Biggest county swing

[Rob]

McPherson County, South Dakota has had some bizarre swings. Look at these results:

1920- 73 percent Republican, 21 percent Farmer-Labor, 6 percent Democratic.

1924- 68 percent Progressive, 29 percent Republican, 3 percent Democratic.

1928- 54 percent Democratic, 46 percent Republican. (That's the first time it ever voted for a Democrat, BTW).

1932- 80 percent Democratic, 18 percent Republican.

1936- 55 percent Republican, 44 percent Democratic.

It must have been the farm crisis... but still, it's weird. After that, it's overwhelmingly GOP again (even Truman got only 23 percent). Some more strange McPherson results:

1952- 87 percent Republican, 13 percent Democratic. (That's actually a fairly typical Plains result for '52).

1956 (Here's where it gets weird again)- 50 percent Republican, 50 percent Democratic; Eisenhower beat Stevenson in this GOP stronghold by only 4 votes! Now look at this:

1960- 79 percent for Nixon, 21 percent for Kennedy. WTF? Even stranger is 1964: 72 percent for Goldwater, 28 percent for LBJ.

Since then, it's been ultra-Republican; the best Democratic showing has been Dukakis's 29.5 percent in 1988. Is there any explanation for this? McPherson is (or at least was) a big wheat-growing area, but that doesn't account for all of these swings.