Why Indiana is conservative (asked on another diary): Funding for public education has been mediocre. Many Indiana college graduates leave for Chicago, California, or the East. Only in the early 1960s did a school consolidation law compel the rural areas to give their young better opportunities for advanced math and foreign language study than for basketball (I experienced this first-hand in the 1950s).
For over 30 years, federal government incompetence managing the national economy (including the administrations of Democratic Presidents Carter and Clinton) shafted Indiana blue-collar folks who lost union jobs during the emergence of the Rust Belt. A wave of Reagan Democrats in 1980 also sank liberal Senator Birch Bayh.
In the 1920's the KKK got at least 300,000 men (both my grandfathers, btw), building on Protestant anti-Catholic, anti-German, and anti-black bigotry, bankrolled (over $1 million) the Indiana Republican Party's gubernatorial candidate, only to see KKK Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, a vicious drunk, convicted of second-degree murder for abducting and "strong-arming" Madge Oberholtzer. Indiana conservatives don’t want to confront their predecessors’ shame.
The main conservative security blanket in central Indiana, stifling liberal viewpoints, has been the Indianapolis Star (owned by the Pulliam family until they sold it to Gannett), which still carries a lot of conservative columnists with a large following, and no balancing liberal columnists. The dominant culture in Indiana since the 1930's has celebrated basketball, self-reliance, and ethnic homogeneity, in a predictable effort to sweep Indiana's disgrace out the porch, not under the rug.
Since the folding of Scripps-Howard’s Indianapolis Times in the early 1960s, there have been few outlets for liberal and progressive columnists (think of major Indiana talents like Kurt Vonnegut and David Letterman who made the big time but are frozen out of pro-Republican Indiana media). The Young Americans for Freedom was founded at Indiana University. Elected in 1958 and 1962, liberal senators Vance Hartke and Birch Bayh helped dampen that conservative resurgence among Indiana white-collar folks, but it took Carter's incompetence and Reagan's snaky charms to sink Bayh in the 1980 election. Since then, Indiana has been bereft of strong liberal leadership -- except we were all proud of Vonnegut and Letterman.
More on why so many Reagan Democrats. Because the Indiana economy is heavily focused on agriculture and manufacturing, there are lots of good blue-collar jobs (formerly unionized, less so now). My father, a retired union carpenter with liberal social values, voted for Reagan in 1980 (although had Ted Kennedy gotten the nomination, he would probably have voted for him).
My father, an idealist who spent 15 years after retiring helping Lafayette down-and-outers, saw that Carter had no intention, let alone ability, to carry out the 1976 Democratic Party platform: pro-union reform of National Labor Relatins Act (RESULT: Reagan busted the air controllers in 1981); Hawkins-Humphrey Full Employment Act with a goal of keeping unemployment below 4% (RESULT: Reagan's 1981-82 recession (partly Carter's fault) took unemployment to 8(?) % and engendered widespread homelessness, including PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vets as well as working people who lost their homes); National Health Insurance (RESULT: prospective main author, Michigan Congresswoman Martha Griffiths, who was marginalized by Carter, was not in the picture when an ex-Goldwaterite from Wellesley blew it in 1994); and creation of a Consumer Protection Agency, as called for by Ralph Nader and Public Citizen (RESULTS: corporate swindling of working people for 32 years, with even the Clintonistas looking the other way).