Italians and Jews in NY/NJ

[King of Kensington]

I'm guessing that the Italian vote went around 60/40 R and the Jewish vote 60/40 D in these two states in the last presidential election.

Less Democratic than in the US as a whole.  Larger Orthodox/traditional/immigrant Jewish populations and it seems like less assimilated Italian American voters (more common in the NYC metro than anywhere else) are also more Republican.

[King of Kensington]

Why do you think LESS assimilated Italian-Americans are more Republican?  If anything, I'd assume the opposite.

Here's how I see it.  A lot of people think Italian immigration to the US basically stopped in 1920.  And yes, when you're talking about Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, New Orleans and Youngstown the postwar Italians are inconsequential statistically speaking.  But there was a modest but not insignificant wave of Italian immigration from 1950-1970 as well that was heavily skewed towards New York.  Many settled in outer borough Italian neighborhoods (and reinforced Italian culture in those enclaves among Italian Americans) and a good number of Italian Americans in NYC are descended from the postwar wave.

For example Bensonhurst is thought of as the classic Italian American neighborhood.  But I believe it was actually more Jewish than Italian until about 1960 (Glazer and Moynihan neglected to mention it in their chapter on Italians when they referred to the city's Italian neighborhoods in their classic book Beyond the Melting Pot).  It received an influx of Italian immigrants after the war and the Italian American population probably peaked there around 1980 or so.  In other words, it's the postwar immigrants that really give southern Brooklyn its Italian character .

Don't the Italians of Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights (although it's been declined significantly in the last two decades, it's still the biggest concentration of Italian speakers in the USA) vote massively Republican?  

It also seems to me that Italians in metro New York (where they're less "melted") are more Republican than elsewhere in the US.

[King of Kensington]

I had forgotten about this thread:

Why are New York Italians more Republican?

[King of Kensington]

An interesting blog post on Italian American culture in NY/NJ vs. California

http://www.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east

Basically she argues that Italian culture stayed alive longer in NY/NJ because of sheer numbers and postwar immigration: that is, Italians created new enclaves in the suburbs and postwar immigration had enough of an impact in Italian neighborhoods to reinforce Italian culture.  In contrast, in California there was no concentrated movement to the suburbs and Italians became more or less "generic white people."

If anything I would guess California Italian Americans are quite a bit more liberal than the typical white Californian, just because they're more urban and the transplants would be less socially conservative than Italians in the Northeast (plus Southern California for a long time was largely made up of conservative Midwestern Protestants and their descendants).

And California Jews are almost certainly a lot more liberal than in the New York area, for obvious reasons.

[King of Kensington]

Also, there are a lot of autopilot white Catholic Democrats in New England and Chicago and I doubt that Italian Americans in those places would be immune to that phenomenon - in other words they're more Democratic than in NY/NJ.  

[King of Kensington]

Thinking of the Jewish vote in the New York area, here's my stab in the dark guess:  it's probably about 80% Democrat in Manhattan, Brooklyn is probably about 60-70% GOP (Orthodox and Russians outnumber the Park Slope/Brooklyn Heights urban liberals who are probably even more Democratic than in Manhattan), Queens I'm not sure (probably pretty evenly split), Long Island maybe 60/40 Democrat (there's the the wealthy suburban liberals of the North Shore but also the Orthodox Five Towns), Westchester it probably matches the 70/30 figure nationally and Rockland must be overwhelmingly GOP.  

New Jersey I'm less familiar with, but I'll say it's about 60-65% D: obviously there's a lot of affluent suburban liberals, but observant Jews likely make up a larger proportion of the state than the US average (i.e. Lakewood, Teaneck).

ETA:  Another thing to take into account is that Conservative Judaism is relatively stronger among non-Orthodox Jews in the New York area than in a lot of the US where Reform is by far the biggest movement.  Conservative Jews overall are closer to Reform ideologically and politically than Orthodox, and thus somewhat less Democratic.

[King of Kensington]

And the little Sephardic enclave of Deal, although only a drop in the bucket in terms of the overall Jewish population.  Romney and McCain both received 71% of the vote there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal,_New_Jersey

[King of Kensington]

Dyker Heights is still quite Republican, as it is still heavily Italian and also fairly wealthy.  In Bensonhurst, now, the old generation of Italians is being slowly replaced by a mostly Chinese immigrant (/"moving on up" from Sunset Park/Chinatown) population, and they've voted about 50/50 for Obama, more Republican downballot.  Presumably with those numbers, the Italians in Bensonhurst are strongly Republican.

But less strong than another Italian stronghold, the South Shore of Staten Island.

If Howard Beach is a pretty representative NYC Italian neighborhood my 60/40 R estimate seems about right, according to this NYT graphic.

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Also the Westchester towns of Eastchester and Harrison both went around 55% R.  Long Island towns are unfortunately too big to break down meaningfully.

[King of Kensington]

There's some Syrian enclaves in Brooklyn and Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills and Long Island.

[King of Kensington]

Looking at Upstate New York, it seems like the Italian American vote was pretty evenly split.

For instance, Obama won the heavily Italian Rochester suburb of Gates (56-43).  The most Italian town is Frankfort outside Utica and it went 52% Republican (though it only has  a population of 3,000).

[King of Kensington]

They're pretty evenly split, probably a bit more Democrat than Republican outside the New York metro, but maybe 60/40 R in the New York metro.

[King of Kensington]

Looking back to 1960, it appears that Italian and Irish Catholics were more right-wing than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly New England.  According to Kevin Phillips (The Emerging Repulican Majority) perhaps 40% of the Catholic vote in the 1960s in NYC was Republican.

Certainly by 1980, New York Jews moved from being from the left of American Jews generally to the right of them.  In the 50s, Eisenhower did significantly worse in Jewish areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx than the 35-40% he got with Jews generally.  But by the 1960s, the outer borough Jewish population that remained (largely Orthodox and working class/lower middle class) was turning rightward.

[King of Kensington]

Is Assembly District presidential voting data available?  I recall it being shared here some years ago.

[King of Kensington]

To answer my own question, here's Assembly District data for 2012 in NYC:

http://vote.nyc.ny.us/html/results/2012.shtml

Romney got 65% in Staten Island's Assembly District 62 - presumably this is the mostly Italian South Shore - as well as 54% in Assembly District 64.

In Brooklyn, Romney got 75% in AD 48 and 59% in AD 45 which are (I'm pretty sure) Hasidic and Russian Jewish respectively.

Obama won every Assembly District in Queens but not sure if he carried the Jewish vote in Forest Hills/Rego Park (are there still a lot of affluent liberals there anymore?)