Working class white protestants

[Thunderbird is the word]

Did White Working class protestants always tend to lean more Republican due to having always belonged to the dominant group? (outside the south of course) I'm thinking of All In The Family "Mr we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again."

[Ban my account ffs!]

My dad is a working class white protestant and he has always been Republican.  His big defining moment was his disgust at leftists treating returning Vietnam troops like crap.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Keep in mind that by the time of the New Deal, the American working class outside the South was heavily Catholic, and that non-Southern Protestants (particularly in cities) were disproportionately (though certainly not exclusively) middle-class.

Also, remember that a lot of working-class white Protestants outside the South were of Southern (broadly defined) or border state extraction, so while they were not as heavily Democratic as those in the Solid South, I suspect that a lot of them had longstanding Democratic loyalties (not just because of their social class, either...)

But yes, working class white Protestants outside of the South were significantly less Democratic than the rest of the working class white electorate (especially Catholics, Jews, etc.).

[ElectionsGuy]

In the South, they are heavily Republican, but historically Democratic (obvious). Outside the south, I would guess that they would be a toss-up demographic historically, but leaning R now (due to the income defining the parties more clearly in the past than now).

[Thunderbird is the word]

Keep in mind that by the time of the New Deal, the American working class outside the South was heavily Catholic, and that non-Southern Protestants (particularly in cities) were disproportionately (though certainly not exclusively) middle-class.

Also, remember that a lot of working-class white Protestants outside the South were of Southern (broadly defined) or border state extraction, so while they were not as heavily Democratic as those in the Solid South, I suspect that a lot of them had longstanding Democratic loyalties (not just because of their social class, either...)

But yes, working class white Protestants outside of the South were significantly less Democratic than the rest of the working class white electorate (especially Catholics, Jews, etc.).

True, recent okie migrants or other southerners who had migrated north for work. One demographic though I guess which isn't really as significant I guess are those like Archie Bunker who tended to be the descendants of nativists in New York and Boston and I guess old Yankee types from rural New England and perhaps the rural Midwest.

[King of Kensington]

Archie Bunker's "WASPishness" was very unconvincing. 

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Archie Bunker's "WASPishness" was very unconvincing. 

^^^

He's clearly an Irish stereotype.

[Thunderbird is the word]

Archie Bunker's "WASPishness" was very unconvincing. 

^^^

He's clearly an Irish stereotype.

If he was Irish he'd be presented as more of a Reagan Democrat type but he appears to have always been a Republican given that he once expressed a hatred for FDR and also was nostalgic for Herbert Hoover. It would make more sense for him to be Irish though, having him as a WASP was probably them trying to hue to closely to the original British show "till death do us part" since the Irish were still more of an ethnic minority in 1970s London than New York.

[King of Kensington]

The old school New York Irish accent (the now almost extinct accent Carroll O'Connor gave Archie) is the closest thing to "cockney" in NYC.

In London, Irish immigration was actually more of a mid-20th century phenomenon than a 19th century one.  

[King of Kensington]

Also, the Herbert Hoover reference in the show's opening theme wasn't exactly accurate either. He's not a Hoover Republican (he would have been about 5 years old when Hoover became president anyway) or full-fledged anti-New Dealer.  He was a staunch union man.  And his views on FDR were somewhat more nuanced - he bashed FDR more to annoy Edith's liberal cousin Maude than anything else.  In this exchange Edith states that Archie's family was for Roosevelt, to which Archie replies that was for two terms.  And there's actually an element of truth to that:  while FDR enjoyed near-universal Jewish support throughout his presidency, support among Irish and Italians actually dropped off quite a bit in 1940 and 1944 (the Irish because of his pro-British stance and the Italians because of the "stab in the back" speech about Mussolini).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10CRI7w_vIM

Of course you can't expect TV shows to be 100% consistent.  

Archie Bunker is "not Irish" in the way that the Costanzas on Seinfeld are "not Jewish."

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I would argue that the UP of Michigan and the Iron Range demonstrate that Protestantism isn't the valid category of importance here; the issue is that white working class affinity for the Democratic Party rooted in some semblance of "leftist" sentiment only exists in regions that have a long history of union activism, typically as part of CIO affiliates. Of course, outside of coal country in Kentucky or parts of West Virginia, there aren't many regions that have this kind of history that aren't predominantly Catholic because CIO affiliates tended to be more powerful in "heavier" industries reliant on "low-skill" immigrant labor.

Basically, this issue has nothing to do with Catholicism but rather the fact that communities that developed working class consciousness/culture/identification tended to be Catholic; a similar trend happened with the Swedes, Finns and old stock Americans out West in some logging/mining communities.

[King of Kensington]

If there were a US version of Canada's NDP, Minnesota's Iron Range and Michigan's Upper Peninsula would be one of their biggest strongholds.