NY Catholics were less likely to vote JFK
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  NY Catholics were less likely to vote JFK
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Author Topic: NY Catholics were less likely to vote JFK  (Read 1783 times)
King of Kensington
Junior Chimp
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« on: May 09, 2020, 08:36:03 PM »
« edited: May 10, 2020, 08:46:03 PM by King of Kensington »

And I just deleted half of the OP.

From memory:  It looks like New York City area Catholics were a lot less supportive of JFK than those in New England, Chicago etc., apparently he only got a little over half of the outer borough Catholic vote.

In Nassau County too, Kennedy got 45% of the vote and the county was more than 25% Jewish at the time (overwhelmingly Democratic).  There must have been at least as many Catholics as Protestants there by 1960.

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Left Wing
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« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2020, 07:36:12 PM »

I know my devout catholic grandmother from New York did not vote for JFK because he was more pro-choice than Nixon. Maybe it was a feeling of him being a catholic traitor to some people?
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Asenath Waite
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« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2020, 08:30:07 PM »

I know my devout catholic grandmother from New York did not vote for JFK because he was more pro-choice than Nixon. Maybe it was a feeling of him being a catholic traitor to some people?

I didn't even realize abortion was such a federal issue in 1960 to the point where presidential candidates would have their stances be on the record
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2020, 08:45:31 PM »
« Edited: May 10, 2020, 09:22:03 PM by King of Kensington »

In Nassau County too, Kennedy got 45% of the vote and the county was more than 25% Jewish at the time (overwhelmingly Democratic).  There must have been at least as many Catholics as Protestants there by 1960.

Some time googling suggests that Nassau was about 45% Catholic at the time.

Also, Dewey got 70% of the vote in 1948, so Nixon was down 15 points from that, so quite the decline in the GOP vote due to the influx of Catholics and Jews.
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BRTD
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« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2020, 10:31:26 PM »

In Nassau County too, Kennedy got 45% of the vote and the county was more than 25% Jewish at the time (overwhelmingly Democratic).  There must have been at least as many Catholics as Protestants there by 1960.

Some time googling suggests that Nassau was about 45% Catholic at the time.
Source?

It's almost impossible to get reliable precise numbers on religious demographics per county now (ARDA is basically just a rough estimate), much less in 1960.
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SevenEleven
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« Reply #5 on: May 10, 2020, 11:54:42 PM »

I know my devout catholic grandmother from New York did not vote for JFK because he was more pro-choice than Nixon. Maybe it was a feeling of him being a catholic traitor to some people?

I didn't even realize abortion was such a federal issue in 1960 to the point where presidential candidates would have their stances be on the record

It wasn't, lol.
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Sam Smith
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« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2020, 08:46:46 AM »

The same is maybe true for New Jersey.

I don't think Catholics voted 78% for JFK. It was maybe 65%-70%.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #7 on: May 11, 2020, 09:40:17 PM »

I know my devout catholic grandmother from New York did not vote for JFK because he was more pro-choice than Nixon. Maybe it was a feeling of him being a catholic traitor to some people?

I didn't even realize abortion was such a federal issue in 1960 to the point where presidential candidates would have their stances be on the record
She was very focused on that issue, maybe more so than your average person. I guess Nixon talked against abortion more and that swayed very pro-life people like her. She was the Right to Life nominee for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1990

Hate to say it but your grandma is full of it. Abortion was not a national political issue in 1960 and it was not part of either Nixon or JFK's campaign. Neither took a stance on it, and I would be very surprised if either talked about it at all during that election, let alone if one did enough to sway people over the issue. Maybe "full of it" is too harsh and your grandma is just misremembering things. But there most definitely was not a common perception in 1960 that JFK was a "Catholic traitor" because of abortion, to say the least.

Hell, the GOP stance on abortion wasn't even clear by the time it actually became nationally legal with Roe v. Wade; Nixon did not oppose the ruling. There is no way in hell that he was railing against it in 1960. JFK wasn't talking pro-choice either. The only way this is true is if your grandma was the only person in the country who thought, for some reason, that Nixon was the "pro-life" candidate and JFK the "pro-choice" candidate at a time when those terms would be anachronistic and neither candidate had actually taken a position on the issue. And then was a single-issue voter over this issue that didn't exist in the election. I find that highly improbable at best, sorry.

More likely she was projecting backwards her views on abortion and her faith decades later, associating the GOP (and by extension Nixon) with the pro-life position and the Democrats (and by extension JFK) with the pro-choice position after these had actually become the parties' dominant positions and the issue was actually prominent. She might have convinced herself that was how she felt at the time and voted based on it, even if she didn't in reality. Human memory is fuzzy that way and we're prone to filling in lost details with newer information that distorts it. This becomes worse the farther removed we get from the actual time we are "remembering." It's a phenomenon that explains how all sorts of things get exaggerated or conflated over time.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #8 on: May 12, 2020, 08:29:37 PM »

Two hypotheses:

1. The Democratic Party in NY was less Catholic-dominated than in cities such as Boston and Chicago (ie large number of Jews and Manhattan liberals), so perhaps they felt it was less ''their'' party

2. The Catholic Church leadership was particularly conservative in NY
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AMB1996
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« Reply #9 on: May 12, 2020, 08:49:31 PM »
« Edited: May 12, 2020, 09:06:15 PM by RoboWop »

Got curious based on the discussion in this thread and some quick research shows that neither Kennedy nor Nixon took a public position on abortion in 1960.

Kennedy
Abortion did come on the political radar in 1962 when TV host Sherri Finkbine fled the US to get an abortion after taking Thalidomide (which her husband had smuggled here after the Kennedy administration banned it). I can't find Kennedy or any politician making a statement on it. Interestingly, the only time Kennedy and abortion were mentioned together in the press is in August 1963, when Swedish newspapers said infant Patrick Kennedy should have been aborted rather than born prematurely. Kennedy died without making a public pronouncement on the issue.

Nixon

Hell, the GOP stance on abortion wasn't even clear by the time it actually became nationally legal with Roe v. Wade; Nixon did not oppose the ruling.

However, claiming that Nixon "did not oppose" Roe is misleading if not outright wrong. Nixon had previously banned military abortions and was publicly supportive of restrictions as President even before Roe. He even actively said that the effort to ban abortion in New York was a "noble endeavor." By the time Roe actually rolled around, Nixon was a little busy with Watergate, but public commentators noted that the decision was a break with Nixon policy.

Perhaps he didn't make these positions vocal in 1968 because Humphrey was also very anti-abortion. There's a reason McGovern was pegged as the candidate of "abortion, amnesty, and acid" in 1972. It was on the radar well before Roe. (This myth, that Roe suddenly awakened some vast conspiracy of evangelicals and Catholics, is very persistent. I will always take the chance to correct it.)
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Intell
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« Reply #10 on: May 12, 2020, 09:43:12 PM »

Italian Catholics were republican in nyc
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AMB1996
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« Reply #11 on: May 12, 2020, 10:03:20 PM »

Italian Catholics were republican in nyc

This is my guess. Though they were not particularly different in beliefs, NYC Catholics were more likely to be Republicans because men like Fiorello LaGuardia, John Marchi, and Paul Fino (and maybe even Vito Marcantonio) had brought many Italians into the party.

I'm guessing Irish Catholics were more Democratic in Boston than in other cities (maybe excluding NYC) because the local Democratic Party was so heavily influenced by Irish leadership.
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Intell
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« Reply #12 on: May 13, 2020, 02:06:14 AM »

Italian Catholics were republican in nyc

This is my guess. Though they were not particularly different in beliefs, NYC Catholics were more likely to be Republicans because men like Fiorello LaGuardia, John Marchi, and Paul Fino (and maybe even Vito Marcantonio) had brought many Italians into the party.

I'm guessing Irish Catholics were more Democratic in Boston than in other cities (maybe excluding NYC) because the local Democratic Party was so heavily influenced by Irish leadership.

I'm pretty sure all white ethnic groups were more democratic in New England. The primary conflict there tended to white ethnics vs white WASP so there was less divisions between white ethnics.
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zoz
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« Reply #13 on: May 13, 2020, 09:54:45 AM »

My grandparents were Irish Catholic Democrats from Brooklyn and they strongly disliked Kennedy for whatever reasons. I think they didn't like his religious controversy, perhaps they felt he distanced himself too much from the Church.
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King of Kensington
Junior Chimp
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« Reply #14 on: May 18, 2020, 08:24:52 PM »

Glazer and Moynihan talk about a conservative trend among the Irish in NY in Beyond the Melting Pot.:

Quote
The crisis for the conservative Irish came in 1960 when, for the second time, an Irish Catholic ran for President.  It turned out that for many the estrangement from the Democratic party had gone too deep to be overcome by primitive appeals...Kennedy probably got a little more of a bare majority of the Irish vote in New York City.  The students at Fordham gave him as much, but it appears it was the Jewish students in the College of Pharmacy who saved that ancient Jesuit institution from going on record as opposed to the election of the first Catholic President of the United States,

They describe Irish Democrats as basically conservative (i.e. strong support for Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy, the break of several prominent Irish Democrats with Roosevelt etc.)  Reform Democrats in the city were mostly WASP or Jewish, displacing Tammany Hall Democrats.

They also note that the Irish in NY suburbanized at a faster rate than Jews and Italians.
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Calthrina950
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« Reply #15 on: May 21, 2020, 03:14:04 PM »

Glazer and Moynihan talk about a conservative trend among the Irish in NY in Beyond the Melting Pot.:

Quote
The crisis for the conservative Irish came in 1960 when, for the second time, an Irish Catholic ran for President.  It turned out that for many the estrangement from the Democratic party had gone too deep to be overcome by primitive appeals...Kennedy probably got a little more of a bare majority of the Irish vote in New York City.  The students at Fordham gave him as much, but it appears it was the Jewish students in the College of Pharmacy who saved that ancient Jesuit institution from going on record as opposed to the election of the first Catholic President of the United States,

They describe Irish Democrats as basically conservative (i.e. strong support for Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy, the break of several prominent Irish Democrats with Roosevelt etc.)  Reform Democrats in the city were mostly WASP or Jewish, displacing Tammany Hall Democrats.

They also note that the Irish in NY suburbanized at a faster rate than Jews and Italians.

In his The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Philips makes reference to Beyond the Melting Pot and states that Nixon probably won a majority of the Catholic middle-class vote in New York City. Kennedy's majority of the Catholic vote in New York City overall-about 60 percent-was much lower than what had been obtained by Truman, Roosevelt, and Al Smith. It's clear that Eisenhower permanently converted some Catholic voters into being reliably Republican constituents. 
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longtimelurker
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« Reply #16 on: June 07, 2020, 10:32:15 AM »

Two hypotheses:

1. The Democratic Party in NY was less Catholic-dominated than in cities such as Boston and Chicago (ie large number of Jews and Manhattan liberals), so perhaps they felt it was less ''their'' party

2. The Catholic Church leadership was particularly conservative in NY

In NYC in the 1930's and 1940's, if you were a working-class Catholic, you were either a pro-New Deal Democrat or a pro-New Deal liberal Republican like Fiorello La Guardia.  After La Guardia left office, a lot of non-Irish Catholics felt left out of the Democratic party machine, and voted GOP.  A lot of Jews did, too; Jacob Javits - more liberal than even most NYC Democrats - cited the Democratic Party's corruption as the main reason he became a Republican.
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