the Driftless Area

[The Head Beagle]

The Driftless Area or Paleozoic Plateau is a region in the American Midwest noted mainly for its deeply carved river valleys ... primarily in southwest Wisconsin ... This region's peculiar terrain is due to its having escaped glaciation in the last glacial period.

Discuss.

[Vasall des Midas]

That Dem riverbelt extends outside of Wisconsin, though.

[The Head Beagle]

That Dem riverbelt extends outside of Wisconsin, though.

All right, how about this, then?

[freepcrusher]

http://verseau.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/geographic-curiosities-the-east-west-divide-in-wisconsin/

[Torie]

Does the presence of hard pressed dairy farms in Western Wisconsin have anything to do with the political divide?

[Sibboleth]

Ah, very interesting. I suppose the next question would be how this landscape has shaped (recent!) human settlement patterns/economic activity/etc, and how this is different from nearby (and more prone to political conservatism) agricultural areas.

[The Head Beagle]

Bump.

This effect remained strong this election, as has been noted a couple of other places, and may be even increasing in some areas.

Interestingly, this actually isn't an area of traditional Democratic farm populism, as you'll see if you compare 2012 in any of the affected states to, say, 1976 or 1988. In NE Iowa and the SE corner of Minnesota, Obama won counties that never voted Dem in any of the three elections with Mondale on the ticket or in the 1988 farm crisis. And in Illinois the contrast is even more dramatic; in the NW there are even a few Goldwater/Obama '12 counties. In general NW Illinois seems to be splitting off from the downstate.

Both here and in northern New England, it seems like the combination of hillier small farms and a kind of northern, non-Evangelical culture has led to an increased Dem rural vote in recent years, even though many areas with just one without the other have been very GOP.

[InsaneTrollLogic]

Aren't there a lot of small dense  John-Deere type manufacturing cities there, like the Quad Cities (which, combined is roughly the size of Des Moines), Dubuque and Rochester, MN that somehow haven't been inudated by Reagan Democrat/evangelical/anti-labor service industry types?

That's the best explanation that I can come up with and I lived there one summer. These small cities/large towns have a lot of minorities in them. Similar cities anywhere else aren't strong Republican, but probably give republicans high single digits in Presidential elections and probably are represented 2:1 Republican at the local level. These cities seem lean D.

Again, its probably because there has been little Southern migration.