Washtenaw, MI went from Nixon 1968 to McGovern to Ford to Carter 1980. From 1988 on, it has voted Democratic.
It was highly Democratic in the Third Party system, Republican until LBJ, then shifted from Nixon to McGovern in 1972, and has been Democratic since 1988.
The two are amongst just five counties that voted for Landon in 1936 and McGovern in 1972. However, with its location, Jackson County did swing substantially to Trump with Hilary winning only a plurality, so it may be that the Democrats cannot hold it despite its college characteristics.
It’s interesting that even winning only one county, Illinois was McGovern’s eleventh-best state by raw vote percentage, whereas Johnson actually did worse than his national percentage there in 1964. The same is true of California, and both states were narrowly won by Ford in 1976, and then Carter only carried three counties in each in 1980. Albert J. Menendez argued that California had very large highly liberal Democratic and very large, highly conservative Republican organisations at that time, but never says that of Illinois.
The similarity in voting patterns between Illinois and California is quite striking and has been so ever since California entered the Union in 1850. However, it is seldom noted in the politics textbooks. It is true that Illinois and California voted for different candidates in 1880, 1912, 1916 and 1960, but in all cases wafer-thin margins were involved.
In fact, since 1864, the largest absolute difference between the two states’ voting patterns occurred in 1936 when California voted 17.24 points more Democratic than Illinois (showing how bad a candidate Ozark mountaineer Alf Landon was in the West). The two pairs of states – Mississippi and Alabama, Kansas and North Dakota – with the longest runs of voting for the same candidate both saw wider differences in the Catholicism-influenced 1928 election. That 1928 election shows the second-biggest difference between California and Illinois, with California’s hostility towards Al Smith making it vote 15.85 points more Republican than Illinois.
Athens County was one of the few counties (along with Jackson County, Illinois and Pitkin County, Colorado) to shift from Nixon in 1968 to McGovern in 1972.
There was also Washtenaw County, eleven counties in South Dakota, and
Rusk County in Wisconsin, the latter of which Trump won by two-to-one after it had voted for Obama as recently as 2008.
