Discussion: does Obama orienteer?

besides the education result
did you notice that most orienteering in the US seems to be in states that voted for Obama?

funny i thought the same thing when I saw that.

But who votes for Harper?

Hamiltonians.

Your riding imcludes Flamborough doesn't it? That is Hamilton's Alberta. Or Texas.

Which sets-up excellent vote splitting potential unless one of the NDP or Libs run a lame candidate. That has become the norm in Edmonton Strathcona (my old riding) where the Liberals ran an undergrad last election and gave up the riding to the NDP. It was the "Eye of Layton" seat in Alberta and the NDP put all their eggs into that basket. Well that's not really true, they also ran a strong candidate in Edmonton Centre too.

The split in the US is pretty much perfectly down to urban / rural (and suburbs) rather than Blue and Red states. All the states are kind of purple on average with very few pure blue (Vermont) and pure red (Utah this round).

The Tories won the majority because of Ontario suburbs. Canadian politics are all about those seats.

Nev-
Harper won because he repeated over and over and over that
Statistics Canada doesn't know about data
that the police don't know about guns and gun crime
that prison officials don't know about criminals
that climate scientists don't know about weather
that business knows best
that Canadian business is on the right track, despite that fact we dont make much any more
that... well you get the idea
and said that enough that 40% of the people believed him

Nicely summarized, GHOSLO.

Here's the 2012 "purple map" of the U.S.
http://kryogenix.org/days/2012/11/07/purple-map-20...

There was once an orienteering club in Alabama. It was called O-bama.

Ok, not really. But I wish.

Are you still stuck with that stupid british one-man-riding system? A sure way to get a parliament that is as far off from what people actually want as possible. On the other hand it has some benefits that the election system is actually possible to understand for ordinary people. Unlike Sweden where you need a PhD in both mathematics and political science to even have a small grasp of what's going on.

Here are some interesting red/blue maps based on who could vote at different times in America's past.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/what-the-...