Several recent GeoCurrents posts have emphasized similarities in the electoral geographies of the United States and Canada. But there are also some major differences, particularly regarding state/province voting patterns and levels of economic development.
In the U.S., the wealthiest states tend to favor the left-leaning Democratic Party while the poorest states tend to favor the right-leaning Republican Party. As can be seen in the map first posted below, in 2024 presidential election all but one of the states that gave Kamala Harris the highest percentage of their votes have relatively high median household income figures. Intriguingly, however, that state that most strongly supported Harris, Vermont, has only a mid-level income figure. By the same token, states with the lowest median household income figures supported Donald Trump in 2024. Yet the state that most strongly supported Trump, Wyoming, has a relatively high median income figure (see the second map below).
In Canada this relationship is largely inverted. In the 2025 Federal Election, provinces with the lowest median income levels strongly supported parties on the left, whereas the province with the highest income level, Alberta, strongly supported the Conservative Party (see the first two maps posted below). The correlation between economic development and conservative political orientation is more clearly apparent when comparing the 2025 electoral map with the map of per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by province. As can be seen, the two provinces that strongly supported the Conservative Party, Alberta and Saskatchewan, have much higher GDP figures than Canada’s other provinces. (Canada’s three northern territories admittedly have high GDP figures and low levels of support for the Conservative Party, but they also have very small populations.)
This seeming economic-electoral discrepancy between the United States and Canada is easily explained, at least at the upper end of the GDP spectrum. The productive economies of the two conservative provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, are heavily based on natural resources and agriculture, and in Alberta fossil fuels play a particularly prominent role. In recent years, Canada’s Liberal government has pursued a carbon-reduction agenda that has restricted the oil and natural gas industries, and extractive processes more generally, angering many voters. Such policies have helped spur an independence movement in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, Saskatchewan
The independence movement in the western Prairie Provinces also gains strength from Canada’s system of “equalization payments,” which effectively transfers funds from wealthier to poorer provinces so that “reasonably comparable levels of public services can be provided at similar levels of taxation.” In 2025, the three westernmost provinces will not receive any equalization payments, whereas all the eastern provinces, including Ontario, Canada’s economic core, will receive such payments. The equalization-payments map, posted below, not surprisingly figures prominently in Alberta independence movement.
