Canada’s 2025 Election and the American Nations

Every Canadian regional culture voted for the Liberals, except Far West, in an election mirroring trends in the United States

By Colin Woodard

At Nationhood Lab, our data journalism has been focused on regional differences within the United States, but American Nations provided a framework for understanding deep underlying cultural dynamics in North America’s other federations, Canada and Mexico. Many of the regional cultures within the present borders of the United States extend to (or from) our neighbors. Despite profound differences in their respective colonial and federal histories, immigration regimes and constitutional arrangements, the three federations’ politics have recognizable, geographical parallels. 

Canada’s 2025 federal election is a case in point. If you’ve forgotten, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party had already governed for a decade, winning the 2015, 2019 and 2021 elections by slowly decreasing margins. Trudeau himself had become extremely unpopular and throughout 2024, polls indicated the Conservative Party was headed for a landslide victory. But after Trump was narrowly returned to office, started a trade war, and repeatedly threatened Canada with annexation, Trudeau relinquished leadership to Mark Carney, a former central banker who’d promised to stand up to the bully in the White House. In reaction, Canadians rallied to the anti-Trumpist party, delivering the Liberals their greatest margin of victory since 1980.

How did this play out in regional terms? We coded all of Canada’s new 2025 election districts – or “ridings” – by their dominant American Nations culture and then totaled the votes cast by party in each. The map at the top of this post reveals which party’s candidates received the most votes in each nation and their margin of victory over the runner-up party. (In keeping with Canadian practice, red is Liberal and blue is Conservative.) The results run in tandem with those in the United States and follow the broad outlines of Canadian political dynamics laid out in American Nations, which was published back in 2011, years before the Liberal’s reign or the existence of the Trumpist movement.

“But wait,” you might say, “Canada has remained “center Left” for ten years while U.S. voters keep putting far right and even fascist politicians into the highest offices of the legislative and executive branches. Aren’t the two federations diverging?” Yes, they are. But that’s because Canada and the U.S. are made up of different mixes of North America’s centuries-old regional cultures or “nations.”

In the U.S., Trumpism’s support is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, two regions that don’t extend to Canada at all. He also has substantial support in the Far West, which he won by 9.5 points last year. The Far West is, indeed, Canada’s conservative outlier and the birthplace and stronghold of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s political enterprise. In this spring’s election, in fact, it’s the only region the Liberals didn’t win, going for Tories by a whopping 35.2 points, the most lopsided victory either party experienced in the vote.

In both federations, the Midlands has been up for grabs, a swing region that’s been trending right as conservative movements in both federations have traded laissez-faire economics for ethnonationalism. Hillary Clinton won the Midlands by 0.6 points in 2016, Biden won the region by 3.1 in 2020, and Trump claimed it by 0.5 in 2024. In April, the Liberals won the region – which in Canada is the most populous and urbanized – by 5.8 points, their narrowest regional margin.

In both federations, communitarian Left Coast and Yankeedom are progressive, though rural Yankeedom has proven less resistant to ethnonationalism than it was to the traditional Republicans’ laissez-faire individualism. In the U.S., Trump lost these regions by 37.2 and 10.7 points respectively in 2020 and by 33.3 and 6.1 in 2024, but he moved rural Yankee counties from +5.9 Democratic in the 2008 election (Obama v McCain) to +19.3 Republican in 2024. Similarly, in Canada’s 2015 election, Liberals won all 25 ridings in Yankeedom, but this year they lost five rural ones in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and scored an overall victory margin of +17.1 points.

Left Coast’s “liberal” margins are higher when you take into account the performance there of the New Democratic Party, a social democratic movement to the left of the Liberals. The NDP was nearly wiped out on the federal stage in April, but they held their three seats in British Columbia’s Left Coast section, where the pro-environment Greens scored their only seat. Those two parties account for more than 13 percent of the section’s vote, their largest combined share in any region.

While Canada lacks a conservative “Dixie bloc” – and, therefore, a legacy of slavery and apartheid – it has three large, strongly communitarian regions that leave little or no footprint within the United States, pulling their federation well to the left of ours.

The most consequential of these is New France – southern Quebec and parts of New Brunswick – a region with a strong social democratic tradition, complete with powerul trade unions and state-owned hydroelectric, investment, casino and alcohol distribution corporations. The U.S. enclave of New France in southern Louisiana has been politically absorbed by the Deep South surrounding it, but its Canadian “homeland” very much has not. In April its voters gave the Liberals their largest victory margin — 28.3 points – and relegated the Conservatives to third place, behind the secessionist Bloc Québécois.

In the U.S., indigenous-dominated First Nation is confined to a small enclave of just 62,000 people in northern and western Alaska, too small to have much bearing on federal politics. But in Canada, First Nation is a sprawling region almost as big as the continental United States comprising hundreds of thousands of people and dominating two territories, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. It voted for the Liberals by a nearly 18-point margin, mirroring northern and western Alaska’s strong preference for Democrats.

Finally, there’s a culture only found in Canada: that of the unique, 400-year old Anglo-Irish of Newfoundland – which only joined Canada after World War II — and southern Labrador. This rural region, distinct from the Yankee Maritimes, has a neighborly, communitarian ethos and a history of social democracy (under their colorful first premier, Joey Smallwood) and usually votes similarly to Canadian Yankeedom. This spring, it gave the Liberals a 15.5 point victory, but with a strong urban/rural split. Whereas in 2015, every riding in the region went for the Liberals, this year only Labrador and the relatively urbanized Avalon Peninsula did so, the while the other three, very rural, ridings elected Conservative to represent them in Parliament.

Canada changed its federal election district boundaries after the 2021 federal election, so we can’t easily provide direct statistical comparisons to past elections. But this map created by Wikipedia user Tholden28, transposed the 2021 results into the districts used for the 2025 contest, giving a sense of the trend lines:

The bottom line is that Trumpism is a non-starter on the Canadian federal stage. It remains to be seen how it will fare in the U.S. in the even more extreme version we’ve seen this year.

Thanks to our partners at Motivf, Tova Perlman (for her electoral data wrangling) and John Liberty (for the maps.)

— Colin Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.