Just how strong is Atlas's affinity for cold liberal rural white places?
Edit: so to give all the Americans here of how much of an aberration NFLD would be in American places, imagine if America had a state that was 94% White, 93% Christian, was mostly rural, had an oil dependant economy, where Romney gets 10.3% of the vote, and the state Republican Party which is competitive locally actively campaigned on behalf of Obama.
can you give us interested Yankees a thumbnail summary of.....how?
I can take a crack at it:
1) Unlike pretty much everywhere else in the Anglosphere, the rural Protestant majority in Newfoundland has historically voted Liberal, while the more urban Irish Catholics favoured the Tories. Cultural issues also aren't really big in Newfoundland, so there wasn't really a reason for folks to change sides like southern Evangelicals did.
2) The oil economy is a pretty new thing. Newfoundland was historically dirt poor and the oil money has really only stayed in the capital, St. John's, (e.g. Unemployment rate in St. John's is 6%. It's 17% in the rest of the province) so you have a white rural Protestant population, who are tribal Liberals, and are really, really poor.
3) Large swathes of provincial funding in the poorer provinces comes from the federal government and richer provinces. This is called equalization. The federal Tories reneged on a promise to exclude oil royalties from the Atlantic provinces, equalization formula. This drastically reduced Newfoundland's transfer payments and prompted the (very popular) Tory Premier to actively campaign against his federal counterparts, which in turn killed the federal Tories in the province.
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