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The voting of the green: How the US’s most Irish-American counties voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections

Voting pattern analysis shows many counties with strong links to Irish ancestry skewed towards voting for Democratic presidential candidates

Voters line up to cast their ballots in the 2020 US presidential election. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times
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Nora-Ide McAuliffe
Fri Jul 19 2024 - 14:21

An analysis of voting patterns of the top 25 US counties claiming the highest levels of Irish ancestry shows that more than half voted Democrat in the last two presidential elections.

In 2016, 52 per cent of people in these counties voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton ahead of Republican rival Donald Trump, while more than two-thirds (68 per cent) voted for fellow Democrat Joe Biden in his battle with Trump in the 2020 election.

The data does not indicate how any particular ancestry group in these counties voted: rather, it shows how the county in which they live voted overall.

Of the 25 counties analysed, Irish was the dominant ancestry claimed in 20 of them.

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Just five counties – Gloucester County in New Jersey, Greeley County and Grant County in Nebraska, Carroll County in New Hampshire, and Pike County in Pennsylvania – had dominant ancestries of either Italian, German or English.

According to the US census, the 25 counties with the highest percentage of people claiming Irish ancestry are largely located in the east coast states of Pennsylvania (five counties), New Jersey (three), Massachusetts (three), New Hampshire (three), Rhode Island (three) and New York (two).

Of these, the counties with the highest percentage of Irish ancestry in the state of Massachusetts (Plymouth, Barnstable, Norfolk) and state of Rhode Island (Washington, Newport, Kent) all voted Democrat in the past two presidential elections.

In New Hampshire, two out of three “Irish counties” in this state (Carroll and Rockingham) changed their vote from Republican to Democrat in 2020, turning all three counties blue, while in New York state, Saratoga county, where 23.2 per cent of the population claims Irish ancestry, voted for Biden (51.6 per cent) in 2020, having voted for Trump (48.5 per cent) four years previously.

In New Jersey, Cape May (the county with the highest percentage of people claiming Irish ancestry in the whole country at 28.6 per cent), Gloucester and Sussex counties all voted for Donald Trump in 2016. However, in Gloucester county, where Trump won by just 0.5 per cent in 2016, Biden won by 1.9 per cent four years later.

In Pennsylvania, four of the five “Irish” counties have voted Democrat in the past two elections. Pike County has remained the outlier among these, voting for Trump on both occasions with Republican Donald Trump getting 61.5 per cent of the vote in 2016 and 59.6 per cent in 2020.

Moving across the country and away from the east coast, of the six remaining counties, five have voted overwhelmingly Republican in the last two elections. The largest margin is found in Roberts County, Texas, where just over one-fifth (21.47 per cent) of the population claims to be of Irish ancestry. In 2016, 94.6 per cent of the votes in this county went to Trump with 96.2 per cent of the votes cast for him in 2020.

The final county, Silver Bow, Montana, which has the fourth-highest (25.4) percentage of people claiming Irish ancestry, voted Democrat in both elections, with 52.4 per cent voting for Clinton in 2016 and 55.7 per cent voting for Biden in 2020.