- Very conservative suburbs
- Largely rural
- White and Protestant, and of German origin
- Not many college towns
- Low minority population
Why is having a large German American community relevant? I’ve heard its early settlement by people from more southern colonies like Virginia has led to IN voting more like a southern state.
Voting Republican is not just analogous with voting like a Southern state, LOL.
Someone on Atlas once said that was a factor in Indiana historically voting differently from Ohio and Illinois, I don't remember who. Maybe they said "conservative" instead of "Republican".
Indiana used to be a swing state and it was so in the late 1800's. Lincoln's nomination was made precisely to appeal to states like this that Fremont had lost. The State only had a narrow strip of "Yankee diaspora" or "Yankee exodus" in its northern counties, whereas OH for instance had a greater checkerboard pattern of Southern and Yankee and German settlements. Illinois also had a greater surge of Yankee settlement in the 1850's/1860's as Chicago boomed from the canals and railroads.
Indiana thus didn't have much of an abolitionist presence, and very little in the way of Free Soil Yankee Democrats who would join a new GOP, and its Whig presence was weak like most of the states west of OH. Its Democrats were either Southerns or Catholic German/Irish. They didn't care much about slavery, but they did care about jobs and Lincoln appealed to this "they are going to take your jobs angle" to get Indiana to vote Republican. His family was also one of them, having been Kentuckians who moved north to Indiana and then to Illinois.
The Republicans depended on German protestants to stay about even and the state mirrored the national average in most every election during this period.
Even in 1928, the state matches the national numbers, but that belies pro-catholic Dem shifts and anti-catholic GOP shifts under the surface most likely, exaggerating the previous dynamic. The real shift begins in 1936 and most especially in 1940, and this coincides with the realignment of Germans (including Catholic Germans) to the Republicans, during the New Deal Era.
Since then most German heavy states in the Midwest have been more Republican than the national average.
