

If they moved to the South, the fact that they were white was the only thing that was relevant to their social standing. If they moved to the West, there weren't opportunities to settle in homogenous ethnic neighborhoods with their fellow Italians/Irish/Poles so they lost any sense of ethnic identity within a generation or two.

Mmm
Actually, for a time Irish people were classified as "colored" in parts of the South (chiefly Virginia) and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration did not classify Southern Italians as "white".
Most lynchings of White people in the South were directed against Irishmen and Italians.