Comparing Recent Patterns of Electoral Geography in the United States and Canada (Part 1: State/Province Level)
Comparing electoral maps of Canada and the United States is a challenging exercise. The two countries have markedly different political systems: the United States is a presidential democratic republic and Canada is a nominally monarchical state governed through a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. Although both counties are organized as federal rather than unitary states, the individual U.S. states select the country’s president through the Electoral College, where provinces of Canada have no such role. As a result, maps showing Canada’s selection of its head of government (prime minister) are almost always based on parliamentary ridings (electoral districts), whereas those showing the selection of a U.S. president are generally based on states.
A few maps, however, do show the results of Canadian federal elections by province and territory.* The default map in the Wikipedia’s article on the 2025 Canadian Federal Election, for example, shows “Results by electoral district, shaded by winners’ vote share,” but one can click a button to find a map showing instead “Results by province and territory,” which also happen to be shaded by winners’ vote share.
A geographically naive and careless viewer of paired Canadian and American electoral maps by state and province (posted above) might conclude that the geographical voting patterns of the two countries have little in common. Such maps are almost always based on a red/blue dichotomy, but the blue areas of Canada are adjacent to red areas in the United States, just as Canada’s blue provinces are adjacent to red states. Such a seeming disjunction, however, is a mere artifact of the color schemes. Canada follows the much more common British norm of mapping left-leaning parties in red and right-leaning parties in blue, whereas the United States reverses the pattern. This idiosyncratic convention is generally attributed to a New York Times map of the 2000 presidential election. It surprised me at the time that this new convention would prevail. Democrats, I had thought, would object to its implicit “American exceptionalism,” while Republicans, or so I imagined, would take offense at being mapping with a color that is historically associated not just with the left but also the far left. But both sides have embraced the scheme, with the simplistic notion that the U.S. is divided into a “Red America” and “Blue America taking hold of the public imagination.
Another major difference in the political environments of the two countries is the fact that Canada has five political parties represented in its Parliament whereas the United States essentially operates under a two-party system, with only Democrats and Republicans represented in Congress.** The Wikipedia map of Canada posted above thus features a third color, a shade of yellow-orange that represents the leftwing New Democratic Party. A geographically naive viewer of the map, however, could easily conclude that support for this party is greater than it is. One sees a large expanse of yellow-orange on this map, but it covers only a single riding, which is coterminous with the territory of Nunavut. Nunavut, moreover, is not as large as it appears to be, and, more important, it is very sparsely populated, with only 36,858 people living across its 808,190 sq mi (2,093,190 km2). To put these figures in comparative perspective, Alaska, with 740,133 inhabitants in 665,384 sq mi (1,723,337 km2), is by far the most sparsely settled U.S. state; its population density of 1.3/sq mi (0.5/km2) is well below that of 48th-slot Wyoming, with 6.0/sq mi (2.3/km2). Nunavut’s figure, in contrast, is a mere 0.05/sq mi (0.02/km2).
To make the electoral geography of the U.S. and Canada more readily comparable, I have remapped the two countries as a single unit while altering two basic parameters. First, I have deleted Canada’s sparsely populated territories along with the two discontinuous U.S. states, Alaska and Hawaii. Second, I have adjusted the color schemes, following the U.S. model in the first map posted below and the Canadian/British model in the second. (Note also that I have followed the depictions of vote-share by color intensity found in the Wikipedia maps posted above, but have reduced the categories to two for each color. I have done this merely for the sake of convenience.)
As these maps show, at the state/province levels the United States and Canada exhibit somewhat similar geographical-electoral patterns. The northeast U.S. and the adjacent provinces of Atlantic Canada decisively favor candidates and parties on the left side of the political spectrum. The same is true for the Pacific coasts of both countries. Both the U.S. and Canada also have conservative interior sections. The major difference is the Great Lakes region, constituted in Canada by Ontario, by far the country’s most populous province. This trans-border region is shown as having a more left-leaning orientation in Canada than in the U.S. But the electoral difference between Ontario and the U.S. Great Lakes states is, in one sense, not as pronounced as it appears on this map. Before 2016, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had been part of the so-called Blue Wall of reliably Democratic-voting states. It is also noteworthy that in Ontario in 2025 the Liberals outpolled the Conservatives by only 5.5 percent, with the latter party gaining 14 of the province’s parliamentary seats. Such showings seemingly indicate some degree of electoral affinity across this trans-national region.
Such an analysis, however, misses the fact that two secondary leftwing Canadian parties, the NDP and Greens, carried a significant number of Ontario’s votes in 2025 (4.9 and 1.2 percent respectively). In the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Canadian electorate as a whole is significantly shifted to the left relative to that of the United States. Alberta and Saskatchewan are apparent exceptions to this generalization – but are they really? Many sources claim that Canada’s Conservative Party is not nearly as rightwing as the Republican Party of the United States. But this claim is also debatable, as the Republican shift to populism involved moving sharply rightward on some issue (such as immigration) but toward the center on others (such as entitlements for citizens). But for the sake of the arguments advanced at the beginning of this paragraph, I have revised the two maps posted above by shifting Ontario to a darker “left” shade (whether blue or red), Alberta and Saskatchewan from dark to light “right,” and Manitoba from light “right” to light “left.” For Quebec, I added a third level of color intensity to reflect the fact that the Conservative Party took a mere 23.4 percent of its vote in 2025, with the rest going to Canada’s four left-of-center parties (Liberal, NDP, Green, and Bloc Québécois). Such results significantly contrast with those of Vermont, the most left-voting state in the U.S., where Donald Trump took a relatively hefty 32.3 percent of the vote in 2024.
All the maps that I have created for this post, it is important to note, should be regarded as merely subjective and suggestive.
* Far-northern Canada is organized into three territories, which have electoral representation but do not have provincial status.
** There are several independents in Congress, but they caucus with one party or the other.