Nederlandse kaart-gasme

[EPG]

It looks to me that the CDA does well in the small-town and rural southern areas around cities like Helmond and Oss, which on that map are more contestable. Of the two municipalities, Oss favoured CDA twice and SP once. Helmond didn't favour CDA at all.

I wonder if the CDA enjoys an apparent advantage in these maps, being the only Christian option in Catholic areas, and furthermore one which does especially well in European elections with low turnout and lots of over-65 voters. The low turnout probably explains 50+ success. A most-popular-party map will give CDA the nice green colour on, say, 20% versus 60% for SP+GL+PvdA+D66, if those four parties split their 60% evenly.

Most valuable in a PR system are maps of single-party support. We have a similar problem in Ireland. The combination of PR, a natural party of government, and no local poll results led to very monochrome maps in the past. The constituencies typically split about 39/4 in favour of the nationally-dominant party. It's more important to know how many votes were won, where. It's clear from that blogpost on WElections that, for instance, PvdA and SP split traditional left-wing areas, each doing best in municipalities where its rival was unusually weak compared to its region.

[EPG]

I assume Dutch voters most hostile to the European Union are also hostile to multiculturalism and immigration, rather than supportive of institutional changes to the EU to achieve far-left policies that are not currently feasible under internal market rules. The SP clearly fail to appeal to the former, even if they serve well the niche market of the latter.