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.
Even within the group of “affluent Republicans” in California at this point you would have had a big divide. On the one hand, there were the Bay Area Republicans, who were mostly moderate Rockefeller types and more established in the area; Marin County was Republican until 1984. On the other hand the rabidly right-wing, conspiracy-minded Republicans of SoCal, particularly Orange County (which saw an incredible 225% growth in population between 1950-1960), who counted large numbers of Midwestern transplants in their ranks. For many of them, their internal migration would have had a symbolic significance of escaping the soon-to-be Rust Belt and industrial cities just beginning to decay, dominated by New Deal politics, to the booming land of low regulation, low unionisation and Cold War industry.
