NY Catholics were less likely to vote JFK

[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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[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.

[King of Kensington]

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

[King of Kensington]

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.