Irish American, Italian American and Polish American vote: how do they differ?

[King of Kensington]

Any data or suggestive data?  How do Irish Catholic, Italian and Polish voters differ in terms of voting and political liberalism and conservatism?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Precinct data suggests that Polish voters are more left-leaning than Italian voters, which isn't surprising. Poles had a much larger presence in heavy industry, which were dominated by leftist, CIO-affiliated unions. Thus, there's a pretty close association between Polish ancestry and classic "white working class" voting patterns. This association does not hold for Italian or Irish voters. Although Italian and Irish voters show a similar trend, their respective allegiances appear to be more quite tribal in nature and linked to machine politics rather than shopfloor politics.

This is lazy psephology but I think this map exemplifies my point


In the US, Poles are associated with the steel industry and the auto industry. The USW, along with the UAW, were two of the more radical CIO affiliates known for their advocacy of "left-liberal"/social democratic politics. In short: Poles are proles.

[Miles]

FWIW, my mom's side of the family is Sicilian, my dad's side is Irish. Overall, my mom's side is more conservative.

[Thunderbird is the word]

I think that Italian-Americans historically tend to lean conservative. As far as Irish-Americans go most of the Irish side of my family leans left to varying degrees, Irish-Americans used to be a solidly Democratic voting block but I'd say now are probably pretty evenly divided politically based on class/level of religiosity/region etc.

[Thunderbird is the word]

Precinct data suggests that Polish voters are more left-leaning than Italian voters, which isn't surprising. Poles had a much larger presence in heavy industry, which were dominated by leftist, CIO-affiliated unions. Thus, there's a pretty close association between Polish ancestry and classic "white working class" voting patterns. This association does not hold for Italian or Irish voters. Although Italian and Irish voters show a similar trend, their respective allegiances appear to be more quite tribal in nature and linked to machine politics rather than shopfloor politics.

This is lazy psephology but I think this map exemplifies my point


In the US, Poles are associated with the steel industry and the auto industry. The USW, along with the UAW, were two of the more radical CIO affiliates known for their advocacy of "left-liberal"/social democratic politics. In short: Poles are proles.

Funny, I would have guessed that they'd be the most conservative out of the three groups due toms historic anti-communism.

[traininthedistance]

I can offer some anecdotal evidence from the Polish half of my family.

My grandfather (who was actually born here, but spent most of his youth in Poland) was a good, hardworking, and loving man, God rest his soul, but he did not have a whole lot of nice things to say about Communists or blacks or liberals or anything like that.  And it's not like he was in any way white-collar (he worked as a machinist!) or even particularly religious. I mean, of course he was Catholic and raised his kids Catholic, but he was not exactly a committed believer if you know what I mean. (All of you except BRTD know what I mean.)

My grandmother... well, she did not express opinions.  A woman's place was in the kitchen, to clean and cook and never contradict the man of the house.  That was the way it was.

My mother of course chafed against the more... "traditional" let's say attitudes of her parents and thus considered herself a liberal in her youth, like so many Baby Boomers.  These days she is an avid Fox News-watcher.  Like so many Baby Boomers.  

Her brother never even went through that liberal youth phase.

I love my family, but that does not mean I love their politics.  (Or, just as a general aside, that I should feel obligated to sugarcoat sexism and racism just because it comes from someone not at the top of the totem pole.)

[King of Kensington]

How does Cheektowaga, NY vote?  Hard to think of a more explicitly "Polish American" place?

[DC Al Fine]

I can offer some anecdotal evidence from the Polish half of my family.

My grandfather (who was actually born here, but spent most of his youth in Poland) was a good, hardworking, and loving man, God rest his soul, but he did not have a whole lot of nice things to say about Communists or blacks or liberals or anything like that.  And it's not like he was in any way white-collar (he worked as a machinist!) or even particularly religious. I mean, of course he was Catholic and raised his kids Catholic, but he was not exactly a committed believer if you know what I mean. (All of you except BRTD know what I mean.)

My grandmother... well, she did not express opinions.  A woman's place was in the kitchen, to clean and cook and never contradict the man of the house.  That was the way it was.

Wow, that sounds a lot like one side of my family. Except switch out Polish Catholic for Dutch Reformed.

[King of Kensington]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-American_vote

Polish Americans also seem to be in somewhat more segregated metros than Italian Americans.  Not sure how they differ in terms of voting on the issue of race.

(Yes, New York is segregated at the census tract level, but you white ethnic and Black neighborhoods bump up against each other more than in say, Chicago where you have a huge cluster of 90%+ African American neighborhoods on the South Side).

In which states (outside New England) did Obama win the NHW Catholic vote?

[traininthedistance]

How does Cheektowaga, NY vote?  Hard to think of a more explicitly "Polish American" place?

You could also look at Wallington, NJ, which is where my grandparents were from and, even now many decades after heavy European immigration tailed off, is not only over half-Polish, but still has a core of Polish speakers and businesses that cater to them. The borough is 85% white, though the Latino population is growing.  It is also insanely dense by American standards, with over 11K people in its one square mile.  And yet it's a suburb.

Wallington was one of those rare unicorns where Obama did better in 2012 than in 2008: he barely won the first time around, with 50.4%, but rose to 54.4% four years later.  I'm sure most of that improvement goes hand-in-hand with an increase in the Latino population, but you can also construct just-so stories about the white working class getting over their racial animus and blanching at Mr. 47% if you really want to.  As for other metrics, Christie crushed while local registration is lopsided in favor of the Dems.

I would assume that your median Polish-American voter is to the left of your median white voter. They're certainly not anything like a monolithic bloc, though.

[King of Kensington]

I pointed to Cheektowaga as an explicitly Polish American place.

Chicago and New Jersey have a lot of post-1980 Polish immigrants, Buffalo doesn't.  I wanted to pick a place which is overwhelmingly American born and more removed from the immigrant experience (though it would be interesting to know how the more recent immigrants vote as well).

I would agree that Polish Americans are to the left of the median white voter.

I don't know a lot about Buffalo, but we get their TV stations in southern Ontario.  It is roughly evenly split between Polish and Italian.  Yet I get the sense the Italians are better represented among the wealthy in Buffalo and the Poles are a bit more working class.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Results for Cheektowaga, NY:

2012 - Obama 57-41
2008 - Obama 56-43
2004 - Kerry 58-39
2000 - Gore 61-33-4
1996 - Clinton 57-28-13 (Dole 2nd)
1992 - Clinton 44-30-26 (Perot 2nd)

(I'm never too clear on what the rules are for posting isolated results from the members-only part of the site. I don't want to deprive Dave of revenue for his work, but obviously the occasional result here and there for a forum discussion is nowhere close to the whole collection, and can be useful for the discussion. Anyway, if the mods have a firm view about this I'm happy to go either way).

[King of Kensington]

Interesting.  So the Polish American vote for the "party of the working man" has really held up.

[King of Kensington]

I know the late sociologist Andrew Greeley did a lot of work on American Catholics during the 60s and 70s including ethnic group voting patterns.  He was a liberal Catholic who sought to refute the "reactionary hard hat ethnic Catholic" stereotype. Will try to dig it up.

Irish Catholics I believe are the most affluent and educated white ethnic group after Jews and probably have been for half a century.  Which isn't that surprising that they've been in the US a long time and are concentrated in the higher income Northeast.   

In 1960, while JFK of course dominated Irish precincts in his native Boston, in New York he only got small majorities in heavily Irish precincts in NYC.  Part of it was obviously due to him not having "favorite son" status there, but I wonder if had to do with economics too.  The Boston Irish were a much larger percentage of the population in Boston and social mobility took longer than elsewhere.

I think Greeley showed as well that Irish and Polish Catholics were more religious than Italians.  Interesting given that Italians might actually be the most politically conservative of the three groups.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Interesting.  So the Polish American vote for the "party of the working man" has really held up.

I wouldn't attribute this to any ethnic-specific causal factors. Eastern Europeans had a much larger presence on the shop floor of large factories that featured tight-knit work-related cultural activities and left-liberal unions. As far as I know, Italian-Americans were less proletarian and had higher rates of entrepreneurship.

Irish-Americans are hard to pin down: Irish-American identity is very symbolic at this point. There isn't much that distinguishes Irish-Americans from WASPs outside of religious identity. At this point, there's a lot of overlap between both groups. There aren't many "pure" Irish-Americans in the US. It's easier to pin down the voting behavior of German-Americans than Irish-Americans because there are many, many communities in the Midwest which have retained many German traditions and sensibilities. German Catholics, in particular, have maintained their ethnic traditions and this is reflected in their voting patterns. They're very "swingy".

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think that's a bit of a stretch unless limited to a few rural areas. German-Americans are one of the most assimilated groups. Probably a majority of Upper Midwesterners have some German ancestry (good point here: most Midwest whites don't fall under just "German" or "Norwegian", just about everyone here is mixed.) German-Americans as a distinct culture thus only exists in a few enclaves. By all means they're there (New Ulm, MN, south central North Dakota, and some areas in SE Wisconsin now being gobbled up by Milwaukee exurbia) but that's a small portion of the German population.

Also notable is that Midwesterner cities don't have "ethnic" neighborhoods, they have white and non-white. There aren't any German/Scandinavian/Irish parts of Minneapolis, on fact we actually have more distinction amongst black neighborhoods because of the African-American vs. African immigrant thing, they tend to be segregated. St. Paul did once have a heavily Irish area but that's mostly diluted now, same with the Eastern European population in South St. Paul (actually a suburb) that came during the boom of the meat packing industry, some are still around but most people there would just be seen as "white" today. Even more so in places like Des Moines and Madison, and as a result I'd imagine there's not much difference in voting patterns amongst different groups of whites.

[SNJ1985]

The most Polish American county is Luzerne County, PA. It usually votes Democratic.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I think that's a bit of a stretch unless limited to a few rural areas. German-Americans are one of the most assimilated groups. Probably a majority of Upper Midwesterners have some German ancestry (good point here: most Midwest whites don't fall under just "German" or "Norwegian", just about everyone here is mixed.) German-Americans as a distinct culture thus only exists in a few enclaves. By all means they're there (New Ulm, MN, south central North Dakota, and some areas in SE Wisconsin now being gobbled up by Milwaukee exurbia) but that's a small portion of the German population.

Also notable is that Midwesterner cities don't have "ethnic" neighborhoods, they have white and non-white. There aren't any German/Scandinavian/Irish parts of Minneapolis, on fact we actually have more distinction amongst black neighborhoods because of the African-American vs. African immigrant thing, they tend to be segregated. St. Paul did once have a heavily Irish area but that's mostly diluted now, same with the Eastern European population in South St. Paul (actually a suburb) that came during the boom of the meat packing industry, some are still around but most people there would just be seen as "white" today. Even more so in places like Des Moines and Madison, and as a result I'd imagine there's not much difference in voting patterns amongst different groups of whites.

I probably should have noted that I was referring to rural communities.

I agree with your post but I'd posit that there's still statistically significant differences in voting patterns among different ethnic communities due to differences in class background, especially among the elderly. There aren't many elderly Polish-Americans who worked as white collar workers or in entirely non-unionized professions. I imagine that class background is still the most important cleavage among elderly non-Southern whites.

[King of Kensington]

Irish-Americans are hard to pin down: Irish-American identity is very symbolic at this point. There isn't much that distinguishes Irish-Americans from WASPs outside of religious identity. At this point, there's a lot of overlap between both groups. There aren't many "pure" Irish-Americans in the US.

Have to agree.  For all the puffery about Irish American distinctiveness, they're pretty assimilated and very few live in anything that could be called an "enclave."

An analysis of census tracts conducted in the New York metropolitan area in 1990 (meaning it's almost certainly less now), only 4% of people with Irish ancestry lived in "enclaves" (census tracts where an ancestry group made up at least one third of the population) - barely any at all.  In contrast, about a quarter of Italian Americans lived in enclaves. (source: Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, p. 88)

Also, they intermarry with WASPs quite a bit:

"A rigorously constructed random sample of Catholic Americans compiled by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, enumerating over 2,000 people, was analysed by Richard Alba and Ronald Kessler for the indications it could give on inter-ethnic marriage patterns... Kessler found that Irish Catholics were marrying people of English background at more than 8 percent above the expected rate, while they married people of German, Italian and Polish ancestry with a frequency of about 3 percent below the mathematically modelled expected rate.  As a whole, Irish Catholics were selecting against the Germans, Italians and Poles...and selecting for the predominantly Protestant English.  Alba and Kessler express the view that 'Irish Catholics are drawn toward marriage to others from the British Isles, whether Catholic or Protestant.' - Reginald Byron, Irish America (p. 284-285).

Boston seems to be an exception to the rule - presumably given their large percentage, greater representation in the working class and legacy of Irish-Yankee tensions.  In the Boston MSA, 38% of those reporting Irish ancestry are of single Irish ancestry, 45% in Suffolk County.  That's pretty remarkable given they're mostly fourth generation and beyond at this point.  You also have the biggest swath of Irish American suburbia, the South Shore (aka "the Irish Riviera").

Irish Americans as a whole resemble the "quieter" Irish Catholic identity of Canada and Australia than they do the Boston Irish.  

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

The most Polish American county is Luzerne County, PA. It usually votes Democratic.

I wonder how much of the Polish population there lives in the city of Wilkes-Barre itself. I couldn't find any info on that. The county also has large Italian and Irish populations that combine to outnumber the Poles. Of course the whole region of NE PA should be voting D because it's the remnants of coal country. Ethnicity or urbanisation may not be part of it.

[King of Kensington]

Also notable is that Midwesterner cities don't have "ethnic" neighborhoods, they have white and non-white. There aren't any German/Scandinavian/Irish parts of Minneapolis, on fact we actually have more distinction amongst black neighborhoods because of the African-American vs. African immigrant thing, they tend to be segregated. St. Paul did once have a heavily Irish area but that's mostly diluted now, same with the Eastern European population in South St. Paul (actually a suburb) that came during the boom of the meat packing industry, some are still around but most people there would just be seen as "white" today. Even more so in places like Des Moines and Madison, and as a result I'd imagine there's not much difference in voting patterns amongst different groups of whites.

Except for Great Lakes and rust belt cities like Chicago and Cleveland. 

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Irish-Americans are hard to pin down: Irish-American identity is very symbolic at this point. There isn't much that distinguishes Irish-Americans from WASPs outside of religious identity. At this point, there's a lot of overlap between both groups. There aren't many "pure" Irish-Americans in the US. It's easier to pin down the voting behavior of German-Americans than Irish-Americans because there are many, many communities in the Midwest which have retained many German traditions and sensibilities. German Catholics, in particular, have maintained their ethnic traditions and this is reflected in their voting patterns. They're very "swingy".

Oh, If only...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Irish-Americans are hard to pin down: Irish-American identity is very symbolic at this point. There isn't much that distinguishes Irish-Americans from WASPs outside of religious identity. At this point, there's a lot of overlap between both groups. There aren't many "pure" Irish-Americans in the US. It's easier to pin down the voting behavior of German-Americans than Irish-Americans because there are many, many communities in the Midwest which have retained many German traditions and sensibilities. German Catholics, in particular, have maintained their ethnic traditions and this is reflected in their voting patterns. They're very "swingy".

Oh, If only...

I mean symbolic in this sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_ethnicity

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The most Polish American county is Luzerne County, PA. It usually votes Democratic.

I wonder how much of the Polish population there lives in the city of Wilkes-Barre itself. I couldn't find any info on that. The county also has large Italian and Irish populations that combine to outnumber the Poles. Of course the whole region of NE PA should be voting D because it's the remnants of coal country. Ethnicity or urbanisation may not be part of it.

Poles tend to live in outlying proletarian communities that are very Democratic. Two of the most Polish municipalities in the country are in Luzerne County; these communities gave President Obama over 60% of the vote in 2008. I'd wager that these towns are far more Democratic downballot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_E._Kanjorski
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trumka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Kaptur

When I think of Polish-American politics, I think of Kanjorski, Trumpka and Kaptur.

[King of Kensington]

When I think of Polish-American politics, I think of Kanjorski, Trumpka and Kaptur.

Then there was the fictional Polish American from Chicago on All in the Family, Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic.  Whose surname wasn't Polish, and who spoke with a New York accent apparently.  But he was from a working class background and him becoming an educated liberal wasn't implausible at all.

Far more unbelievable was that Archie Bunker was supposed to a working class white Protestant living in Queens in the 1970s.  But I think of him as Irish American - Irish American Carroll O'Connor (who came from a middle class background himself) gave Archie Bunker an old school working class New York Irish accent.