The UK with Dems/GOP

[Alcibiades]

In any case, at the risk of seeming dumb, I made the northeast corridor with UK-style parties. Might do the rest of the country in a bit.



This is a bit generous to the Tories--it's assuming a 2019 style right-wing overperformance. A lot of these would be more favorable to Labour normally (thinking of PA-13, NY-24, VA-08 maybe) and then a lot more would be quintessential marginals (MA-04, MA-09, NJ-12, NJ-01, all the Torie SEPA districts, maybe NH-01 and NY-10). District lines and the VRA also have a certain effect--New Jersey would probably have a few more Labour seats with compact districts, while Maryland's gerrymander of Montgomery County actually works as a Tory gerrymander, since the parts of Montgomery County near DC have a slight Labour lean while most of the outer DC area and the panhandle (save Cumberland and Garrett County) are hyper-Tory.

I should also probably say that I don't have an especially deep knowledge of U.K. politics so probably a lot of this is wrong. Also there were certain areas I was unsure about--Long Island in particular, which I ended up using Essex as a parallel for--so I'd welcome corrections. I also just realized that I completely forgot about the Lib Dems (lol) so I'd welcome suggestions about where they might win--my intuition at first blush is MA-05, NY-10, NJ-05, NJ-12, and VA-11, but that seems a little too favorable to Labour.

If anything, this is far too generous to Labour based off 2019. Those red rural districts in PA and WV are exactly the type they would have lost that year (the “white working class” constituencies Labour retained in 2019 were mostly deprived urban ones, which the US largely lacks). On the other hand though, I think you have probably been a bit too favourable to the Tories in suburban/urban districts - the Arlington/inner suburban Fairfax districts, for instance, seem somewhat analogous to areas like Wandsworth where the Tories have really slid over the last two elections. Basically, I think you have overestimated the inversion of “US-style” patterns here.

[Alcibiades]

In any case, at the risk of seeming dumb, I made the northeast corridor with UK-style parties. Might do the rest of the country in a bit.



This is a bit generous to the Tories--it's assuming a 2019 style right-wing overperformance. A lot of these would be more favorable to Labour normally (thinking of PA-13, NY-24, VA-08 maybe) and then a lot more would be quintessential marginals (MA-04, MA-09, NJ-12, NJ-01, all the Torie SEPA districts, maybe NH-01 and NY-10). District lines and the VRA also have a certain effect--New Jersey would probably have a few more Labour seats with compact districts, while Maryland's gerrymander of Montgomery County actually works as a Tory gerrymander, since the parts of Montgomery County near DC have a slight Labour lean while most of the outer DC area and the panhandle (save Cumberland and Garrett County) are hyper-Tory.

I should also probably say that I don't have an especially deep knowledge of U.K. politics so probably a lot of this is wrong. Also there were certain areas I was unsure about--Long Island in particular, which I ended up using Essex as a parallel for--so I'd welcome corrections. I also just realized that I completely forgot about the Lib Dems (lol) so I'd welcome suggestions about where they might win--my intuition at first blush is MA-05, NY-10, NJ-05, NJ-12, and VA-11, but that seems a little too favorable to Labour.

If anything, this is far too generous to Labour based off 2019. Those red rural districts in PA and WV are exactly the type they would have lost that year (the “white working class” constituencies Labour retained in 2019 were mostly deprived urban ones, which the US largely lacks). On the other hand though, I think you have probably been a bit too favourable to the Tories in suburban/urban districts - the Arlington/inner suburban Fairfax districts, for instance, seem somewhat analogous to areas like Wandsworth where the Tories have really slid over the last two elections. Basically, I think you have overestimated the inversion of “US-style” patterns here.

Even in 2019 Labour didn't lose the most abjectly poor parts of 'traditionally working class' Britain (although their position did weaken considerably). The places in the red wall that fell were generally the areas with high homeownership, lower poverty and an elderly age profile. I'm not an expert on West Virginia but if one of the districts is considerably less poor than the state then that one would have fallen, but in general even in 2019 the Tories still fell short in areas as deprived as West Virginia is.

I think part of the issue here is that there is really nowhere like WV in the UK - as Al said, nowhere as deprived, and also nowhere (apart from perhaps the Highlands and Snowdonia - but those are obviously nothing like it in most other respects) which is anywhere near as remote. Nonetheless, it is not an exaggeration to say that Labour won essentially zero rural seats in 2019 (again, assuming that this is the election Sol is doing an American version of), and West Virginia seems quite a bit like some of those rural seats in County Durham scattered with ex-pit villages which the Tories gained last time out. Another thing is that West Virginia has the second-highest home ownership rate in the United States - Appalachia is generally marked by extremely high rates for such a deprived place.

[Alcibiades]

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.