GeoCurrents on the political anomaly of the “Driftless” zone of the upper Mississippi (via GLPiggy). The anomaly has to do with the fact that this area is very white, very rural, and not in the orbit of a larger cosmopolitan urban area (e.g., “Greater Boston,” which extends into New Hampshire). The post goes into much greater detail, but concludes with a request for more information. This is the area where local knowledge might be helpful.
I went poking around old county level presidential election maps, and I can’t see the Driftless blue-zone being a shadow or ghost of any past pattern. But, I did stumble upon again the 1856 presidential election map by county…can there be a better illustration of the “Greater Yankeedom” (the red are Republican voting counties, the first year that the Republicans were a substantial national party):
Addendum: Obviously not the whole North was Yankee. So who were the others? The ancestors of what in the 20th century become “white ethnics,” disproportionately urban Catholics (in this case, mostly Irish and German) were already Democratic leaning by this period. There were also old groups, like the Hudson Valley Dutch, as well as the merchant class of New York City, which were long anti-Yankee in their politics and sentiments. Not only that, but New York City was economically integrated with the South’s cotton economy to a greater extent than other zones of the North. And in places like Pennsylvania there were deep reserves of populist Democrats. Finally, across the southern half of the Midwest states the settlers were actually often from the Upper South states. The “Butternuts.”