Region of the country that has made the sharpest ideological 180

[soniquemd21921]

Santa Cruz County, California must be up there. The opening of UC Santa Cruz in the mid 60s has transformed this traditionally Republican coastal county into one of the most hard-left areas in the country (Angela Davis is a professor at UC Santa Cruz, 'nuff said).

What others would qualify? How about the Black Belt counties of Alabama (for obvious reasons)?

[soniquemd21921]

I still think Vermont is the most extreme of any state as far as shifts go, but I'm guessing that's more of a partisan shift then a real ideological shift (Vermont was always economically conservative/socially moderate).

Still, I doubt the election of a self-declared socialist to Congress, having several dozen towns pass resolutions calling for the impeachment and/or arrest of the president, or Wal-Mart having a hard time getting stores built in the state would have happened if Vermont was still a Republican-friendly state the way New Hampshire and Maine are.

[soniquemd21921]

The Midwest was apparently a bastion of economic leftism and radical agrarianism in the early 20th century, North Dakota in particular.

It's interesting to note that before WWII the most radical/liberal Republicans in Congress were all from the Midwest and West - e.g. Robert La Follette (Sr. and Jr.), George Norris, William Lemke and Hiram Johnson.

And then there's Utah. Despite its modern-day reputation as a deep red state, it voted for FDR all four times by wide margins.

[soniquemd21921]

Goldwater won the Rock and Fox valleys and Chicago suburbs; he topped 60% in Du Page. But by 2004 Bush won Du Page by 55-45 and then four years later it and five other counties in the area voted Democratic for the first time since before the Civil War. Obviously Obama's home state status and the anti-Republican trend that occurred just about everywhere in 2008 pushed Obama over the top, but I don't see McHenry, Kendall, Carroll and Boone voting for Obama a second time considering that he won them by margins of 5 points or less, that they all voted Republican in the 2010 Senate and Governor races by double-digit margins, and voted for Bush in the 57-60% range.

Was 2004 the first time ever that southern Illinois was more Republican than northern Illinois? Even in years of huge Democratic landslides (FDR and LBJ) the Rock and Fox valleys and Chicago suburbs voted Republican by wide margins (Alf Landon got 67% of the vote in Boone), but in 2004 Bush's margin in that region was only slightly above his nationwide average.

[soniquemd21921]

How about Tompkins County, New York (Ithaca)? Before the 70s it had the same lopsidedly Republican voting pattern that nearly every other upstate county had (65-75% Republican); even in 1972 with McGovern running Nixon still got 57% of the vote in Tompkins. But over the next few years it swung very hard to the Democrats: Mondale narrowly won it in 1984, and with each subsequent election the Democratic margin got higher and higher. Now Tompkins votes for Democrats by the same margin it voted for Republicans 50 years ago.

[soniquemd21921]

Oh of course Phk, like I said the university played a role. It doesn't come close to explaining the large trend to the dems in the county at large and the bay area.

Ford carried Washtenaw County, Michigan. Maybe it was due to my voting for Ford in 1976 in that county.  Ford actually carried the undergraduate dorm precincts.

Washtenaw County was a Republican bastion before the 70s (it voted against FDR all four times). McGovern's narrow victory in Washtenaw was likely due to a high turnout of first-time college voters.

It seems that colleges and the towns they were in had little in common in the pre-26th Amendment era. Oberlin College was a hotbed of leftism long before the Vietnam War, but the village of Oberlin was overwhelmingly Republican well into the 60s.

[soniquemd21921]

DeKalb county, GA is pretty interesting.

In 1976 it was Carter's worse county, I believe. He won Georgia with 66% yet he only won 56% in Dekalb.

In 2008,  McCain was the guy who won Georgia, with 52% of the vote, yet he only got 20% of the vote in DeKalb that year.

So the county goes from 10 points more R than the state as a whole, to 32 points more D in 30 years. This is pretty much all due to demographics. The county is over 50% black, so the minority voters make it Democratic. Then, the yuppies, college students at Emory, and researchers at the CDC make it liberal as well.

Goldwater carried De Kalb county as well (57 percent). In 1972 it gave Nixon 77 percent, but by 1984 it gave Reagan just 58 percent.

Another Georgia county that has changed dramatically is Clayton, another Atlanta suburb. It gave Goldwater 64 percent of the vote, Nixon an astonishing 86 percent in '72, and Reagan 73 percent in '84. But the county has seen a tremendous growth of black residents in the last 20 years - Obama received 83 percent of the vote in Clayton.