OTL Election maps resources thread

Merci beaucoup! I'll get stuck in with mapping that soon then ;)
Since looking it up might be a nightmare, here are the results from Seine-Maritime as far as I can tell.
PartyVotesShareEntitled seatsActual seats (I think)
COM
71712​
12,1%​
1,448101​
2​
EXG
16584​
2,8%​
0,334885​
SOC
211198​
35,5%​
4,264781​
4​
DVG
6303​
1,1%​
0,127278​
DVD
2898​
0,5%​
0,05852​
UDF-RPR
233910​
39,4%​
4,723411​
5​
FRN
39982​
6,7%​
0,807368​
1​
ECO
11670​
2,0%​
0,235656​
TOTAL
594257​
100%​
12​
12​
 
So interestingly, in a ruling by the Constitutional Court, the special FPTP peace agreement constituencies in Colombia are now going to exist (after having contentiously "failed" in Congress due to an obscure majorities rule). Here's the map I made five years ago about them:

  1. Constituency 1 has 812,148 inhabitants and is located in the western departments of Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Nariño.
  2. Constituency 2 has 169,974 inhabitants and is located in the eastern department of Arauca (still plagued by violence by the ELN)
  3. Constituency 3 has 476,372 inhabitants and is located in Antioquia, in the northwest.
  4. Constituency 4 has 144,103 inhabitants and is composed of the Cataumbo region in northern Norte de Santander, in the border with Venezuela,
  5. Constituency 5 has 514,673 inhabitants and is composed of the entirety of Caquetá department, plus a single department in Huila (this is the zone of highest FARC concentration),
  6. Constituency 6 has 209,084 inhabitants and is located mostly over northern Chocó, although also has departments in southern Chocó and Antioquia. It's notable for being the constituency where the Bojayá massacre (the largest massacre by FARC) ocurred.
  7. Constituency 7 has 272,157 inhabitants and is located in southern Meta and all of Guaviare, also heavily affected by FARC,
  8. Constituency 8 has 362,286 inhabitants and is located in the Montes de María region in the central Atlantic coast, near Cartagena,
  9. Constituency 9 has 487,950 inhabitants and composes the Pacific coast of Cauca and Valle del Cauca - the trading hub of the Colombian Pacific (and also Colombia's crime capital),
  10. Constituency 10 has 448,365 inhabitants and composes the Pacific coast of Nariño - the coca exportation capital of Colombia,
  11. Constituency 11 has 272,637 inhabitants and is located in southern Putumayo - the area where Shining Path and FARC used to sorta meld together (I'm only half joking),
  12. Constituency 12 has 1,371,062 inhabitants and is located in Guajira, Magdalena and Sucre - home of the largest Native communities, the birthplace of García Márquez, and Colombia's largest drug plantations,
  13. Constituency 13 has 170,144 inhabitants and is located in the Magdalena River in Bolívar and Antioquia - the bottleneck for riverbound trade,
  14. Constituency 14 has 296,887 inhabitants and is located in southern Córdoba - home to huge ranches and paramilitary-FARC violence.
  15. Constituency 15 has 124,330 inhabitants and is located in southern Tolima - this is where FARC started, and where they tried to set up their peasant communes early on.
  16. Constituency 16 has 648,597 inhabitants and is located in Urabá, Antioquia - drug trade's gateway to North America, and one of the highest-hit areas of the country.
These constituencies will come into effect in the 2018 elections, and will cease existing at the end of the 2026 period - lasting a total of eight years.

Without further ado, here's the map:

colombian_special_peace_constituencies_by_fed42-db85erp.png
 
Not very great maps of the Boundary Commission for England's initial proposals for English Parliamentary constituencies, released 8th June 2021.

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I was about to say 'well at least they've stopped splitting up the counties into arbitrary messes' and then I noticed Lancaster and Morecambe being paired up with southern Cumbria, whatever the hell that thing they did with eastern Leeds is, and the big lumps of Suffolk and Wiltshire mashed together with Braintree and the Cotswolds. I despise how the Boundary Commission just arbitrarily decided in 2013 'sod it, counties don't matter anymore'- I'd honestly rather the populations were a bit more unequal but the counties were all kept together, it looks ugly and messy as sin otherwise.
 
Lancaster and Morecambe being paired up with southern Cumbria,
To be fair, isn't that a combination the councils themselves have been pushing for?

Also, granted I don't live there, but it really feels to me like it makes more sense to lump Wetherby in with Tadcaster than it does to lump it in with Rothwell.
 
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I was about to say 'well at least they've stopped splitting up the counties into arbitrary messes' and then I noticed Lancaster and Morecambe being paired up with southern Cumbria, whatever the hell that thing they did with eastern Leeds is, and the big lumps of Suffolk and Wiltshire mashed together with Braintree and the Cotswolds. I despise how the Boundary Commission just arbitrarily decided in 2013 'sod it, counties don't matter anymore'- I'd honestly rather the populations were a bit more unequal but the counties were all kept together, it looks ugly and messy as sin otherwise.
By law the population has to be within 5% of a national threshold. It's not the commission making that decision.
 
I was about to say 'well at least they've stopped splitting up the counties into arbitrary messes' and then I noticed Lancaster and Morecambe being paired up with southern Cumbria,
Cumbria only borders Lancashire in the North West region; given the decision not to cross regional boundaries, and given Cumbria is too big for 5 seats and too small for 6, the link with northern Lancashire is inevitable. It's only Morecambe being linked with Cumbria, not Lancaster.
 
Apparently the French regional elections were held in June, so I decided to map the two rounds by popular vote.

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Despite political discourse on the national level in France currently being dominated by the centrist La République En Marche! (LREM) and far-right RN, in the regions the Socialists and Republicans have managed to hold on much better than they did in the National Assembly in 2017. Having said that, it probably helps that regional elections involve the biggest parties building alliances with smaller ones, and alliances that are led by other parties still have a prominent role (particularly in the overseas regions), but the fact remains that LREM made quite limited progress and the RN suffered a net loss of seats in every region where they had held any, and despite a narrow victory in the first round in Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, they were quashed by tactical voting for a LR-led centre-right alliance in the second round.

In fact, surprisingly given the drastic transformation of the French political landscape in the six years since the last regional elections, the 2021 election saw quite little change- French Guiana flipped from the centrist Guiana Rally (GR) to the PSG, Martinique went from the pro-independence MIM to the autonomist PPM and La Réunion went from Republican to a left-wing alliance supported by the Socialists, Communists and LFI, but every mainland region voted the same as in 2015. The LR-led alliance in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and the PS-led one in Occitanie achieved noticeably large re-election victories.

By the way, the distinction between who's down as part of the parties and who's down as 'miscellaneous' is based on the allegiance of the council presidents, and the three 'miscellaneous right' ones in the north have Republican support despite not being Republicans themselves.
 
The elections to the Czechoslovak Chamber of Deputies of 1920.

Electoral system

General

Inspired by the electoral systems of Belgium and interwar Germany, the Czechoslovak electoral system featured three levels (skrutinium) of proportional representation that operated in slightly different fashions. The two chambers of the National Assembly, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate were made up of 300 and 150 members, respectively, elected every 6 and every 8 years respectively. In practice, however, both chambers were always elected simultaneously. In practice too, very few of the Chamber's legislatures lasted all 6 years, with elections held in 1920, 1925, 1929 ad 1935, only the 1929-1935 legislature lasted roughly what it was meant to.

Voting was mandatory for every man and woman over 21 but below 70. Overall, the elections can be considered to have been free and fair, with the potential exception of Ruthenia where it isn't unheard for the government authorities to favor anti-Hungarian parties. Indeed, one of the reasons why the election of 1920 wasn't held in Ruthenia until 1924 was precisely because many in Prague feared a Magyarone victory.

Elections were held on two days, on a Sunday for the first round, and a week later for the second and third rounds, although no one voted on these latter rounds. The time span was designed to give the parties time to draft candidate lists for these latter rounds. The party lists were closed lists.

Constituencies (Chamber)

For the election of 1920, the country was divided into a total of 23 constituencies, electing from 6 o 45 deputies. The numbers of seats that were allocated to each constituency was not exactly based on population - although it did play a large role. According to the authors of the electoral law, other factors like the historical under-representation of Czech voters also played a role in the over-representation of, for instance, the Bohemian central plateau, or the under-representation of the Hungarians in Slovakia (grouped into the Nové Zamky and Kosice constituencies). In theory, it was also designed to reflect future demographic trends as the electoral law had no way of automatically re-allocating the seats.

This last, official reason to me appears to be basically false, the Czech Lands had far lower birth rates than Slovakia, not to mention feudal Ruthenia, and on average, it was better represented. The table below shows the ratio of citizen per seat, including both voting age and underage citizens. That is one of the reasons why Ruthenia also shows such a discrepancy with the rest of the country - it was a far younger part of the country.

In 1920, no elections would be held in either the Tesin or the Uzhorod constituencies. In the case of Tesin, because at the time of the election, the territory of the former Duchy of Teschen was disputed between Czechoslovakia and Poland, resulting in a short war that was ended through a League of Nations-mediated settlement and a partition of the territory. For 1925, the Czechoslovak part of Tesin was added to the Moravska Ostrava constituency. Elections in the administrative district of Hlucin (Mor. Ostrava) couldn't be held either due to its disputed status, and as a result, in 1920, the constituency would have elected 13, rather than 14 seats.

1920 was also the only time the Prague constituency existed, as in the successive elections, the constituency was divided into two, Prague A and Prague B, each electing 24 seats each.

In practice, in 1920, only 281 representatives were elected and sat between 1920 and 1924, 290 from 1924 until 1925.

HwcGC2G.png
First Round

The number of theoretically-allocated seats per constituency's main role was limited. They served to calculate the quota of each constituency. This quota was Hare - the number of valid votes casts divided by the number of seats. The resulting number was always rounded down. This number was known as the 'election number'.

In the first round, there were no thresholds for parties to cross, and any party that met the quota would get a seat. This is pretty straightforward. Because of the differences in voters:seats ratio, the election number could vary significantly, from 17,679 in Liptovsky Sväty Mikulas to 27,743 in Kosice.

N3STlcj.png

All valid votes from each party would thus be allocated on the basis of these quotas. Unallocated seats and votes would pass to the second (and ultimately third rounds). This meant that in practice, each constituency elected less seats than it was theoretically allocated, on average only 66% of all seats were allocated on the first round, with great variation, going from only 50% in Hradec Kralové to 86.67% in Prague.

This would become a significant political issue later on, as the Slovak People's Party resented losing 'Slovak' seats due to the national character of the second and third rounds.

Second Round

All the remaining votes that had not been enough to obtain a seat and all the unallocated seats from the first round were grouped together. The second round was held a week after the first round, giving time to the parties to create candidate lists from candidates who hadn't been elected on the first round from across the country.

The way that the second round operated diverges somewhat from the first round. For starters, the second round was done through a single, national constituency. The second round also featured a threshold - in order to be able to participate in this second allocation of seats, a party would have had to obtain at least one seat on the first round or 20,000 votes in at least one constituency. The United Jewish Party, for instance, had failed to gain any seats in the first round and never obtained more than 11,000 votes in a constituency. As a result, it would not participate.

The quota (electoral number) for the second round was also calculated differently. Instead of taking into account all the valid votes cast, it only took into account the remaining votes of parties that met the threshold and divided it by the number of remaining seats plus one (Hagenbach-Bischoff quota), making it slightly more favorable to larger parties than the Hare quota used on the first round. Like on the first round, the resulting number was rounded down.

In 1920, the electoral number was 20,574 for the Chamber of Deputies. In the second round, there were 83 seats to be allocated, of which 77 were, and the 6 left would be allocated on the third and final round.

The electoral law stipulated that there would be no third round in the - rare - case that all remaining seats had been allocated on the second round.

Third Round

In the case that after applying the second round quota to the remaining seats, there were still unassigned seats, then these were allocated to the parties according to the largest remainder system.

This would thus look something similar to this:

7bhbfqT.png

Parties' breakdown.

One of the interesting aspects of Czechoslovak politics, particularly in the Czech lands, was how the same social cleavages cut within each ethnic group in a similar fashion, and how the way that Czechs and Germans voted in Bohemia was fairly similar, and the same was true in Moravia (& Silesia). So for instance:

Social Democracy:

Both Czechs and Germans had strong social democratic parties that in 1920 were about to split up 60:40 between socdems and communists [1].

So, for instance, you had the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers' Party (ČSDSD) and the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in Czechoslovakia (DSAP) as Marxist reformist parties. Both parties were ideologically very similar, with the exception of the issue of self-determination, as they both had been parts of the same party until the 1900s. After 1926, the two parties would begin cooperating quite closely, and in fact, their own respective trade unions would even merge.

There was also the SSČLP, a small, more Czech nationalist outfit that would merge back with the post-split Social Democrats after 1923.

Non-Marxist Socialism:

Then you had a strong Czech non-Marxist, socialist party with nationalist leanings and deeply tied to nationalist civil society. These were the Czechoslovak Socialist Party (ČSS) and the German National Socialist Workers' Party (DNSAP). Now, the ČSS had both quasi-left-liberals but also strasserites, but the party would force the latter out, whereas its German equivalent was basically dominated by pre-left-fascists. That is to say, the DNSAP in the 1920s was nominally democratic outwards (and internally was democratic, eschewing a Führerprinz organisation) and its ideology was economically corporatist, anti-Marxist, "moderately" anti-Semitic, and pro-federalist (being pro-Anschluss could get you banned). In terms of sociology, the ČSS was predominantly lower-middle class, whereas the DNSAP.

Political Catholicism:

Then you had the parties of religious Catholics, who were way stronger in Moravia than in Bohemia. These were the Czechoslovak People's Party (ČSL) and the German Christian-Social People's Party (DCVP). In 1920, the future Hlinka's Slovak People's Party ran with the ČSL. In 1920, this helped boost the vote share of the party.

Agrarianism:

Then you had the agrarian parties, stronger in the more secular countryside of Bohemia. The agrarian parties combined social conservatism, pro-market positions with a desire for land reform and some degree of social welfare (particularly inasmuch as it protected farmers). There was the Republican Party of the Czechoslovak Countryside (RSČV) which merged with the Slovak Agrarian Party in 1922, becoming the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants (RSZML) on the Czechoslovak side, and the Farmers' League (BdL) on the German side.

Liberalism & National-liberalism:

Next up there were the national parties. On the Czechoslovak side, you had the ČsND, the Czechoslovak National Democracy, the direct descendant of the 19th century Young Czechs party. The party was the most Czech chauvinist and the most closely associated with big business. It was quite socially conservative too. During the 1930s, the party would drift from national liberal and national conservative positions to corporatist authoritarianism and quasi-fascism. Then there was also the Czechoslovak Traders' Party (ČŽOS), which thought of itself as a party in defence of the urban middle classes opposed to both trade unions and big business interests, and was less dogmatically nationalist than the National Democrats. The ČZOS cooperated with the agrarians in parliament.

On the German side, you had the German Democratic Freedom Party (DDFP), a small progressive left-liberal party with a similar base to the German DDP, including many German-speaking Jews. Among its MPs was Kafka's brother. The other, liberal party was the German National Party (DNP), which was a national-liberal party but erred more on the national than the liberal side of things. The party was, like the DNSAP, the most opposed to the existence of the Czechoslovak state and advocated for self-determination. The party's voters were largely upper-class Germans.

In 1920, the DNP and the DNSAP ran together as the German Electoral Coalition (Deutsche Wahlgemeinschaft, DWG).

Slovakia:

In Slovakia, politics were somewhat less (or more?) confusing. This is because, unlike the Czech lands, there was a much more limited parliamentary tradition in Slovakia, where politics had been far more centralised in Budapest and much more elitist owing to Budapest's hyper-restrictive franchise.

So basically, on the Slovak side of things, most of the Czechoslovak parties developed their Slovak wings. Some of them, like the Social Democrats essentially lost the entire party apparatus to the Communists when the party split so they had to start anew.

As for 'indigenous' parties, there was the Slovak National and Peasants' Party (SNaRS), the merger of the Slovak National Party (SNS) and the Slovak agrarians. The party's delegation in Prague split up in 1922, between the Slovak nationalists and the agrarians. The Agrarians would become the Slovak wing of the RSZML.

On the Hungarian side of Slovak politics, there were 3 parties running in 1920.

First, there was the Hungarian and German Christian‐Socialist Party (the future OKSzP), the main party of the Hungarian minority. The party was politically Catholic and the most willing to cooperate with the new authorities in Prague, although it would slowly move towards more hostile positions as a result of internal conflicts and Budapest's influence on the party.

Then, the Hungarian-German Social Democratic Party (MNSDP, UDSDP). The party would last a few months after the election, as the majority of the party defected to join the Slovak wing of the KSČ. The rump party would split, with its German members becoming DSAP's German wing, and its remaining Hungarian members forming the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (MSDP), which would merge in 1926 with the ČSDSD Slovak wing.

Lastly, there was the Hungarian Party of Smallholders (MKP, the full name was "National Hungarian Smallholders' and Landowners' Party"). The party started out as the Hungarian agrarian party but would radicalise, like all other Hungarian parties, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s becoming essentially an irredentist, nationalist party.

Honorary mention to the Jewish Party - which I'm sure you can guess what its political programme was about - which obtained nearly 80,000 votes across Czechoslovakia. But as it failed to obtain 20,000 votes or one seat in at least one constituency, it didn't cross the threshold to be able to obtain seats in the second and third rounds, so it got 0 seats.
[1] Even then it's important to note that until 1929, the KSČ was a communist party but not one fully controlled by Moscow. The purge of the party's leader, Haken, and his executive and their replacement by Gottwald was the coup de grâce.

The map:

KdZyU99.png
 
I've never seen this format done for early 19th-century presidential elections, which is a shame. It isn't as worth it for elections after 1832, though, since that was the last one until 1892 to have any states choose electors in any way other than statewide bloc vote.

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I've never seen this format done for early 19th-century presidential elections, which is a shame. It isn't as worth it for elections after 1832, though, since that was the last one until 1892 to have any states choose electors in any way other than statewide bloc vote.

View attachment 677949
Just to check - is there a record of why each area coloured white didn't have a popular vote?

Did some have indirect elections, or were they unincorporated areas within a state, or something?

I'm guessing at least some of them were still Native land.
 
Just to check - is there a record of why each area coloured white didn't have a popular vote?

Did some have indirect elections, or were they unincorporated areas within a state, or something?

I'm guessing at least some of them were still Native land.

States using state legislative choice and territories are fully blanked out, while areas within a state that were not attached to any county and/or were not yet ceded by the Native Americans are also blanked out.
 
While it was effectively uncontested on the presidential question, the 1820 presidential election saw some Federalists chosen to the Electoral College, who chose a disorganized variety of vice-presidential candidates. Ohio and Kentucky are shown as unopposed as, while the positions of elector were contested, everyone agreed on the Monroe/Tompkins ticket, and results were spotty at best.
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Although they haven't finished counting the results, they've been confirmed, so here's the California recall election.
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This is the fourth recall election to make a statewide ballot (though every Governor of California since 1960 has faced a petition for a recall election), and the first ever to fail due to a No vote on the recall happening. This differentiates Gavin Newsom's victory over the recall from Scott Walker's in 2012- Walker won by defeating a Democratic challenger, though Newsom did get more than twice as many votes as his potential successor (on which more in a second).

Newsom had faced seven recall petitions, and the one which led to this recall election is largely believed to have been influenced by his handling of Covid, particularly his continuation of closure of public schools, large fradulent unemployment claims, slow vaccine rollout and his French Laundry dinner flouting Covid precautions.
For a while, Newsom looked quite vulnerable thanks to his perceived incompetence and hypocrisy on the pandemic, and Republicans and proponents of the recall tried to hammer him on that; Arnold Schwarzenegger even went as far as to say it was the 'same climate' as the 2003 recall. During the summer it looked like a Yes vote might be possible, but quite quickly it became clear that this was nowhere near as probable as he assumed.

If anything, the way the recall played out served to almost totally disprove Schwarzenegger's assertion. For a start, the Republican frontrunner was not a moderate trying to unite the incumbent Governor's opponents, but conservative talk show host Larry Elder, who basically painted himself as an heir to Trump (rather ironic given his status as potentially the first African-American Governor of California). This allowed Newsom to paint the election as a referendum not on him, but on Trumpism and the far right, galvanizing his support among Democrats and obfuscating his earlier missteps. Also in keeping with his inspiration, Elder accused the results of being based on mass fraud (though to his credit, unlike Trump he has conceded) and hinted he plans to try again. Sadly he didn't make the statement, 'I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME GAVIN, NEXT TIIIME!'

Interestingly, while Newsom comfortably defeated the recall, the vote on his successor (which is of course nonbinding now) saw Elder win by a 37-point margin and only a combined 27.9% of the vote go to Democrats. (I find it amusing that while Elder swept the state- though, as mentioned, with less than 2.4 million votes to over 5.8 million going No on the recall- San Francisco still didn't vote for him, instead giving a victory by a tiny margin to landlord and YouTuber Kevin Paffrath.) This was part of the party's strategy, though, since the idea was to avoid the recall getting a Yes vote in the first place. A BBC News story outlines an interesting althistory scenario for if it had passed:

'If [Newsom] were to lose this recall election, it wouldn't just end his political career - it would result in a handbrake turn for the political trajectory of California, with a new Republican Governor elected by a tiny proportion of the state's 22 million voters. And that could have major national implications.
California's senior Senator Diane Feinstein is 88 years old. If she were, for any reason, unable to complete her term after a new Republican Governor had been inaugurated, they would appoint her replacement and, in doing so, immediately eliminate the Democrats voting majority of just one in the Senate.'


So, people interested in Republican-wanking California, make of that what you will.
 
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Weird, messy European elections have become as much a part of European politics as elections themselves. So it says a lot that even by those standards, the 2021 German federal election has been weird and messy. For a start, the result was guaranteed to be interesting given that Angela Merkel retired as Chancellor after sixteen years and no incumbent Chancellor would be running, the first time in post-war German history this has been the case.

But instead of Merkel’s absence giving her CDU/CSU an opportunity for a new lease of life, the party has been mired in conflicts. The CDU leadership contest in 2018 saw former the party’s General Secretary and former Minister-President of Saarland Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (commonly known by her initials AKK), perceived as an heir to Merkel, defeating the more conservative former Bundestag leader Fredrich Merz. One of AKK’s main assets was that, despite her social conservatism, she was seen as more moderate and likely not to rock the boat; she demonstrated during the 2019 EU Parliament elections that this was not the case with a rather ham-fisted push for electoral law to reduce the ability of social media personalities to influence voter choices after a popular YouTuber called Rezo put out a video aggressively critiquing the CDU/CSU, SPD and AfD.

This fiasco and reporting that Merkel did not think AKK was up to the job of Chancellor weakened her, but her failure to discipline the Thuringia CDU for voting with the AfD for the election of Thomas Kemmerich as the state’s Minister-President in February 2020 was the last straw. When AKK announced she would resign as CDU leader, the leadership race was expected to be held in the summer, but ended up being postponed until the start of 2021 thanks to COVID-19.

That race led to the election as CDU leader of North-Rhine Westphalia Minister-President Armin Laschet, also a social conservative (like AKK he opposed gay marriage, but tapped the gay Health Minister Jens Spahn to serve as his deputy) and economic moderate who is ideologically close to Merkel. Laschet faced a challenge by Markus Söder of the CSU, and the two of them failed to agree between themselves who should be Chancellor candidate, forcing the federal board to break the deadlock and make Laschet party leader.

Something just as interesting has happened on the opposition side during 2021. Thanks to fatigue with the grand coalition and the general rise in awareness of the severity of climate change, the Greens managed during April and May to overtake the CDU/CSU for first in the polls, and rather than retaining the dual leadership it, Die Linke and the AfD have traditionally practiced, it picked a Chancellor candidate for the first time, Annalena Baerbock.

But the really odd thing to happen concerns the CDU/CSU’s longtime coalition partner. The SPD, which has spent all but four of the last 23 years as a part of Germany’s federal government and spent the 2010s as a poster child for Pasokification, has managed with its Chancellor candidate, Vice Chancellor and former Mayor of Hamburg Olaf Scholz, to capitalize on the fractious nature of the conflict. With Laschet and the CDU/CSU seen as burnt out and divided and Baerbock and the Greens as too inexperienced for government, Scholz benefitted both from his slightly more left-wing campaign promises like raising the minimum wage from €9.60 to €12 and improving the affordability of housing and from his perceived closeness to Merkel on issues like national and European leadership.

Mostly thanks to Scholz’s presence, the SPD moved to a consistent lead in the polls during late August and early September, but its lead tightened towards the end of the campaign, likely due to closer scrutiny of Scholz’s past (I read quite a scathing article about it in Politico a week or so ago) and Merkel finally giving her endorsement to Laschet. The exit polls showed a neck-and-neck race between the two main parties, but by the closest margin since 2005 and for the first time since 2002, the SPD emerged as the largest party in the Bundestag with (as of this writing) a projected 206 seats while the CDU/CSU came out with just 196 seats, its worst result ever.

It’s probably accurate to say the 2021 election was a vote against both the major two parties to a significant degree, though. Though they didn’t do as spectacularly as they’d hoped earlier in the year, the Greens got their best result ever and broke 100 seats for the first time (coming in at 118) and won their first FPTP district outside of Berlin (their first eleven, actually!) and the FDP took 92, their best total since 2009. More concerningly, the AfD took sixteen FPTP districts, all in the East, and topped the polls for the PR vote in Saxony and (just barely) in Thuringia. Ironically they actually lost 11 seats due to their vote declining overall across the country. Die Linke were badly hurt by the surge of the bigger left-wing parties, falling to 4.9% of the vote and just barely re-entering the Bundestag thanks to winning three seats (they lost an East Berlin district to the CDU of all parties though).

The East-West divide is still very prominent, which is probably unsurprising in German politics at this point- as mentioned, in the West the Greens made unprecedented gains and the AfD did the same in the East, but the SPD also achieved a striking recovery in the East, going from holding two seats across all of the former East Germany (one in East Berlin and one in Potsdam, the latter electing Scholz this year) to twenty-seven, more than any other party. The one which really grabbed people’s attention was Vorpommern-Rügen-Vorpommern-Greifswald I, Merkel’s old district, going red as every FPTP seat in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg went to the SPD, which they didn’t even manage in 1998.

In terms of raw votes, though, initial analysis suggests the more fundamental division now is one of age. Apparently older voters whose cleavages between the CDU/CSU and SPD are well-established stayed that way, while younger voters went to the Greens and FDP and middle-aged voters were more likely to break for the AfD.

Now that the results have come in, of course, comes the agonizing process of coalition-building. The smart money is on either a traffic light coalition (SPD, Greens and FDP) or a Jamaica coalition (CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP); the numbers would allow for either, with the Greens being more inclined to work with the SPD and the FDP more inclined towards the CDU/CSU. Both leaders have more-or-less ruled out another grand coalition (then again, they did that in 2005 and 2017…) and are settling in for hard negotiations, though of course Merkel will stay in place until a new Chancellor is elected by the Bundestag. Probably the most apt comment I’ve seen is someone who said the real negotiations will be between the FDP and Greens.

Anyway, now I’ve done that long as hell write-up to contextualize it, here are the maps I made of the eststimme (‘first vote’, for the FPTP districts) and zweitstimme (‘second vote’, for the PR lists in each state, though they’re counted by district as well). Credit for the basemap goes to Oryxslayer, though I made a few amendments to account for boundary changes and my format is based on majorities rather than voteshare.

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Sorry to bump this thread again, but I came up with and made a mapping idea today I wanted to share. So generally the typical way Irish elections are mapped (and have been mapped on this thread in the past) is just by showing the first preference votes by party. That's all well and good, but after looking into the results of some elections in a bit more detail I've realized you get very different maps if you look at that compared to if you look at the first preference votes by candidate. To test/demonstrate this, I've mapped the 2020 election both ways:

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Basically, the map on the right is the typical STV vote by party and seat assignment map; the map on the left is the result of the first count, and thus the margin and party of the first TD elected (leaving out the Ceann Comhairle in their seat since they get re-elected automatically).
How practical this actually is is debatable, but I definitely found it interesting and fun to do as opposed to just mapping an Irish election the old-fashioned way (though admittedly 2020 was such a chaotic election it was pretty enjoyable to map the old-fashioned way too!). If people are interested, I'm tempted to make more of these.

(In case anyone was wondering, the map is the Wikipedia one edited in GIMP- there may be a bit of antialiasing I didn't manage to get rid of in places unfortunately- and I got the results from ElectionsIreland.)
 
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