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