Geopolitics Archives - GeoCurrents

Is Apple Maps Erasing Druze Identity by Calling the “Jabal al-Druze” the “Jabal al-Arab”?

Article-Grid, Insurgencies, Myth of the Nation-State, Nationalism, Regionalism, Southwest Asia and North Africa / Martin W. Lewis

Armed conflict over the past few weeks in southern Syria between the Druze and Bedouin militias receiving help from the Syrian military have taken over a thousand lives. As reported in the Kurdish press, Tawfiq al-Hijri, Deputy Head of the Foreign Relations Office of the Spiritual Presidency of the Druze Community in Syria, argues that “jihadist elements within the state [are] planning a systematic purge of minority communities. What we’re facing is nothing short of genocide. … Their ideology cannot be changed. They seek to subjugate or eliminate all minorities—starting with Alawites and Druze, and targeting Kurds next.”

Tawfiq al-Hijri may be exaggerating the threat, and the situation in southern Syria is certainly complicated, as GeoCurrents will explore in subsequent posts. But it is difficult to deny the Druze of Syria find themselves in a precarious situation. As adherents of an esoteric sect that grew out Islam but is no longer within the folds of that faith, the Druze find themselves targeted by Sunni extremists, many of whom are now officials in the Syrian government. Although the county’s leaders have officially abandoned the jihadi path, it is understandable that Druze leaders remain unconvinced.

Wikipedia Map of the Military Situation in southern Syria July 2025

The geographical focus of the current conflict is the As-Suwayda Governorate, which covers 5,550 km² (2,140 sq mi)and is home to some 375,000 people, 90 percent of whom are Druze (seven percent are Christian, and the remaining three percent are Sunni Muslims, as of 2010). The core of As-Suwayda is a basaltic plateau known as the Jabal al-Druze, or “Mountain of the Druze.” The Jabal al-Druze is clearly visible on satellite images of the region (see the figure posted below). Although having a semi-arid Mediterranean climate with only around 14 inches (364 mm) of annual precipitation (in the city of Suwayda), the region has fertile soils and supports a large agricultural population.

The Jabal al-Druze in Syria, Satellite-Image Map

Despite its cultural and geographical significance, the Jabal al-Druze appears on relatively few maps. It is nowhere to be found, for example, in Apple Maps, where a search for “Jabal al-Druze” first took me to a place in India called “Jabal” and then to “Jabal al-Nour” in Saudi Arabia (see the figure below). More disturbing, Apple Maps labels the plateau in question as “Jabal al-Arab,” or “Mountain of the Arabs” (see the second figure below). This maneuver effectively erases Druze identity from the region and could easily be interpreted as an intentional insult to the Druze community.

Apple Maps Labels Jabal al-Druze as “Jabal al-Arab”

Apple Maps’ “Depiction” of “Jabal al-Druze”

The Jabal al-Druze is admittedly sometimes called “Jabal al-Arab, as well as the “Jabal Hauran,” but these are secondary names, at least as framed by the Wikipedia article on the region. Although the chatbot Grok tells me that “some sources suggest [that the name Jabal al-Arab] predates the Druze-specific designation or was used in certain historical contexts to describe the same volcanic highland,” ChatGPT more pointedly states that the term is “pan-Arab or nationalist in tone, and has been used more frequently by the Ba’athist government of Syria, which promotes Arab identity.”

Left unsaid by ChatGPT was the fact that the Arab-Nationalist-Socialist Ba’ath Party of Syria long sought to undermine the sectarian identity of the Druze and other Arabic-speaking minorities and subsume them within the majority ethnic formation. Such policies were violently implemented under the rule of Adib Shishakli in the early 1950s. According to the Wikipedia article on the Druze:

Shishakli believed that among his many opponents in Syria, the Druze were the most potentially dangerous, and he was determined to crush them. He frequently proclaimed: “My enemies are like a serpent: The head is the Jebel al-Druze, the stomach Homs, and the tail Aleppo. If I crush the head, the serpent will die.” Shishakli dispatched 10,000 regular troops to occupy the Jebel al-Druze. Several towns were bombarded with heavy weapons, killing scores of civilians and destroying many houses. According to Druze accounts, Shishakli encouraged neighboring Bedouin tribes to plunder the defenseless population and allowed his own troops to run amok.

Although later Ba’ath government, including that of the recently deposed Assad regime, protected the Druze from Sunni extremists, memories of these earlier events remain powerful. Recent attacks on the Druze community by Sunni Bedouin tribes and elements of the Syrian state have a disconcerting resemblance to those of the early 1950s.

The term “Jabal al-Arab,” used by Apple Maps thus seem to me to be an ideologically laden substitute for “Jabal al-Druze.” At the very least, it tells us nothing specific about the region, quite unlike the more commonly accepted term. The extent to which the Arabic-speaking Druze even consider themselves to be “Arabs,” moreover, is unclear and contested. As I was unable to find much useful information on this issue, I turned to AI. ChatGPT’s response to my query seems reasonable (although the term “mainstream” in the second paragraph below is unnecessary and misleading):

ChatGPT: Some Druze do consider themselves Arabs, especially in the sense of speaking Arabic and being part of the broader Arab cultural and historical sphere. In this view, they may identify with Arab nationalism or see themselves as part of the Arab world.

Others distinguish themselves from Arabs, emphasizing their distinct religious and historical identity. The Druze faith is separate from mainstream Islam, and some Druze prefer to be seen as an independent ethnoreligious group with roots in ancient Middle Eastern cultures, possibly tracing their heritage to pre-Islamic or even non-Arab origins.

The chatbot Grok, in contrast, suggests that most Druze do accept an Arab identity, albeit subordinate to their religious identity. Yet even if that is the case, I imagine that most Druze people would find the label “Jabal al-Arab” offensive.

As I have criticized Apple Maps in this post, it is fitting to examine the labeling practice of its main competitor, Google Maps. Google’s mapping program has no designation for the region itself, using labels only for towns and cities; in my initial query, moreover it told me that “Google maps can’t find “Jabal al-Druze” (see the figure posted below). When I re-queried the program after zooming in on the region, however, I was taken to the highest elevation in the region, also known as Jabal al-Druze. In this instance, Google Maps clearly outperforms Apple Maps.

Is Apple Maps Erasing Druze Identity by Calling the “Jabal al-Druze” the “Jabal al-Arab”? Read More »

Economic Factors Behind the Alberta Secession Movement in Canada

Article-Grid, Elections, North America, Regionalism / Martin W. Lewis

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).

2024 U.S. Election Income Level and Harris Vote map

2024 U.S. Election Income Level & Trump Vote map

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.)

Conservative Vote in the 2025 Canadian Election map

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.

Economic Factors Behind the Alberta Secession Movement in Canada Read More »

Who Are “The Laurentian Elite?” Where Is “Laurentian Canada?” & Why Do Americans Ignore the Saint Lawrence River?

Article-Grid, Borders, Geopolitics, Historical Geography, North America, Physical Geography / Martin W. Lewis

Canada’s western separatists often refer disparagingly to “the Laurentian elite” and “Laurentian Canada,” terms that are not familiar to most readers in the United States. These terms derive from the region around the Saint Lawrence River, Canada’s political, economic, and demographic core, but they refer more specifically to the Canadian establishment, or governing class. As the Wikipedia article on the “the Laurentian elite” notes, this group has a “bias toward federal power,” which is one of the main reasons why is deeply distrusted by western regionalists. It is closely associated with the center-left Liberal Party.

I could not find a map of “Laurentian Canada,” as its geographical bounds are vague and unspecified. It could conceivably cover the entire “Quebec City-Windsor Corridor,” a well-mapped region that contains roughly half the country’s population (see the map below). ChatGPT, however, tells me that “Laurentian Canada” refers “particularly to southern Quebec and eastern Ontario,” a region focused on Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. The chatbot Grok also specifies the inclusion of Quebec City. I am dubious of this claim, however, as Quebec City strikes me as too provincial and too francophone to merit inclusion. It is also uncertain whether this informal region encompasses southwestern Ontario; cities such as Windsor strike me as too peripheral to be included. I have therefore impressionistically mapped a limited “Laurentian Canada” within the larger “Quebec City-Windsor Corridor” (the second map posted below).

The Saint Lawrence River, and larger Saint Lawrence corridor, is tremendously important in the history of Canada and for the country’s self-image. In the U.S., however, the river and its basin are generally overlooked, even though a large portion of the watershed is in the United States. For more than a hundred miles in northern New York, moreover, the river forms the border between the two countries. But consider its portrayal in a visually appealing but conceptually muddled National Geographic map of the “Watersheds of the United States,” the subtitle of which asks, “Where do the U.S. watersheds drain?” A casual interpretation of this map might lead to the conclusion that the rivers of northern New York drain into the “Great Lakes,” as this watershed (depicted in orange), is not mapped as reaching the sea. Bizarrely, a few limited areas in Canadian that drain either into the Great Lakes or directly into the Saint Lawrence are mapped as part of the same drainage basin, yet almost all of the northern portion of the watershed goes unmapped.

The general exclusion of the Saint Lawrence River from the U.S. geographical imagination stems in part from a heritage of nationalist thinking. The Great Lakes figure prominently, as four of them are partly in the U.S. and the fifth, Michigan, is entirely American. But the Saint Lawrence? It seems to be regarded as a Canadian river, and therefore of relatively little significance. Contributing to this partial erasure of the Saint Lawrence is the fact that its upper reaches, bordering New York, is something of a demographic and economic backwater. The two largest cities along this portion of the river, Cornwall and Brockville in Ontario, have modest populations (47,800 and 22,100 respectively), and those on the U.S. side are smaller still.

The reduced significance of the upper Saint Lawrence is partly rooted in physical geography and history. Before the development of canals, traveling upstream from Montreal would take one into Lake Ontario but not much farther, given the profound barrier of Niagara Falls. To reach the upper Great Lakes, and hence the interior of the continent, travelers would instead voyage up the Ottawa River and then make a short portage to gain access to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron (see the map below).

Ottawa-River Route to Interior North America

But regardless of such occlusion in the U.S. geographical imagination, the Saint Lawrence is one of the great rivers of the world, the tenth largest by average discharge. In terms of flow, the Mississippi and Saint Lawrence are in a league of their own as far as North America rivers are concerned, with average discharges into the sea of 21,300 and 17,600 cubic meters per second respectively. The next largest, the Mackenzie, flowing into the Arctic Ocean, has an average discharge of 9,800 m³/s, whereas that of the mighty Columbia is “only” 7,400 m³/s (see the map posted below).

Largest Drainage Basins of North America map

The relatively short length of the Saint Lawrence has probably contributed to its relative obscurity in the United States. But its actual length is the subject of debate. Does it include the massive estuary, the largest in the world according to some sources? Although most watershed maps of the Saint Lawrence include the estuary, sometimes even up to Anticosti Island (see the Wikipedia map posted below), I have covered only a small portion of it on my own map (the second figure posted above). Equally vexing is whether the Great Lakes, and the short rivers that flow between them, can be counted as part of the same river. Vanishingly few sources do so, but the Wikipedia article on the Saint Lawrence includes all options in reckoning its length:

Length: 500 km (310 mi) excluding the estuary. C. 928 km if included. (St. Lawrence River–Lake Ontario–Niagara–Lake Erie–Detroit–Lake St. Clair–St. Clair–Lake Huron–St. Marys River–Lake Superior–St. Louis–North River: 3,058 km).

Determining the length of a river, it turns out, can be a very tricky exercise.

Saint Lawrence Among Other Rivers of Central North America

Who Are “The Laurentian Elite?” Where Is “Laurentian Canada?” & Why Do Americans Ignore the Saint Lawrence River? Read More »

Exploring the Urban/Rural Electoral Divide in Canada, and Its Exceptions

Article-Grid, Elections, North America / Martin W. Lewis

Although the Canadian electorate is more leftwing than that of the United States, the two counties have similar electoral geographies (see the previous GeoCurrents post). In both the U.S. and Canada, population density figures prominently in the political divide: the more urban the location, the higher the vote tends to be for parties and candidates on the left.

There are, however, some important exceptions to this generalization. Canada’s three very sparsely inhabited northern territories, along with the thinly settled northern reaches of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec, opted for left-leaning parties in the 2025 federal election, as they generally do. Such voting behavior stems largely from the fact that many or most of their inhabitants are indigenous (First Nations), a group that generally supports the Liberal and NDP parties. A similar pattern is found in the United States, where sparsely inhabited but heavily indigenous areas in central and western Alaska, western South Dakota, and northern Arizona usually vote for candidates in the Democratic Party. (Urban Native Americans and those without reserved lands, however, have recently been trending in a decidedly Republican direction; according to exit polling, 68 percent of “Native American/American Indian” voters supported Donald Trump in 2024.)

The tendency for rural areas and small cities to support conservative parties is exemplified by southern Ontario, which has 94 percent of the province’s population on 14 percent of its land. As the map posted below shows, all but one of this region’s sizable cities supported the Liberal Party in the 2015 federal election. Southern Ontario’s rural areas turned, as usual, to the Conservative Party, as did Toronto’s northwestern suburbs and exurbs. In the Ottawa area, city and suburbs alike supported the Liberals. The one metropolitan area that went “blue” (“red” by U.S. conventions) in 2025 was Windsor, immediately south of Detroit. Intriguingly, the city of Windsor has long been a stronghold of the leftwing New Democratic Party. Note, however, the city’s light shade of blue on the map, showing that the Conservative victory came through minority support, owing to the multiple parties on the left. The Conservative Party’s success in the Windsor area has generally been attributed to the rising cost of living and concerns about public safety, but such issues are equally prominent in other Ontario cities, where the Conservatives gained votes but did not achieve victories. Windsor’s troubled manufacturing sector and its close economic ties with the United States may have contributed to its 2025 swing to the right.

Southern Canada’s major exception to the urban/rural political divide is found in Quebec. In the western half of southern Quebec, most rural districts usually support candidates in the separatist-oriented Bloc Quebecois, as they did in 2025. Although this party has some conservative aspects, it is usually classified as center-left (see the discussion forum for the previous GeoCurrents post). The Bloc also did well in sparsely settled areas of far eastern Quebec. But it was a different story in the lower Saint Laurence Valley in the southeast, where the Conservatives prevailed in rural areas and small cities, as they usually do. Although the Liberal Party triumphed in Quebec City in 2025, its suburbs voted blue (red, by U.S. conventions). Outside this southeastern region, support for the Conservative Party in Quebec is very limited.

The compelling question here is why most rural and small-city voters in areas surrounding Montréal support the socially liberal Bloc Quebecois whereas those near Quebec City turn instead to Conservative Party. Quebec City is much smaller and less cosmopolitan than Montréal, which is probably of some significance (Quebec City 2021 population, 549,459 city and 839,311 metro; Montréal 2021 population, 1,762,949 city and 4,291,732 metro). It is also much more francophone than largely bilingual Montréal. The French language and Quebecois culture have historically been more threatened in the west than in the east. Such precarity may have fostered protective ethno-nationalist politics in the west. Such reasoning, however, cannot account for the success of the Bloc Quebecois in far-eastern Quebec.

In discussion forums on Reddit, a different factor behind southeastern Quebec’s conservatism tends to be highlighted: rightwing talk radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, the radio-host turned politician Gilles Bernier gained influence across the Quebec City region. From 1984 to 1997, he represented the riding of Beauce, south of Quebec City, in the Canadian parliament. As Wikipedia notes, Beauce “has the highest percentage of people who answered “Canadian” as their ethnic origin in the 2006 Census” and has the “highest percentage of White people of European descent (99.3%)” in the country. The current influential radio figure in southeastern Quebec is Éric Duhaime, described by Wikipedia as both “openly gay” and as “a Canadian conservative columnist, radio host and politician serving as leader of the conservative party of since April 17, 2021.” The same article further claims that Duhaime “has been associated with radio poubelle(literally ‘garbage radio’), a style of provocative right-wing radio popular in Quebec.” But while it is tempting to attribute a conservative regional orientation to right-wing radio, one must ask why radio poubelle proved much more popular in the east than in the west. This importamt question deserves more investigation than I can provide.

British Columbia is another interesting place for examining the urban/rural electoral divide. Outside the three largest urban areas, Vancouver, Victoria, and Kelowna, only one electoral district did not vote Conservative in 2025* (Courtenay-Alberni, which supported instead the leftwing New Democratic Party.) But rural and small-city voters in this “left-voting” province proved to be much less conservative than rural and small-city voters in neighboring “right-voting” Alberta. In several districts of British Columbia, the Conservative candidate in 2025 won with less than 40 percent of the total vote (see the map posted below). The only dark-blue riding in British Columbia, with a more than 70 percent Conservative vote in 2025, is found in the northeast, an area demographically anchored on the agricultural “Peace River Country,” the core of which is in conservative Alberta.

British Columbia and Alberta 2025 Election map

Although the Conservative Party narrowly won most rural ridings in British Columbia in 2025, it had been a different story in previous recent federal elections. In 2021, the leftwing New Democratic was victorious across the province’s non-metropolitan western districts and triumphed as well in central Vancouver. Even in 2025, if one were to combine the vote tallies of the Liberal, NDP, and Green parties, western British Columbia would not be mapped in “conservative blue.” Some of this region’s electoral districts have large indigenous communities, which constitute more than a third of the population of the massive Skeena-Bulkley Valley riding. Overall, however, rural and small-city voters of all ethnic groups in western British Columbia tend in a leftwing direction The same pattern is found in several non-metropolitan counties in northwestern California and far-western Washington and Oregon.

Finally, most rural and small-city voters in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in far eastern Canada also favor the political left. Contrastingly, most of New Brunswick follows the more typical pattern, with the larger cities voting “left” and the more rural areas voting “right.” The exception to this rule in New Brunswick are several mostly French-speaking rural ridings in the north and east, which opted for the Liberal Party in 2025, as they usually do.

I thought it would be interesting to compare recent voting patterns in Canada’s Maritime provinces and in neighboring northern New England in the U.S. The map that I made is crude and impressionistic, but it is still suggestive. Extensive areas on both sides of this trans-border region have left-voting but mostly rural elecorates. The adjacent low-density areas of interior Maine and central New Brunswick, however, have a decidedly conservative orientation.

Northern New England & Canadian Maritimes Political Orientation map

*The “West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country” riding might seem mostly rural on the map, but it encompasses West Vancouver as well as the ski-resort town of Whistler.

Exploring the Urban/Rural Electoral Divide in Canada, and Its Exceptions Read More »

Comparing Recent Patterns of Electoral Geography in the United States and Canada (Part 1: State/Province Level)

Article-Grid, Elections, Regionalism / Martin W. Lewis

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.

US 2024 Election Canada 2025 Election maps

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 48^th-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.)

U.S. Canada Electoral Maps 2024 2025 Compared 1

US Canada 2024 2025 Election Maps Compared 2

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.

US Canada 2024 2025 Election Maps Compared 3

US Canada 2024 2025 Election Maps Compared 4

* 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.

Comparing Recent Patterns of Electoral Geography in the United States and Canada (Part 1: State/Province Level) Read More »

A Major Win for the Left in Canada’s 2025 Election – But Not in Alberta or Saskatchewan

Article-Grid, Elections, North America / Martin W. Lewis

The Conservative Party was widely expected to win Canada’s April 28 federal election. As recently as January 2025, the party was polling well ahead of the governing Liberals (see the graph posted below). But after U.S. President Donald Trump began calling Canada the “fifty-first state,” support for the Conservative Party plunged while support for the Liberal Party surged. In the end, the Liberals scored a relatively narrow victory, taking 170 parliamentary seats with 43.8 per cent of the vote to the Conservatives 143 seats with 41.3 percent of the vote.

But if the election was fairly close in terms of party politics, it was a different matter regarding political ideology. In Canada, the center-right Conservative Party is the only major party with a right-leaning political stance. But three additional parties are generally located to the left of the center-left Liberal Party. All three suffered major losses in 2025, as left-leaning voters rallied with the Liberals to prevent a Conservative victory. The New Democratic Party lost 17 seats, the Bloc Québécois lost 11, and the Green Party lost one, retaining a single seat. All told, the election might be considered a landslide for the left, with its four parties taking 57.7 percent of the vote against the Conservative’s 41.3 percent.

Although the Liberal Party scored decisive victories in eight of Canada’s 10 provinces, it was a different matter altogether in the remaining two: Alberta and Saskatchewan. In these resource-rich provinces, it was the Conservative Party that scored landslide victories, taking 63.7 percent of the vote in Alberta and 64.7 percent in neighboring Saskatchewan. As can be seen in the second map posted below, the discrepancy in support for the Conservative Party between these two provinces and the rest of Canada is profound. Outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Conservatives took more than 45 percent of the vote only in Manitoba, while in Quebec they received a meager 23.4 percent. As will be explored in later GeoCurrents posts, the nationwide defeat of the Conservative Party has reinvigorated a separatist movement in Alberta, and, to a lesser extent, in Saskatchewan. This development potentially threatens Canadian nationhood.

Canada 2025 Election Results by Province map

As is the case in the United States and Europe, rightwing political sentiments in Canada are concentrated in rural areas and in smaller cities and towns, whereas leftwing political sentiments are concentrated in urban areas. But again, Alberta and Saskatchewan are partial exceptions (see the first figure below). To be sure, the left did relatively well in 2025 in central Edmonton and Calgary, taking three parliamentary seats. In Strathcona, located in Edmonton’s university district, the social-democratic New Democratic Party came in first, as it has in every federal election since 2008. But as the map posted below shows, all other ridings (federal electoral districts) in the Edmonton and Calgary metro areas supported the Conservative Party. In Saskatchewan, the Conservative Party triumphed in all six metropolitan ridings, located in and around the smaller cities of Saskatoon and Regina, albeit with lower vote percentages than in adjacent rural areas. Such urban support for the Conservative Party sharply differentiates Alberta and Saskatchewan from Canada’s other western provinces, British Columbia and Manitoba (see the second figure below).

2025 Canada Election Metro Areas in Alberta and Saskatchewan map

2025 Canada Election Metro Areas British Columbia and Manitoba map

But as the map posted below shows, one highly rural Saskatchewan riding, which essentially covers the entire northern half of the province, gave landslide support to the Liberal Party (with 65.1 percent of the vote, as opposed to 25.5 percent for the Conservative Party). Not surprisingly, this district – Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River – is demographically dominated by indigenous people, who constitute more than 70 percent of its population. Other parts of Canada with indigenous (First Nations) majorities also voted for parties on the left, as will be examined in a later post.

Alberta and Saskatchewan in the 2025 Canadian Election map

A Major Win for the Left in Canada’s 2025 Election – But Not in Alberta or Saskatchewan Read More »

The New York Times Maps Trump as Having Defeated Biden in 2024

Article-Grid, Cartography, Elections / Martin W. Lewis

I have long been a fan of the political cartography of the New York Times and have often used its maps in my courses and blog posts. But this year I am not so impressed. Consider, for example, the map detail that I have posted below, taken from a full-page cartographic exercise printed in today’s edition, entitled “2024 Elections: The Final Tallies.” As can be seen, a circle is placed over every America county ostensibly showing, by diameter, the margin of victory of the winning candidate in that locale. Counties that Donald Trump won are coded in light red, while counties that Kamala Harris won are coded in light blue. But that is not what the key tells us. Instead, it states that the blue circles indicate a victory by Joe Biden! The Times, I think, owes an apology to Harris.

Detail of a NY Times Erronious Map of the 2024 US Presidential Election

Substituting “Biden” for “Harris” can be taken as a mere typo. As I am habitually guilty of the publishing typos in my blog posts, I am perhaps in no position to pass judgement. By only my eyes scan my posts before publication. One can only wonder how may sets of eyes passed over “Biden won” before the article was published.

More concerning Iin some ways is the assertion that the diameters of the county circles show the local “margin of victory.” In political discourse, as noted by Ballotpedia,

[A]n electoral margin-of-victory (MOV) is the difference between the share of votes cast for the winning candidate and the second-place candidate in an election. For example, if Candidate A wins an election with 55 percent of the vote and Candidate B, the second-place finisher, wins 45 percent of the vote, the winner’s margin of victory is 10 percent.

This map, however, shows not the “margin” of victory, as it is generally defined, but rather the numerical vote gap in absolute terms. As a result, it depicts total population as much or more than political polarization, which is precisely what “margin of victory” maps are designed to portray. A county with a thousand voters, 99 percent of whom opted for one candidate, would therefore be mapped as having a much narrower margin of victory than one of a million votes in which the winning candidate won by a mere 10,000 votes.

“Magin of victory” can, however, be defined in absolute rather than relative terms, as was done today by the New York Times. But the paper’s cartographers and editors should have let their readers know that this is an aberrant definition and should have explained why it was used in this instance.

The New York Times Maps Trump as Having Defeated Biden in 2024 Read More »

The Cook Islands: Seeking Independence and Sovereignty, Or Already Independent and Sovereign?

Article-Grid, Myth of the Nation-State, Self-Declared States / Martin W. Lewis

In late December 2024, the government of the Cook Islands, an autonomous Polynesian polity in “free association” with New Zealand, announced plans to introduce its own national passports and citizenship. Currently, Cook Islanders are citizens of New Zealand while being considered “nationals” of the Cook Islands. The government of New Zealand has resisted the plan, although it has also stated that it is open to the complete independence of the Cook Islands if the Cook Islanders pass a referendum to that effect.

Some sources, however, already regard the Cook Islands as a fully sovereign and independent country. According to a Wikipedia article, “the Cook Islands and Niue [another Polynesian polity associated with New Zealand] behave as sovereign states in international law…” [emphasis added]. Crucial to this status is the Cook Islands’ full treaty-making power, which it has enjoyed for several decades. As explored in a previous GeoCurrents post, the United Nations has therefore mapped the Cook Islands, along with Niue, as the only “Non-Member States of the United Nations,” which implies full sovereignty. But as the same post also noted, other United Nations maps at the time depicted the Cook Islands as a dependency of New Zealand. (I was oddly denied access to these maps on the United Nations website while I was writing this article; as a result, I cannot state the current position of the U.N.)

The position of the United States is, to the contrary, unambiguous. On September 25, 2023, President Joe Biden signed a statement announcing that “the United States recognizes the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.” According to the Wikipedia article on the political status of the Cook Islands, the United States is the only sovereign state that recognizes its full independence, although other U.N. members have established diplomatic relations with it. Oddly, however, the official U.S. CIA political map still depicts the Cook Islands as a dependency of New Zealand (see the map below).

The United States recognized the independence and full sovereignty of the Cook Islands in part to bolster its position in the Pacific, which it sees a vulnerable, due mainly to Chinese initiatives in the region. Official recognition may also reflect concern in Washington about the sometime fraught relationships of the U.S. with the three Pacific countries that are in “free association” with the United States: Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. Although recognized as fully independent members states of the U.N., all three still have some characteristics of dependencies.

All told, the dividing line between independent sovereign states and other kinds of polities is not as clear-cut as it is conventionally imagined to be.

The Cook Islands: Seeking Independence and Sovereignty, Or Already Independent and Sovereign? Read More »

Hope and Peril in Somaliland

Article-Grid, Border Disputes, Myth of the Nation-State, Sub-Saharan Africa / Martin W. Lewis

As noted in the previous GeoCurrents post, the incoming Trump administration is considering the recognition of the hitherto unrecognized state of Somaliland, which seceded from Somalia in 1991. On the diplomatic front, Somaliland’s position is looking increasingly promising. Its newly elected president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, has said that he will give “special importance” to foreign relations, seeking diplomatic recognition from other countries. Somaliland has offered to host a U.S. naval base in exchange for diplomatic relations. More surprisingly, the federal government of Somalia has reached an agreement with Ethiopia that will allow the latter country to establish a port in Somaliland’s city of Berbera, an arrangement hammered out with the backing of Turkey. Turkish sources see this agreement as a major step toward stabilizing the Horn of Africa region.

Despite these favorable developments, Somaliland faces formidable obstacles. Although Somalia has dropped his opposition to the Ethiopian port, it still claims the entire territory of Somaliland and resolutely rejects its proclaimed statehood. Significantly, China has recently expressed its full support for Somalia in its feckless quest to reclaim the breakaway republic.

It is also essential to note that Somaliland does not control all its own claimed territory. Its eastern region is now under the authority of SSC-Khaatumo, or Khatumo State, an autonomous polity affiliated with the internationally recognized country of Somalia. In 2023, Khatumo forces expelled Somaliland’s troops from a broad swath of the contested territory. In mid-December 2024, the two militaries came to blows in and around the important city of Erigavo, with both sides claiming victory. As reported in Garowe Online, this recent escalation is further destabilizing the region. Somaliland’s largest military force was recently sent to the Erigavo region, while SSC-Khaatumo is reinforcing its position with new military assets. The exact number of casualties in the recent fighting remains unclear, but local sources indicate that many have been injured. Calls for peace talks and international mediation are mounting.

2024 Military and Political Situation in Somaliland

The de facto territorial division of the de facto state of Somaliland largely reflects clan rivalries. Most of the people in the area controlled by SSC-Khaatumo belong to the Dhulbahante (Dolbohanta) clan, whereas most lands that are controlled by Somaliland are populated by members of the Isaaq clan. The Isaaq people suffered a genocidal assault from the Somalia government in the late 1980s, an event that propelled the secession of Somaliland after the general collapse of Somalia in 1991.

Recent political and military developments in the Somalia region indicate that it will be difficult to move away from a clan-based political order, an outcome envisaged by the current federal government of Somalia. Clan loyalty apparently outweighs loyalty to any putative nation-state in the region. Ironically, Somalia has often been considered fortunate due to its relatively monoethnic population, a rarity in sub-Saharan Africa. But overriding loyalty to a Somali-based ethnonational state has never gelled. And even if it were to develop, further problems would probably erupt, as the territory of the Somali-speaking people extends well well beyond the formal boundaries of Somalia, pushing deeply into the territories of Ethiopia and Kenya. Both Ethiopia and Kenya have had many conflicts with their restive Somali populations. All things considered, geopolitical stability still seems like a fond dream over much of the Horn of Africa.

Hope and Peril in Somaliland Read More »

Will the United States Recognize Somaliland as Somalia Continued to Devolve?

Article-Grid, Elections, Insurgencies, Myth of the Nation-State, Sub-Saharan Africa / Martin W. Lewis

Recent reports claim that the incoming Trump administration is considering giving diplomatic recognition to Somaliland, a de facto independent state that broke away from the wreckage of Somalia in 1991. Republican representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania has already introduced a bill (H.R.10402) to formally acknowledge the sovereignty of the unrecognized country. Proponents note that Somaliland is the most stable and democratic state in the Horn of Africa, having recently held an election in which the opposition scored a major victory and smoothly assumed power. Somaliland is also seen as a potential U.S. ally in a troubled and strategic region near the entrance to the Red Sea. As a recent Semafor article notes:

Recognizing Somaliland could enable US intelligence to set up long term operations to monitor the movement of weapons in a volatile region as well as keep an eye on Chinese activity. China already has a permanent military base in neighboring Djibouti. It should allow the US to better monitor Houthi activity in Yemen.

The same article, however, warns that the recognition of Somaliland could have dangerous consequences, potentially destabilizing the larger region:

If Trump does recognize Somaliland it will likely be disruptive to the Horn of Africa region —which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea — say US-Africa watchers… “Recognizing Somaliland would undoubtedly rattle the rump state of Somalia, further destabilize the Horn, and elicit a sharp rebuke from the African Union,” argues Ken Opalo, a political science professor at Georgetown University.

De Jure and De Facto political maps of the Horn of Africa

Regardless of Somaliland’s possible recognition, the Horn of Africa already seems to be undergoing “further” destabilization. Somalia slipped once again into constitutional crisis in early 2024 when its central government sought to recentralize authority, in particular by moving from its clan-based electoral system to one of universal suffrage, which was seen as a threat by important clan leaders. As a result, the autonomous region of Puntland in the north withdrew its support of the federal government and declared its own independence, although most observers see this more as a negotiating bid than an actual secession effort. The crisis intensified in November 2024 after a regional election in Jubaland, the southernmost of Somalia’s federal states. The Mogadishu government rejected the election because it had been conducted under the old clan-based system. A judge in Jubaland then accused Somalia’s president of treason, provoking a federal charge of treason against Jubaland’s reelected president. Federal armed forces were then dispatched to Jubaland to assert central power. They were roundly defeated, however, by Jubaland’s militia, the so-called Dervish Force. Hundreds of Somali soldiers were captured while others fled into Kenya.

Struggles with its own autonomous federal states are not the only threat to Somalia’s largely imaginary national unity and territorial integrity – or to regional “stability.” Islamist insurgents belonging to or affiliated with Al Shabaab, who reject Somali nationhood, control several territorial enclaves of uncertain extent. (Maps of Islamist control vary widely from source to source and from time to time). Insurgent activity is growing, especially in Puntland. Voice of America reports that Islamic State (IS) forces in Somalia, ultimately aiming for global jihad, have doubled their numbers in recent months. A recent Bloomberg article notes that “Islamic State’s presence in Puntland ‘has been central to IS’s global financial and operational network, so the impact of its actions will be global…’” Meanwhile, piracy, most of its also linked to Puntland, also appears to be rebounding.

Although acknowledging Somaliland’s independence could conceivably exacerbate the region’s troubles, it also has the potential to function in a stabilizing manner, considering the chaos engulfing the rest of Somalia. Daniel Haile and Will Childers cogently juxtapose Somaliland’s “relative success in democratic governance” with the instability, brutality, and despotism found in neighboring (recognized) states, arguing that its failure to gain international recognition is “perplexing.”

Perplexing though it may seem, Somaliland’s orphan status is understandable from the perspective of diplomatic sensitivities. The United States has pursued a “one Somalia” policy for much the same reason that it maintains a “one China” policy, even though both rely on a fundamental falsification of geopolitical reality and to some extent run counter to U.S. strategic interests. Although the United States maps Taiwan as part of China, it would be horrified if Beijing were to make that map reflect reality by conquering the island. But officially recognizing Taiwan’s independence would infuriate Beijing for little gain, just as recognizing Somaliland’s independence would anger other African countries. The African Union insists that existing boundaries, inappropriate though they may be, must be regarded as sacrosanct.* Otherwise, the conventional argument has it, border clashes and secessionist insurgencies could quickly crop up across the continent. Such conflicts are, of course, already rife over much of Africa, but they could conceivably intensify if existing boundaries were called into question.

Diplomatic fiction plays an important role in smoothing international relation. Maintaining that Somaliland is still part of Somalia is thus a reasonable, if contestable, position. But taking such pretense out of the diplomatic realm and ensconcing it in public discourse is a more fraught gambit, one that muddies our understanding of how global politics functions. It is hardly surprising that the United Nations Security Council has recently reaffirmed its “full respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence and unity of Somalia,” even though Somalia has no territorial integrity or national unity that one could respect. But it is unreasonable for a supposedly educational Wikipedia article to claim that “Somalia is a federal republic consisting of 6 federal member states. … Somaliland, Puntland, Galmudug, Hirshaabelle, South West, and Jubland.” Although independent since 1960, Somalia did not become a Federal Republic until 2012, twenty-one years after the de facto independence of Somaliland. “Somalia” thus “consists” of six member states only in the diplomatic imagination.

Since its 1991 collapse, the government of Somalia has been undertaking measures designed to restore its territorial integrity and national unity, such as adopting its “widely hailed” federal constitution in 2012. Steadfast believers in the existing international order have thus convinced themselves that the country’s disunion is temporary, and that Somalia will eventually be restored to its position as an integral member of the global community of nations. That possibility, however, is looking increasingly dim – and not just because of the potential U.S. recognition of Somaliland. Perhaps the time has come to drop the pretense of Somaliland’s national unity and territorial integrity and acknowledge the reality of Somaliland’s independence. Considering the recent developments outlined in this post, it seems a bit of a stretch to argue that the possible U.S. recognition of Somaliland would have worrisomely “destabilizing” effects across the Horn of Africa. Somaliland is currently something of an island of stability in a sea of disorder. But despite its capable and reasonably democratic government, Somaliland faces its own serious geopolitical challenges, as the next GeoCurrents post will explore.

*The exception is when both sides in a conflict agree to allow a secessionist state to gain independence, as occurred in 2011 when South Sudan gained sovereignty and was quickly recognized by the international community. This development, needless to say, did not generate peace and stability in either Sudan or South Sudan. But South Sudan, unlike Somaliland, did not have a multi-decade experience as an effective and reasonably democratic state.

Will the United States Recognize Somaliland as Somalia Continued to Devolve? Read More »

U.S. Presidential Election Lecture Series Completed

Article-Grid, Elections / Martin W. Lewis

The GeoCurrents lecture series on the historical geography of U.S. presidential elections has been completed. The series itself can be found here. The final lecture, which covers only the election of 2024, can be found here.

The next GeoCurrents lecture series will be on global demography, with video lectures beginning to be posted in late January 2025. These videos will follow the lectures that I will be giving in a course in Stanford’s University’s Continuing Studies Program in Winter Quarter 2025. A link to the course, called “Population Explosion or Birth Dearth? Understanding Global Demography,” can be found here.

Over the next month and a half, GeoCurrents will be semi-active, with one or two published per week. These posts will cover a variety of topics.

Regarding the 2024 U.S. election, exit polling indicated a major “red-shift” in the voting behavior of Native Americans, although these results have been challenged. The maps posted below show one way in which I explored this issue in the final lecture in the series on U.S. presidential elections

U.S. Presidential Election Lecture Series Completed Read More »

The Electoral Transformation of Wisconsin and Minnesota

Article-Grid, Elections / Martin W. Lewis

The neighboring states of Wisconsin and Minnesota are an instructive place to examine the recent transformation of electoral geography in the United States. Both states saw a comparatively modest “red shift” from the presidential election of 2020 to that of 2024. In Wisconsin, Donald Trump went from 48.82% of the vote to 49.64%, which was enough to turn the state from “blue” to “red.” In Minnesota, Trump lost both contests, but his vote count increased from 45.28% to 46.87%. Intriguingly, in Wisconsin Kamala Harris did better in rural agricultural counties than she did in Minnesota, while Trump did better in suburban counties than he did in Minnesota.

Wisconsin is best regarded as a “deep purple” state, its electorate evenly divided, at least at the presidential level. Minnesota remains “blue,” but of a relatively light hue. Both standings mark a major change from earlier periods. Minnesota was once the most reliably Democratic-voting state in the nation; in 1984, it was the only state to award its electoral votes to Walter Mondale rather than Ronald Reagan. A century ago, Wisconsin was unquestionably the most liberal state in the country. In 1924, it decisively rejected the conservative candidates nominated by both the Democratic and Republican parties, John Davis and Calvin Coolidge respectively, giving Coolidge only 37.1% of its vote and Davis a mere 8.1%. Instead, Wisconsinites favored their own left-leaning Progressive-Party candidate, Robert La Follette, giving him 54% of their vote. La Follette also did well in Minnesota, especially in its rural counties, coming in second place with 42.26%. Nationally, La Follette took only 16.6% percent of the vote.

1924 Presidential Election in Wisconsin and Minnesota

As recently as the 1990s, both Minnesota and Wisconsin were strongly “blue,” with most counties, whether metropolitan or rural, supporting Democrat Bill Clinton over Republican Bob Dole (see the map below). To be sure, the relatively strong showing of the third-party candidate Ross Perot skewed the 1996 contest. But as Perot took votes from both major parties, the basic pattern still holds. As can be seen on the map, there were few “landslide” counties in either state in 1996. Dole did best in the WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) in the Milwaukee metro area, which had long been some of the country’s strongest suburban Republican redoubts. In Minnesota, Clinton’s best showing was not in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) metro area, but rather in Saint Louis County in the northeast. Saint Louis contains the port city of Duluth, as well as most of the iron-mining communities of the Mesabi Range, which had long been labor-oriented Democratic strongholds.

1996 Presidential Election in Wisconsin and Minnesota

By 2012, the electoral maps of Wisconsin and Minnesota had “red-shifted” considerably, even though both states voted decisively for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney, and by virtually identical margins (see the map below). In this election, most rural counties in Minnesota supported the Republican candidate. A cluster of Democratic-voting agricultural counties stand out in southeastern Minnesota, part of a larger still-blue rural zone that extended into southwestern Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, and northwestern Illinois. In in 2012 Wisconsin, in contrast, rural counties were relatively equally divided between the two parties. Note that the dark-blue zone that is demographically centered on Minnesota’s Saint Louis County extended also into far northern Wisconsin, another long-standing Democratic stronghold. The port city of Superior in Douglas County, Wisconsin is part of the Duluth metro area and has a similar economic and political history to that of Duluth itself. It is also significant that by this election the counties containing Minneapolis and Saint Paul had shifted to a darker shade of blue than in 1996. The same was true of Wisconsin’s Dane County, home to both the state capital and the flagship university, both located in Madison. In contrast, the WOW counties of the Milwaukee suburbs had shifted further into the red.

2012 Presidential Election in Wisconsin and Minnesota Map

In 2024, the shift to the Republican Party in Minnesota’s agricultural counties was almost complete (see the map below). Ironically, the state’s Democratic Party is officially designated the “Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL),” even though it now receives little backing from farmers and faces declining support from workers. By area, the largest remaining blue zone in Minnesota is in the far northeast, a sparsely settled, heavily forested region with one second-tier city (Duluth; metropolitan population 280,000). It is noteworthy, however, that this area has moved to a lighter shade of blue, as in common in areas that have experienced industrial decline. The exception in far northeast is Cook County (population 5,600), which has blue-shifted in recent elections. Cook’s exceptional standing is linked to its tourism-dependent economy, which connects it to metropolitan zones. As the Wikipedia article on Cook County notes: “The county was one of the rare white-majority rural counties to have its margin increase for Joe Biden in 2020 relative to Barack Obama’s 2012 margin, with 65 percent of voters choosing the Democratic nominee. In both 2016 and 2020, it was the largest county by area in the contiguous states where Trump lost every precinct …”

2024 Presidential Election in Wisconsin and Minnesota map

Although Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin 2024 while winning Minnesota, the former state had a significantly higher percentage of “blue” counties than the latter (13 out of 72 vs. 9 out of 87). This seeming discrepancy is easily explained by the fact that the population of Minnesota is highly concentrated in the Twin Cities metro area, whereas that of Wisconsin is more widely dispersed (see the paired maps below). More striking is the continuing shift in both states of agricultural counties into the Republican camp; compare the hues of most counties on the 2012 and 2024 maps.

2010 Population density in Wisconsin and Minnesota map

The remaining Democratic-voting counties in Minnesota all fall into a few categories. Not surprisingly, Hennepin (Minneapolis) and Ramsey (Saint Paul) are dark blue, while their eastern suburban counties are light blue. Other blue counties in Minnesota include Olmsted, which contains the city of Rochester and its highly regarded Mayo Clinic, and Clay, which contains the city of Moorhead, part of the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area. (Intriguingly, across the border in North Dakota the county containing the larger city of Fargo gave a plurality of its votes to Trump). The only other blue counties on the Minnesota map are the non-agricultural trio in the northeast, characterized by tourism-dependent economies and long histories of labor activism.

The 2024 Democratic-voting counties of Wisconsin are more diverse. Three counties containing secondary cities – La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Rock – gave a majority of their votes to Harris, as did the two most heavily urban counties, Milwaukee, and Dane. Several northern tourism-dependent counties are also in the blue category, including Door in the northeast. Light-blue Portage County has a minor city (Stevens Point, population 26,000) as well as a significant. university. The bluest county, Menominee, is 84 percent Native America. More intriguing are two blue rural counties in southern Wisconsin, Iowa and Green, which are probably influenced by their proximity to dark-blue Dane County. Finally, it is important to note that the formerly deep-red, affluent WOW suburban counties adjacent to Milwaukee have undergone a significant blue shift since 2012, although they remain in the Republican camp. The Republican Party transition to right-wing populism has gained it many votes in rural areas and even in strongly Democratic urban cores, but it has cost the party votes in affluent, highly educated suburban areas.

The Electoral Transformation of Wisconsin and Minnesota Read More »

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Was No Landslide

Article-Grid, Elections / Martin W. Lewis

Donald Trump clearly enjoyed an unexpected and decisive victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Indeed, many journalists and pundits have described the results as nothing less than a “landslide.” In truth, it came nowhere near that standing. Although the final vote count is not yet in, it likes like Trump will have something like a popular-vote margin of around 2.7 percent. His margin in the electoral college is more substantial – 312 to 226 – but that is hardly an electoral blowout.

To put matters in perspective, in 1984 Ronald Reagan took 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13, while in 1936 Franklin Roosevelt took 523 electoral votes to Alf Landon’s 8. Between 1920 and 1936, every presidential election was a landslide, with popular-vote margins ranging from 17.2% to 26.3. 1920, 1924, and 1928 were Republican landslides while 1932 and 1936 were Democratic landslides; in the electoral college, the Democratic scored additional landslides in 1940 and 1944. Two of these elections are illustrated in the figures posted below.)

1920 Landslide U.S. Presidential Election Map

1936 Landslide U.S. Presidential Election Map

Two possible reasons for the wildly inaccurate use of the term “landslide” come to mind. The first is that no blowout presidential election have occurred for some time; the most recent popular-vote landslide was in 1984, and the most recent electoral-college landslide was in 1988. As both the electorate and the two main political parties have become more ideological polarized – and as the nation has become more evenly divided – the chance of a genuine landslide election has plummeted. The second possible reason is the widespread embrace of hyperbole in political discourse. When it comes to rhetoric, we live in an age of extremes. Accurate depictions are apparently too dull for many viewers and are thus less likely to generate clicks than over-the-top reporting.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Was No Landslide Read More »

Wikipedia’s Visually Striking but Inaccurate Cartograms of U.S. Presidential Elections

Article-Grid, Cartography, Elections / Martin W. Lewis

When preparing the illustrations for my current lecture course on the historical geography of U.S. presidential elections, I was thrilled to discover that Wikipedia’s articles on most of these elections are illustrated with visually striking cartograms of the results, mapped at the county level. In these cartograms, counties are ostensibly scaled to reflect their populations at the time. But as I began to analyze the patterns that they depict, I discovered that they are far from accurate and thus have limited utility.

This realization hit me when I was examining the results of the 1860 election, which resulted in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln – and hence the Civil War. At first glance, the Wikipedia cartogram of this election appeared to be an excellent illustration of the “anybody but Lincoln,” or Fusionist, vote in the greater New York City region. As can be seen in the illustration posted below, New York loomed large in population at the time. It was also distinctly purple, meaning that it gave a majority or plurality of its votes to Fusionist presidential electors.

Wikipedia’s Cartogram of the 1860 U.S. Presidential Election

New York City at the time included only New York County, which is coterminous with the island of Manhattan. Brooklyn, in Kings County, was then a separate city. Queens County, the modern borough of Queens, was at the time largely rural, as was Richmond County, which covers Staten Island. The population imbalances in 1860 were correspondingly considerable, with Manhattan containing over 814,000 residents as opposed to only 57,000 in Queens and 26,000 in Staten Island. But as can be seen from a detail from the Wikipedia cartogram posted below, Queens is portrayed as much larger than Manhattan. Apparently, the counties that constitute the current boroughs of New York City were scaled in accordance with their land areas rather than with their populations at the time, which defeats the purpose of “cartogramic” mapping.

Wikipedia’s Cartogram of the 1860 U.S. Presidential Election in the New York City region map

New York City, however, is a special case as it is the only example in the United States of a city that is composed of separate counties. As a result, an error of this sort is perhaps understandable. I therefore decided to test the Wikipedia’s presidential-election cartograms in a different state and in a different election, that of 1916. In this contest, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, surprisingly defeated the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, largely because Wilson eked out an extremely narrow victory in California. The defeat of Hughes in California has generally been attributed to the fact that he snubbed California’s popular Progressive governor, Hiram Johnson, while campaigning in the state. Regardless of this error, Wilson’s victory in California was extraordinary, as the Democratic Party had been almost dead in California only two years earlier. As can be seen in the illustration posted below, in the state’s 1914 gubernatorial election the Democratic candidate received only 12.5% of the vote, with the Republican candidate receiving only 29.3%. The Progressive (“Bull Moose”) candidate, the-once-and-future-Republican Hiram Johnson, won an easy victory with 49.7%.

Wikipedia Cartogram of the 1916 U.S. Presidential Election

1914 California Gubernatorial Election Map

Owing to California’s massive shift from 1914 to 1916 toward the Democratic Party, I decided that this election was worth analyzing in more detail. I therefore extracted the California portion of the Wikipedia cartogram and expanded it. What I found led me to lose all faith in these Wikipedia visualizations. As can be seen from the figure posted below, the sizes of California’s counties on this cartogram do not represent their populations at the time. This mismatch can be easily seen by comparing the sizes and populations of five counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Butte, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. The gap between reality and depiction is especially glaring regarding San Francisco County, which is coterminous with the city of San Francisco.

Wikipedia’s Inaccurate Cartogram of the 1916 Presidential Election in California

Wikipedia’s Visually Striking but Inaccurate Cartograms of U.S. Presidential Elections Read More »

New Lectures on U.S. Presidential Elections Posted on YouTube

Article-Grid, Elections, North America, Uncategorized / Martin W. Lewis

Several new lectures on the historical geography of U.S. presidential elections have been posted on the GeoCurrents YouTube channel. The most recently posted lecture covers elections from 1880 to 1992.

These lectures include many maps, some which are analyzed in detail, down to the county level. For example, the map posted below has been amended with call-outs indicating counties (or groups of counties) with particular voting patterns.

U.S. Presidential election 1880 distinctive counties map

Maps of congressional elections are also included, especially those that saw major voting shifts, such as the midterm election of 1890 (below)

Political cartoons from the time are used extensively in these lectures. Some are explained through the use of call-outs, as in the example below.

1884 Bourbon Democrats Political Cartoon Explained

GeoCurrents will continue posting illustrated lectures on U.S. presidential elections for the next month or so.

New Lectures on U.S. Presidential Elections Posted on YouTube Read More »

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