But to win here, they have to hold together a decaying coalition of blacks, white ethnics, Jews and upper middle-class liberals.

They have moved their families onto the city's affluent West Side, formerly the stronghold of white ethnics.

(The habits of white ethnics seem to escape his notice.)

And immigrants have revitalized the outer-borough regions from which the white ethnics who formed the city's old middle class fled.

"And that vote will be pretty well split among them, and whoever can get the Hispanics and white ethnics probably has the edge," he said.

Blacks were recruited by the meatpacking industry as strikebreakers, which increased hostility of white ethnics toward them.

Ethnic people today are coming from countries and moving into neighborhoods, and they're not meeting old-fashioned white ethnics.

The more white ethnics there see the Democratic Party dominated by blacks, the more they are afraid.

The white ethnics and the working poor were pushed even further northwest and north.

Most of the employees are white ethnics whom the locals hold in contempt.