Here is a comparison between the Republican vote in the 1964 and 1972 presidential election in Chicago. In each ward I've written the Republican % of the vote. As I argued yesterday, the '68 Wallace vote can be viewed as a stopping point for urban white ethnics from being solidly Democratic to much more Republican. We see some more evidence of that trend here. The wards that I'm most interested in are the south side and north west side. These wards tended to have the highest concentration of urban white ethnics.
Obviously, we must remember that there will have been population shifts and demographic changes between these elections. Nonetheless, using this rough representation, we see some pretty clear movement. As I suggested in my previous post, my suspicion is that there is a strong "backlash" dimension to this trend as urban white ethnics responded to the turmoil of the civil rights movement as well as the "great migration" that witnessed an explosion in the African American population in northern industrial cities like Chicago.
More to come.
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