The UK with Dems/GOP

[Tintrlvr]

Part 3:



There are several constituencies on here which probably would have been Labour voting most of the time--thinking MI-01, OH-06, maybe WI-07--but which fell because of the right's overperformance last election. MI-09 is probably a classic swing district, and IL-17, IN-02, and IN-07 are winnable as well.

There were a few judgements calls as well. Both Indianapolis and Columbus are hard to compare to cities in the UK--they're both expanding, "new growth" cities with smaller histories of industry. I decided to split the difference and give Columbus to the Lib Dems and Indy to the Cons, since the latter is a lot less professional/managerial. (You can probably tell that I'm relying a lot on voting patterns from before our current alignment.)

Another call I made was to have Labour drastically underperform the Democrats in a lot of the rural agricultural Midwest. Democratic strength in places like Iowa or Western Wisconsin is fairly recent and is the outcome of the ag crisis and a higher degree of secularism. Similarly agricultural areas in the UK vote much more decisively to the right, iirc.

Chicago was an interesting area to do--you can really see the north-south class divide which is invisible in current election maps.

I would guess the Lib Dems would have been competitive in Iowa in the recent past - though possibly not now. The farmer-Democratic votes in the Upper Midwest feel about as close as the US gets to the "Celtic fringe", except maybe Maine. Lib Dems probably would have won a majority of the seats in Iowa during the Farm Crisis era, e.g.

[Tintrlvr]

Here is a (very!) rough pass at the western U.S.:




A few necessary caveats:
-California means that one really needs a mental model for Asian-American voting patterns, especially for ethnic groups which are less common in the UK. Since it sounds like Chinese-British people are fairly Tory, I modeled them accordingly. For Japanese and Korean-Americans, I also had them going to conservatives, since IIRC those groups tend to be higher income. Other East Asian immigrant groups often skew a bit more working class, so I have them going to Labour. Apologies if this is grimly ignorant.
-I don't have a great sense of the distribution of a lot of Asian-American ethnic groups in west coast cities, especially in the Bay Area. I may be consequently overestimating the conservatives.
-I colored the wrong Colorado district Lib Dem--I meant to color CO-02 yellow and CO-07 blue.

Other notes:
-The West Coast seems like the sort of place where Lib Dems would be especially strong. I gave them several seats in the Bay and Pramila Jayapal's district (lol) (which would normally go Labour). There are a lot of "very bougie but extremely socially liberal/culturally Democratic" places on the west coast--Boulder, much of the richer parts of the bay, Hollywood--and it's hard to see a better party for those places.
-The Bay Area has several seats--thinking especially of CA-05 and CA-11--which are very socioeconomically heterogeneous. Since this was a Conservative year, I had Napa outvote Vallejo and the Tri-Valley outvote Richmond, but obviously most years it would be different.
-Los Angeles is notably more Left-leaning than San Francisco
-In better years, Alaska, AZ-01, AZ-02, NM-02, CA-12, CA-25, CA-36 and Montana would be winnable for Labour, in addition to the ones already mentioned.

I do think that the Lib Dems would be nowhere to be seen in San Francisco quite frankly, especially post-Coalition — IRL, it has a long history of trade unionism and has been a Democratic stronghold for a very long time. However, Labour wouldn’t necessarily be a shoe-in; I think it would be a very good shout for the Green Party’s sole seat in the country. SF simply has an engrained cultural leftism that would transcend the different national contexts, and it would certainly still be to the left of LA, as it has been basically since forever.

I would give Jayapal's seat to the Greens, but I agree they'd be in with a shout in San Francisco, too, and probably also in the CA North Coast district.

The CA North Coast district would be the only Green-Con marginal in the country. Lib Dems might have done well and won it in 2005 (or maybe even a bit earlier) with their base in Marin and the wealthier parts of Sonoma first, losing it to the Cons in 2015, but then the Greens would have come through in 2019 to win it after the LDs crashed in part to tactical voting. The Greens would always have had a significant presence in Mendocino and Humboldt, their base in the district, although those areas probably would have tactically voted LD before 2015. Labour would have been relevant in those places and in Del Norte in the past due to the lumber industry but would have disappeared in the region by 2005.

The CA North Coast district is the only place in the country where local US Green parties have in the recent past actually won local elections (e.g., they governed Sebastopol for a while in the 00s and Arcata in the 90s), so of course the less-fringe UK Greens would be very successful.