The Imperial Presidency

[robkelk]

An analysis that somebody in D.C. needs to read and understand:

Canada as a 51st state? Republicans would never win another general election

Quotes from the article used under a CC-BY-ND licence.

Still, let’s play out Trump’s hypothetical. Let’s say that Canada became the 51st state in the American union. What would be the electoral implications for the U.S.?

Trump and his Republican Party would certainly not like the answer: the GOP might never win a national election ever again. Indeed, the “state of Canada” would profoundly alter the electoral map of American national politics, almost entirely in the Democratic Party’s favour.

To see how, consider how the 51st state would be represented in the institutions of American government.

Let’s begin in the House of Representatives because that’s where integrating Canada would be the trickiest. In the U.S., House seats are allocated on the basis of representation-by-population, which, based on the 2020 U.S. census, means one House seat for every 761,169 people.

With its population of 41 million, Canada would be apportioned about 54 seats, becoming a bigger state than California. Combine those 54 House seats with the two senators allocated to every state, and you would have an electoral powerhouse north of the 49th parallel. None of this would be good news for Republicans.

Of course, this assumes that annexation can overcome American political fights over reapportionment and redistricting, and that Canada would accept the American constitutional and legal formula for allocating seats that would whittle 338 House of Commons seats down to 54 and its 105 senators down to two. But no matter.

We'll set aside for the moment the difference between a state government and the number of representatives that a state sends to D.C.

Let’s look now at how Canadians would alter American elections. Grafting Canada’s political culture onto U.S. party politics would be awkward, so let’s make another assumption. Presume that Conservative Party of Canada voters would vote Republican and left-of-Conservative voters would vote for Democrats.

Generally, this would include supporters of the Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and the Bloc Québécois.

Here’s where the 51st state becomes a big problem for Trump. Since Canada’s right-wing parties united in 2003, the Conservative Party of Canada has won an average of 35 per cent of the popular vote. Canada’s left-of-Conservative parties, on the other hand, have won an average of 63 per cent of the vote in that time period.

In American terms, that means about two-thirds of voters in the state of Canada would vote Democrat and one third would vote Republican, or 36-18 in the Democrats’ favour.

And that assumes Canadians who vote for the Conservative party would carry over to the GOP. Canadians don't just believe in multiculturalism, gun control, and socialized medicine, we have them as a matter of course.

Looking back over the past quarter century, that margin would have turned every Republican House majority into a Democratic majority (except for 2010). Indeed, left-of-Conservative voters in the state of Canada would make it far more difficult for Republicans to win a House majority ever again.

In the Senate, the two-thirds of Canada’s left-of-Conservative voters would likely send a pair of Democrats to the Senate. That’s not enough to alter the balance of power, but in a world of single-digit margins of victory in the Senate, it’s not trivial. After all, every senator counts, especially for things like Supreme Court and cabinet confirmations.

Now comes the big question: how would the state of Canada alter the Electoral College?

Each state has Electoral College votes that are the sum of their House representatives and senators. We also know (with some exceptions) that the winner of the popular vote in each state takes all of that state’s the Electoral College votes. Where would the state of Canada’s 54 Electoral College votes go?

Given Canada’s left-of-Conservative leanings, the state of Canada’s Electoral College votes would likely go to the Democrat presidential candidate every time. That would have swung two Republican presidential victories in the Democrats’ favour this century (2000 and 2004) and would have made Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 even smaller — so small, in fact, that American electoral math in the expanded U.S. would be fundamentally changed.

So, yeah — if His Orangeness wants to be the final Republican President ever, then go ahead and pursue this crazy scheme.