Perry County, Indiana

[minionofmidas]

I've marvelled at this before.
Jim's post's very interesting, but offer an explanation it does not.

[minionofmidas]

This might though: http://www.city-data.com/city/Tell-City-Indiana.html

57% of males and 20% of females are employed in manufacturing.

That fits well with Jim's description, but it's not as if White factory workers everywhere were Democrats.

Although they have steel and auto industries there: http://www.pickperry.com/major_emp.html

[minionofmidas]

(rural) Greater Minnesota is characterized by the electoral cleavage between Lutheran Democrat Scandinavians and Catholic Republican Bavarians. That's American Demographics 101 stuff, man.
(It's also why the German Catholic areas show up so well in the 1928 and 1960 maps - that wouldn't be the case if they had also voted Democratic in 1924 or 1956.)

I take it that Perry County, unlike bits further west in southwest Indiana, has no coalmining history.
The Iowa analogy may actually be quite fitting.

Fun fact: In the State House, the area was split between the districts of two longterm Democratic incumbents from further east and further west - Paul Robertson and Russ Stilwell. Both held leadership positions, Stilwell's a union man. Both went down to defeat in 2010. Republicans then drew what can almost be described as a Dem pack in the area (eh... it voted for Obama in 2008, anyways, and has all of Perry) and whisked the 2010 winner that lived in it away to make her Lt.Gov.
Then held the seat in 2012 anyways. Democrat can't have outperformed Obama by much.

 

[minionofmidas]

The descendants of German Protestants in the USA are going to be so heavily intermarried with WASPs and in the Upper Midwest with Scandinavians, and are just such a milquetoast ethnicity, as to be almost unspottable even though actually one of the largest population groups in the US. They have no cohesion as a group.