There Is No Irish-American Vote

M E Synon writes:

Before anyone even starts the tripe about Paul Ryan on the Romney ticket and the Repubicans looking for 'Irish-American vote,' I'd better run some of what I wrote about this fictional 'vote' back in 2009. To make it clear: there is no such thing in national American politics as 'the Irish-American vote.' Not that the Irish -- or the British who imagine the Irish control some anti-British agenda in Washington -- will ever accept that. Still, one persists with the facts. From my Irish Daily Mail column in the run-up to St Patrick's Day 2009:

"I never know who is more deluded about that one, the Irish or the British, but here is the fact: there is no such thing as an Irish-American vote in national politics. 'If you do want to break Americans down into descent, indeed, tens of millions are of Irish descent – though not just Irish descent. 'Probably out of any million American of Irish descent, at least 400,000 are also of German descent. But you aren’t going to catch any American with a German name banging on about ‘the German-American vote’, even though there are more Americans of German descent than of Irish descent. About the only European-descent Americans who vote ethnic are from Jewish or Italian families. Those Americans who identify their families as being of Irish origin, most are middle class and vote Republican – but never vote for reasons of ‘Irish issues’."

I spoke to Michael Barone about this two years ago. Mr Barone is a senior writer for US News & World Report and is principle co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, the bible for analysis of US elections. I asked him if there was an identifiable 'Irish-American vote.' Answer: "No, nor is there an Irish position on some major national issue that would make this a distinctive voting group." He agreed that Irish-Americans have simply been absorbed into the general mass of middle-class white people.

More, the Irish began arriving in America in the early 17th century, so any idea that the first wave was off the famine coffin ships is myth. Check out the 1770s muster rolls of the Continental Army if you doubt it. It was no fluke that in 1780 His Excellency General Washington declared St Patrick’s Day a holiday for his troops camped at Morristown, New Jersey. Nor indeed was it a fluke that Washington was blood-kin with the McCartys, members of a family originally from Munster – a family who, generations later, intermarried with the family of Dr Samuel Mudd. He was the doctor who famously treated the Southern patriot John Wilkes Booth when he was fleeing from Federal cavalry after shooting Abraham Lincoln.

But that is another story...