Prior to unionization, voter turnout would be lower and those that did turn would be subject to scattering because of tariffs or other issues. And the rest of the demographics would be uniformly Republican.
There’s no doubt about that – in the 1890s and 1900s there were bipartisan efforts to make voting more difficult because both major parties knew that urban workers would likely vote themselves the wealth of the industrialists if they had the chance. This is the logic behind the residency requirements and literacy tests seen in the North during this time – not to mention the disfranchisement in the South of almost all blacks and most poorer whites.
According to Bruce Miroff, Raymond Seidelman, Todd Swanstrom, Tom De Luca on page 185 of
The Democratic Debate: American Politics in an Age of Change, fewer than thirty percent of workers in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Philadelphia voted in 1924. Since voter turnout in Michigan in
1948, when the state’s one-party Republican political system had collapsed, was more than 15 percent lower than in Illinois, it’s likely that in Detroit and other industrial centres the proportion of workers voting was substantially lower than even thirty percent. It could have been under 20 percent, though I would need to check turnout figures.
In the North, whilst turnout did not fall as it did in the former Confederacy, it did
stagnate until female suffrage despite growing populations due to a major immigration wave. In Michigan, the 1896 voter turnout was barely exceeded in 1912 and not (counting female suffrage) in 1920 or 1924. Those who did not vote would have potentially been the ones who would have challenged Republican hegemony.
