 It voted for a Republican Presidential candidate on just three occasions between 1896 and 1976 – and even in the landslides of Theodore Roosevelt, Harding and Eisenhower when each candidate swept every county in South Dakota, none of them obtained more than 53.1 percent of Brule County's vote.Richard Nixon, running against favorite son George McGovern in 1972, could not obtain 46 percent in Brule County while he was sweeping all but 129 other counties nationwide.Since the “Reagan Revolution”, however, opposition common to all of rural white America to the Democratic Party's liberal views on social issues, along with perceived lack of economic opportunity, has made Brule strongly Republican.