The UK with Dems/GOP

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The general view amongst historians of South Wales is that the part of the United States that works as the best analogue for The Valleys would be the coalfields of Central Appalachia, so Southern WV and Eastern KY. And it happens that Harlan, KY has a roughly similar position in American Labor History as the Rhondda does in British Labour History. No analogue is perfect and there are a few issues with this one: the South Wales coalfield was immediately adjacent to coastal urban centres with their metallurgical industries and ports, its heyday began earlier and lasted for much longer, the region was politically important and influential at a national level in a way that Central Appalachia never was and as brutal as the social impact of the decline and death of heavy industry in the region has been, the existence of a Welfare State and all kinds of governmental Regional Policies over the decades means that the region, though diminished and no longer home to the dynamic and confident society that Dai Smith called 'the World of South Wales', is not actually dying.

There's an obvious temptation - given substantial Welsh emigration to the region in the 19th century - to think of the Anthracite mining district of North Eastern Pennsylvania as an analogue instead, but there are a few problems with this. The principle one is that the region was (and is) far too urbanised: the largest settlement in The Valleys is Merthyr Tydfil and its population peaked at 80,000, which is not only substantially less than Scranton but is actually less than Wilkes-Barre. And that eighty thousand includes all of the outlying townships such as Dowlais that would likely not have been incorporated into the borough in the United States as well as the villages of the Merthyr Vale (of which the best known is Aberfan) which certainly would not have been. Another is geological rather than geographical: although the western end of the South Wales coalfield was an Anthracite producing region, the overwhelming majority of the coalfield produced Steam Coal of varying grades. This might seem like a rather arcane point, but it really isn't: this fact meant that the economic health of the region during its heyday was dependent on a market that was very volatile and much influenced by international factors, which had a major impact on the industrial and political culture of the region to say nothing of the resulting population instability.

Which is a long and hyper-focused way of bringing us to the increasing difficulty of doing this kind of project, as fun as it undoubtedly is. American voting patterns have become increasingly strange from a European perspective (and often look even stranger once look you at detailed results) which makes getting things to fit rather hard. And one reason for this is that the divergent political histories of the United States and Western Europe mean that often the places that have the most in common in most respects are now very different in other ways: in this case it means that even the worst patches of postindustrial despair in Britain are nothing like what can be found in the various Rust Belts of the United States, but similar comments apply to other types of area.

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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.

Or which also had a substantial agricultural element (this does correlate with some of the other factors, but is worth noting), usually easy enough to outvote but not under the specific conditions of 2019, with so much of the usual Labour base on 'strike' one way or another and with so many ordinarily apolitical people turning out to vote because of Brexit.

Of course that's the other issue to remember: it's an error to take any individual British election and declare it to be 'normal' and the baseline. So if you're doing this sort of thing you'd be better off projecting a range of outcomes for a range of different scenarios.

I agree the two NOVA districts should be Labour though, the Tories do horribly with government workers even affluent ones.

Though extremely affluent owner-occupied suburbia is generally brutal for Labour, even when there's a lot of public sector employment. There is, of course, a third party and I suspect that might well be the answer in this case...

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I kind of have to beg to difffer here. ME-2 in particular is a pretty poor area--lowest median household income in New England, and more in line with the WV districts discussed above--and historically a major center of industry. I suppose there's an argument for it having flipped in 2019 but a place like that doesn't seem like somewhere where Labour would have been "dead and buried."

This would be a case where the continental scale of the United States and the wider range of economic activity historically and currently due to the place being, well, large and containing multitudes. Timber-related production on the sort of scale seen in northern Maine isn't something seen in Britain, so there's no direct analogue there, but it seems reasonable, for various reasons, to assume that it wouldn't be bad news for Labour. Certainly industrial-scale timber processing (which does exist in a few places) isn't, so we can at least say that Androscoggin County would be decent for them, most of the time: in fact quite clearly more so than some of the parts of the district that are more reliable territory for the Democrats these days and where I would tend to be very dubious of hypothetical Labour's prospects.

a lot of corporate headquarters, military contractors, engineering, in addition to your typical government employees. Are there equivalent dynamics in parts of London?

In the London metropolitan region rather than London: that's much more of e.g. a Surrey (especially!), Herts or Essex sort of profile.

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It's a little bit disappointing that this exercise is based on 2019, since it seems like the size of that result is obscuring patterns that might otherwise be interesting.

Yes, this is a real problem. The Conservatives led by 12pts at the last GE - that's really not a 'normal' baseline to work off.

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Sure, I understand the impulse to just assume that Labour would win everywhere. I also don't exactly understand which urban voters who are too rich to vote Labour vote Conservative and which vote Liberal Democrat; my instinct as an American is to say that they'd all be Lib Dems, but that's clearly not right.

The classic division was always occupational - higher professionals being much more likely either to be Liberals in general or to cast the odd vote that way when unhappy with their usual preference, while managerial types were more likely to be loyal Conservatives. Employment sector would be another, with those working in senior public administration and the media often having Liberal tendencies and those working in finance and the like being strongly Conservative.

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I'll leave the question of Jews to someone who is more able to speak on the social positions of Jews in America and in Britain.

There has tended to be a significant political cleavage between those who are Orthodox* and those who are not (which has made surveys - always tricky given the small size of the community - a complete nightmare and very vulnerable to definition games) and along much the lines stereotype would demand, although this gap will have been... somewhat smaller... in the past couple of elections for certain obvious reasons. There have also been strong geographical patterns - again, less marked recently. There is also a tendency for support to be more conditional than the norm, which (as you know) is a common theme with many minority groups in Britain.

An area that really does need highlighting, though, would be East Asian ethnicities. In Britain these are low turnout groups but those who do vote are overwhelmingly (probably in the 90% territory in a good election) Conservative.

_{*With the caveat that Hasidic voting patterns are their own world, much might be expected.}

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Stroud and the surrounding villages are quite industrial and as such have always had a decent Labour base.

Similarly, High Peak is a (post)industrial constituency, with the vast majority of the population living in former mill towns on the furthest fringe of the Manchester conurbation. Manchester City Council also built a lot of 'overspill' estates in Glossop under the Town Development Act in the 50s and 60s. Limestone quarrying was historically a major employer in the one urban centre (Buxton) where this pattern does not hold.

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The West in general is interesting because it's a region where Labour would have suffered some very serious long-term structural decline. Washington, at least, would likely still be somewhere where the party would dominate in an even year (traditions matter), but where things could get very nasty in a bad one. And elsewhere the general picture would be worse.

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I find it quite unlikely that the San Francisco district would vote for any party but Labour.  As Alcibiades points out, San Francisco has a long history of great union strength. San Francisco also has unusually regimented and organized local politics, with a remarkably well-defined left and right faction. Transported to a British context, I don't think that these factions would represent different parties; it seems more likely to me that they would be competing factions within the Labour Party. The relationship between capital and labor and the activist class feels too close for them to be represented by different parties. My guess is that this in turn would discourage substantial non-Labour organization within the city. You could have seen a strong Liberal Democrat vote in 2005 for obvious reasons, but I don't think that there would be the sort of Liberal Democrat organization necessary for long-term strength.

A direct analogy for San Francisco is difficult to find in GB of course, but we can maybe consider Oxford and Cambridge as models because while they are university cities they are also important centres for the sort of economic activity you find in that part of the United States. The general picture is of an urban core that is solidly left-of-centre (and with a strong enough Labour ethos in Oxford that the relevant constituency was held - just - in 2005) and which has more social problems than people not familiar with the places in question might assume, but also of a surrounding suburban and commuter hinterland that is very poor for Labour and where the Liberal Democrats are either very strong or nevertheless function as the main 'opposition' to the Conservatives. I think that works quite well for the Bay Area: reliably 'Labour' urban cores (with exactly how solidly so depending on the circumstances of the election and here the patterns won't necessarily align with national ones), but with 'Labour' largely out of the running in suburban centres and commuter settlements - a fact that would not, however, mean default Conservative dominance. Of course onto this we have the ethnic factors alluded to earlier, but I think they mostly work to reinforce this suggestion.