voters,” Nate Cohn noted in The New York Times recently.

“Yet his strongest performance so far wasn’t in Mississippi, where he got 47 percent of the Republican vote, but in Massachusetts, a famously liberal state, where he won 49 percent of Republican voters.”

Massachusetts is also a heavily Catholic state, with plenty of Irish Americans as well as other white ethnic Catholics.

As the Times notes, in Massachusetts, “Catholics made up a majority of the Republican electorate and provided Mr. Trump with a big primary victory. He drew 53 percent of Catholics in the Massachusetts GOP primary, while Mr. Kasich and Mr. Rubio combined for just 35 percent.”

Cohn concludes: “(Trump’s) appeal in historically Democratic areas is a reflection of strength among new Republicans -- whether they be white southerners or whiteReagan in the 1980s.

But a word about that arch-segregationist. In 1968, Wallace ran a slash-and-burn campaign aimed at restoring racial apartheid in the south. How else do you think he won five states in the deep south, even though he ran on a third party line?

But as Kevin Phillips notes in his landmark study The Emerging Republican Majority, “Urban Catholic precincts also gave Wallace fair support in northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York City, Connecticut and Boston.”

Those Irish and Italian guys drinking at Mr. Kelly’s in Park Slope have long moved out of Brooklyn. They and their kids and grandkids moved to Long Island or suburban New Jersey or upstate New York. They may no longer even be members of what Hamill called the “white lower middle class.”