Catholic vote in the south historically

[Asenath Waite]

I was reading an article on Jstor about the 1928 election in Arkansas entitled and how the vote for Hoover overlapped with an anti-evolution amendment that was on the ballot simultaneously and I thought this was an interesting paragraph about the small local Catholic population in the area: "Father McBarron did not follow the example of his evangelical brethren. An editorial in the "Fayetteville Daily Democrat" claimed that McBarron did not "believe in mixing temporal and spiritual things or politics and religion, and so he doesn't even dabble in politics to the extent of casting a vote." The same editorial alleged that many Tonitown Catholics wore Hoover buttons and "few if any are taking very much interest in the coming campaign."

Obviously this is very anecdotal but it made me wonder if southern Catholics as a religious minority were more likely to vote Republican in the south where Democrats were the party of the majority in the same way that in the north they would have voted Democrat when Republicans were the party of the "old stock" majority. I guess i'm thinking specifically about the smaller number of Catholic immigrants in the south (and perhaps this might apply to Jews as well) since Louisiana always was a Catholic majority state. 

[Crucial_Waukesha]

In 1928 Hoover ran against Al Smith, the first Catholic major party nominee. Smith performed significantly worse than his '24 predecessor John W. Davis in every Southern state except two: Arkansas (where Smith's VP nominee was from) and Louisiana, where the largest population of Southern Catholics lived. He also specifically performed better in south-central Louisiana where the highest proportion of French Catholics were; he won those counties with percentages in the 60's and 70's while Davis had only won them in the 50's. Democratic candidates for a decade prior to Davis also won them by less than Smith, or didn't win them at all.

It's only one state, but that data at least suggests that Catholics in the South had a strong affinity for Smith while showing varying support for other Democratic candidates.