Indiana is so conservative for one simple reason:
It's the south, without the African-Americans.
Admittedly the northern lake area counties are part of the North and thus make Indiana a little closer to the center than the deep south (Carolinas, Georgia minus Atlanta, ala. , miss. , etc. ) if they all of a sudden lost all their African Americans.
Ohio and Illinois is much the same but they have far larger areas where the white folk are northern white folk, rather than southern white folk. Sorry if that seems offensive, but there really isn't a better way to put it, each minority type varies somewhat by region but caucasians vary wildly by region, some whites are new england liberals, and some are bible belt conservatives and the midwest is where they mix .
My theory on the Klan being so strong in Indiana is that they found it to be a haven of like minded people without too many of the people they hated (er ... still hate) being around.
This sounds about right. There certainly are southern whites who live in the North, and visa versa. The suburbs of Chicago fit in with the North, but most of the state fits in with the South.
What I find interesting is why is the Fort Wayne area so conservative. I've never been there, but I didn't think it was at all southern.
I don't think Ill. (w/o Chicago) and Ind. are comparable politically. Gore would have still won Illinois without Chicago.
Indiana doesn't make much sense. The guys who work at the factory in Elkhart county with my dad, are a bunch union workers a third of which are from WV. They seem like they should be rather democratic, They were pretty reasonably heavy Bush in '00. Now they seem to fall closer to the northern union worker average. They made fun of my dad for supporting the environut anti-gun Gore, now they tell him he was right all along.
Elkhart County used to be more dependent on factory jobs than any other county in the nation. It still voted 2 to 1 for Bush, its in the North, it borders Michigan and it was still more Republican than the state average. The city of Ft. Wayne is a little more democratic, but Wayne county is much more conservative. I'm not sure what to say about it but the fact that the northern two/thirds of Indiana away from the lake and not in the city of indy proper is all staunchly Republican.
Gore would have lost Illinois if you took Cook county (Chicago's county) out of the state. Bush beat him by like 150,000 in the rest of the state. The reason the rest of Illinois would be more moderate than Indiana is because there are more Northern whites in Illinois. Look at the counties on the Iowa border.
