And "the Collar" is the reason the GOP has little to no shot now at the presidential level in IL. Like other states with bigtime suburban vote, the GOP lost their support.
What I've been desperately trying to figure out is why the Chicago suburbs and the Milwaukee suburbs have moved in opposite directions over the past 30 or so years. They're similar in so many ways but so different in their trends.
The two areas are much more different than you think. Chicago's suburbs are much older and, as a result, the large inner ring is very urban (Evanston, Oak Park, Skokie, Cicero, Berwyn, etc etc...all urban and liberal).
Additionally you have more diversity: Jewish areas like Highland Park and Buffalo Grove, Hispanic areas like Waukegan and Round Lake, black majority suburbs south of the city. Plus many of the wealthier white suburbs are very well educated and are either tepid on or have totally left the GOP.
This leaves only limited areas southwest and far northwest of the city like Naperville, Orland Park, Barrington, McHenry, etc that could pass for Milwaukee suburbs.
This is still confusing to me though. The Milwaukee suburbs are very well off and have high levels of education, so that can't be a full explanation. Maybe going to the point earlier that Chicago's suburbs are older, Milwaukee's suburbs are behind the normal times? So following that, we should expect a D trend in the future... (impossible to imagine) And being more diverse isn't the answer either, since whites in the Chicago suburbs are still around 57-58% GOP, while the ones around Milwaukee are close to 70% GOP.
It's really difficult to wrap one's mind around, partially perhaps because there are so many factors. Racial minority populations have surely grown in areas like Waukegan, which has helped push Lake County from its solid GOP position in the 1980s.
At the same time, you look at areas like Winnetka and Kenilworth - some of the wealthiest areas in the Midwest - and find that they voted for Obama in 2008 and are 50/50 areas (if with a slight GOP edge) in 2012. These are areas that, if in the Milwaukee suburbs, we would expect to be very solidly GOP. A comparable Wisconsin town may be Elm Grove.
One thing that we may notice is that there are religious differences. Surprising enough to me, they have a similar percentage of non-religious residents (around 40%). However, Elm Grove has more than double the Evangelical population as Winnetka (18-8). This is consistent with the suburban Milwaukee counties, and I did not realize that there was an Evangelical presence there. There is also a higher percentage of Catholics in Winnetka as compared to Elm Grove (37-29). I am guessing that there is a decent percentage of these disaffected, meaning the non-religious percentage in Winnetka (for all intents and purposes) may be higher than reported.
Another difference is in education. If we look at the Milwaukee suburbs, we see that perhaps they have even higher percentages of Bachelor's degree completion than those of Chicago. Yet, if we compare these two towns on post-graduate education, we see that Winnetka has around 30% of the population with a Master's degree with an additional 20% higher than that - coming to around 50% with more than a Bachelor's degree.
Compare this to Elm Grove, that shows around 18% with Master's degree and 15% with higher than that - totaling only 23% of the population with more than a Bachelor's degree.
Perhaps this can give us some insight into the differences between white, specifically wealthy voting differences.
