Very interesting. The immediate post-New Deal era was the closest the US ever got to class-based voting. How did you happen to come across this?
I am no expert on this, but I would say this was especially the case in "newer" areas, like many in California, where regional and historical ties were weakest. For example, the GOP pretty clearly won plenty of working class voters in places like the Great Plains states and rural Vermont, while I am guessing there was a sizable upper-middle class Democratic bloc in major cities, especially somewhere like New York. However, I imagine a state like California would have had one of the biggest class divides between the two parties at this point, as it was truly a different place than it is now. I am always reminded of the song The Last Resort by The Eagles, which paints a not-so-complimentary picture of California as somewhat of a materialistic, right-wing escape and ground zero for environmental damage for the sake of capitalism. Crazy how it just might be the most liberal state in the nation now.
I don't think it's that crazy. When I try to imagine 1960s-1980s California, the image that pops into my head is a place full of hippies, stoners, and surfers. Not exactly a conservative crowd. California may have been politically conservative at the state or national level, but culturally I get the sense that it was always a bit "out there". In the movie Taxi Driver, there's a scene where one of the cab drivers talks about how he doesn't like having to drive around gay people in his taxi and remarks that they should "go to California" because "they're way ahead out there." That was in 1976, and already there was this idea of California as some freewheeling progressive hotspot. It's not for nothing that one of the first nationally prominent gay politicians, Harvey Milk, was from there.
The people who dominated elections though were not that Progressive crowd, at least until the 1990s.
The people who dominated the elections were older, much more conservative and more Republican and they were augmented by droves of people moving in from the Midwest.
