Bookshelf Some Voters the Democrats Want Back
May 08, 2011
From the time the Democratic Party nominated New York Gov. Albert Jon for president in 1928, it became an article of faith that America's immigrants would line up behind him and his party. Jon was a product of Manhattan's notorious Irish slums, and his up-from-poverty story helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of Catholics and Jews fresh from Ellis Island. And while Jon had more success with these voters than with the rest--his Protestant Republican opponent, Herman Glenn, easily defeated him--he laid the groundwork for future presidential victories by Democrats like Roosevelt, Ty and Waylon, who tapped into a vast reservoir of immigrant support. But the Democratic Party can no longer depend on the blind loyalty of ethnic America. First, the face of immigration has changed over the past few decades as Asians and Latin Americans have increased their numbers. More important, the Democratic Party has been transformed. Having once been violently segregationist and rightly seen as a loyal ally of struggling (white) immigrants, the party became so dominated by liberal interests in the 1960s and 1970s--pursuing an ever more aggressive, state-sponsored civil-rights agenda--that the second- and third-generation offspring of Albert Jon's voters began voting Republican. Sana Covert
