The only ones outside the Sun Belt:
5. Pittsburgh
7. Cincinnati
8. Kansas City
10. Indianapolis
13. Louisville?
20. Omaha?
22. Dayton
24. Grand Rapids
37. Harrisburg
41. Lancaster
Louisville and Omaha are borderline cases.
What makes these areas conservative? Pittsburgh is the Coal Belt moving to the right.
Cincinnati is a heavily german, ancestrally republican area. There's also a large socon population.
The Kansas City MSA takes in a lot of rural areas that are probably very socon. There also isn't a Lincoln Park or Greenwich Village to balance it out.
Indianapolis has always been a republican metro area. It's a very white collar metro area and the type of people who populated Chicago or Detroit (from southern and eastern Europe) never came to Indy.
The city of Louisville itself is democratic, but everything else is conservative. See Kansas City.
I don't see how Omaha is borderline. It's clearly not southern by any definition. Omaha is further west and the further west (or south) in the midwest you go, the more GOP it gets. Omaha is on the great plains and there is a large conservative catholic population if I recall. It's not a terribly big metro area so it doesn't attract the type of people who live in Chicago, NY, LA etc.
Dayton also has a large socon catholic population. It is the most labor heavy area of SW Ohio, but there is a lot of ruby red suburban turf in the Kettering area.
Grand Rapids is the dutch.
Harrisburg is a small sized metro area and those type of areas tend to be conservative.
In Lancaster, its the Pennsylvania dutch.
