US with Canadian parties

[King of Kensington]

I quite like this discussion.  But here are some comments/questions:

1.  I think there's a problematic tendency here to conflate "liberal Democrats" with the NDP constituency.   Yet the NDP has not been particularly successful with wealthy socially liberal professionals.  The NDP does do well in bohemian neighborhoods and among academic/university communities, but not among more traditional professionals like lawyers and doctors and the "bobos" that David Brooks writes about.  In fact with the collapse of the Liberal Party the constituency that they can count on most are professionals and people with post-graduate degrees.  So places like Aspen, Marin County, Beverly Hills, Lexington Mass., etc. would have stayed Liberal and not have gone NDP.  At most, strong NDP showings in these places would have allowed the Tories to come up the middle and win

2.  Not sure how to put the collapse of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s and 1970s.  In US, "white ethnics" became a swing vote or even Republican, but in Canada this is historically a "bedrock Liberal constituency (though in the 2011 election the less affluent white ethnics swung NDP and more affluent Tory).   What would the scenario have been with "Canadian" style parties?  Would the NDP have become the "civil rights party" and the Libs kept the "white ethnic" vote?  Or would the Liberals have successfully been able to straddle a middle ground and hold both these constituencies?

3.  I'm assuming African Americans and Latinos (with the exception of Tory-leaning Cubans) both would have been Liberal constituencies with a strong NDP minority, but both would have dropped the Liberals like a hot potato in 2011 and gone NDP.   

[King of Kensington]

Excellent and thoughtful analysis and welcome to the Forum, King of Kensington! I hope you wander a few boards lower to the International Elections board and further down to the International General Discussion board, too.

The Hispanic community can be somewhat socially conservative. Do you think there is the possibility of them switching from Liberal to Conservative in 2011, like the Jewish community? Of course, that probably had more to do with foreign policy than social policy, but I'm sure you understand my query.

Yes, it's quite plausible that a sizable minority of the Hispanic community would have swung Conservative in a Harper/Ignatieff/Layton matchup in US terms.  Not as much as the NDP though.  Class status and generational status (multi-generation US-born more Conservative?) would have played a role I think.

Harper would have appealed to US Jews in this scenario to the same degree of Reagan '80 (plus accounting for the growth of the Orthodox and Russian and Israeli immigrant communities since then).  Of course this raises the question of the "religious right" factor, which is the biggest turnoff to Jews.