how did LaFollette voters vote in subsequent elections

[freepcrusher]

I'm sure this question has been asked in the ten year history of this forum but I'll ask anyways. Here is my guess

1928 - evenly split between Hoover and Smith (as many scandinavian areas didn't like Smith either). I might add a lot of them may have voted for Thomas

1932 - heavily for FDR with some still voting for Thomas

1936 - I think a good deal may have voted for Lemke but still heavily for Roosevelt

1940-1944 - still voted for FDR but probably only 60ish percent as opposed to the 70-75% he may have won in 1932 and 36

1948 - somewhere halfway between 32-36 and 40-44 numbers. Probably a non-negligible number for Wallace

After that the population of people who voted for LaFollette start decreasing in large numbers but I'll guess they voted for Eisenhower in 52 and 56, 55-60% towards Kennedy, FDR numbers for LBJ, and close to a majority for Humphrey (and maybe only 5% for Wallace).

[freepcrusher]

Less to the left than you might think. There was a sizable former conservative German Democrat base that supported La Follette for not being too supportive of WWI. Those folks made up the bulk of the Wisconsin GOP from the 1950s onward.

You cannot underestimate the importance of World War I in Wisconsin politics in that era. For instance, in 1920 Woodrow Wilson was so toxic here that Democratic Presidential candidate James Cox managed to get 16% of the vote in Wisconsin. La Follette's success relied on keeping the folks who were staunchly anti-WWI in his fold even though they agreed with him on almost nothing else.

actually from what I know about wisconsin politics, everyone was a republican until the 1950s when many LaFollettites who were formerly republican, migrated into the democratic fold as a backlash against McCarthy (remember McCarthy beat LaFollette in the 1946 republican primary). This is why the state started electing democrats at that time (Proxmire, Nelson, Kastenmeier etc).