I imagine that Catholic areas and voters would be most likely to vote this way, due to Republican Catholics who voted Smith purely due to the religion issue. How common would Smith/Hoover voters have been, and were there any units of population (cities, precincts, districts, etc) that voted for Smith in 1928 and Hoover in 1932? Also, how many counties swung more Republican from 1928-1932? Are there any county swing maps available for the election? I know there were no counties that fully flipped from Smith to Hoover, but I am curious to see how rare it was for counties to swing more Republican. The only example I know of is heavily Catholic Elk County, Pennsylvania, thanks to the below post which sparked my interest in this topic.
Smith-Hoover, Goldwater-Humphrey, and Dole-Gore come to mind. What other voting patters were very unusual?
Smith-Hoover is certainly unusual, but I can provide a concrete example of it. I recall reading somewhere that Hoover did several percentage points better in heavily Catholic Elk County, Pennsylvania, in 1932 than he did in 1928. He still lost the county though, as he did not gain a single county which Smith had carried in 1928 (while losing over 2,000 counties he had won to Franklin Roosevelt). Moreover, Roosevelt did not improve substantially over Smith in Massachusetts. I think that Smith-Hoover voters were predominantly Catholics who went for Smith out of a sense of shared religion, but otherwise voted Republican.
