Here is the 1968 Wallace vote in the city of Milwaukee. This is a city that I would have initially thought he would have done very well in. Just prior to the '68 race, Milwaukee had been going through some extremely turbulent protests, mostly centered around the issue of open housing, headed by Fr. James Groppi. These protests galvanized much of the urban white ethnic population.
Milwaukee has historically been an extremely segregated city. The urban white ethnic population (mostly Polish and German) is most concentrated in wards 8, 11, 12, 14, 17, and 19. This is where one would expect to see Wallace do the best. In fact, we see that his vote performance, while slightly below his national average, is not as strong as we saw in some Chicago wards. As I'll be showing in future posts, other northern industrial cities, most notably Cleveland, saw Wallace do extremely well.
What may explain Wallace's lower than expected performance here is a greater Nixon share of the vote than one would expect. In other words, rather than stopping off with Wallace on the movement to the Republicans, Milwaukee's urban white ethnics may have skipped the Wallace step altogether. We shall see in future posts.
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