The Yankee Dominion: A Map and World Building Project

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Société du Cajuns: 36
Parti Démocratique: 35
Parti Gauche: 13
Parti Socialiste: 12
Democratic Centre Party: 3
Parti Écologique: 2

Louisiana's now done.
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Codae said:
Yes, Indiana. How better to produce a crazy political system than by having multiple classes of parliamentary seats?
Click to expand...
My original post stated that Indiana had separate seats and seat maps for white Anglophones, white Francophones, Afro-Indianans, and natives (like the Maori seats in New Zealand). That would probably be a nightmare to map out, though, so if y'all want to declare it non-canon that's fine.
 
Iowa Political Parties and History
  • Index

    • Oryxslayer

    Iowa​

    Iowa’s history, politics, and even culture is forged from its geography. The state is not quite an industrial state like those to the west or north – dominated by an urban manufacturing hub. At the same time, the state is not a just 90% cows and corn, like those to the west. Missouri to the South differs the most: dual metropolitan cores, French/English Bilingualism, and a history of slavery. It is perhaps ironic that Missouri had the most impact on early Iowa.

    The territory that would become Iowa was originally part of Missouri, governed from Saint Louise on the opposite side of the Missouri. Wishing to constrain French influence to old Lower Louisiana, the early American government carved the state of Missouri from the rest of the western territory, incorporating the land to the south as a new province. The mass to the north became the western territories, occupied by Natives and frontiersmen.

    The westward land rush of the early to mid-19th century deeply benefited what would become Iowa. Southerners traveled up the Mississippi, found cities and constructing forts along her shores. Settlers from the Lakes region then moved into the Eastern chunk of the state, establishing farms and populating early cities. Joining them were the Germans and Scandinavians, who would eventually become omnipresent factor the Western Great Lakes provinces. Settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky meanwhile settled along the Missouri, already establishing a key divide in the early days of state politics.

    The divide gained a third player with the admission of Iowa as a province. With the government came the railroads that connected Iowa both to Chicago to the east and eventually Seattle to the west. With the railroads came settlers, entrepreneurs, and access to global markets. The national government was selling land alongside these railroads for cheap, and settlers were buying. In contrast to the mass of small-scale farms in the east, the western settlers owned large plots of land to produce crops for processing and export. The westerners looked further west for their political hubs to the growing cow towns of Omaha and Kansas City, rather than east to the Quad cities or south to Saint Louise. The trisection of the state was complete.

    But, the east still had the numbers. The railroads had not changed this fact; they had only redrawn its demographic alignment. Eastern cities were growing, and the railroads demanded coal. Eastern coalmines furthered the growth of an urban population and laid the groundwork for a powerful labor movement.

    Eastern numbers still meant that the province was a family-farm province, meaning that the state was vulnerable to grassroots politics. The Populists, and the subsequent Progressives grabbed hold of Iowa and made it their stronghold. Alongside them grew Labor, contained at the time to working class populations of the mines and cities. The west held firm to its rural conservative outlook, but it was a minor footnote to the battles of the west.

    1934 was a year of immense change in Iowa politics. The Progressives, long dominant over Iowa politics lost their majority. The state was devastated by London’s financial woes, the dust storms from the west, and mass railroad strikes. People wanted change. The Populists still were the largest party, but they needed a large degree of support. Eventually, negotiations reached a fateful conclusion. Labor and the Progressives would enter one of America’s first local Red-Green governments.

    Subsequent years would see this government become an entrenched and effective political coalition, winning election after election after election. The ties between agriculture and the working class blossomed into one of the nation’s largest welfare regimes and most cooperation-driven economic environments. The fundamentals of the coalition itself would change; Labor would eventually pass the Progressives to become the largest partner. This was in part because rural issues lacked the need they once deserved, in part because there were more urban voters, and in part because German regionalism was now an issue worthy of casting a ballot for. But, their opposition was divided, and couldn’t stand up to the rurals and urban workers aligned as one.

    The Red-Green government would hold all the way until the next big political crisis – the 1970s. Political fragmentation, the expectance of government action in previously ignored fields like the environment, and growing political uncertainty all contributed to the first government defeat in 1970. This defeat was a surprise for the ruling government, but the growing conservative suburbs in the south had progressively lowered the maximum Red-Green ceiling. The incoming government however lacked a consensus. Continual Red-Green rule had left the opposition to rot, with parties sprouting up and dying off every four years. There was not even a true conservative majority – several independents had to back the 6-party government.

    It is no surprise then that such a government collapsed in under a year. Right-Wing suburbanites were the largest party in this arrangement, and moved to end Iowa’s expansive welfare state. Cutting subsidies for job training programs successfully won each parties approval, but when they moved to public universities it all collapsed. The Iowa Deutchspartei, angry that such cuts would mean death for expansive German language programs, withdrew support and backed a return of Red-Green. While it seemed to many that is brief moment of right-wing government would be just a one-time blip in the eternal Labor-Progressive regime, it was really the beginning of a new political alliance.

    Now that it had the first taste of power, the Right wanted more. Centralization reforms and a few ambitious leaders got everyone on board – culminating in the creation of Iowa’s United Conservative Party. There was a problem though. There were two lessons learned from 1970. First was Unity, a lesson at the core of the United Conservatives. The second lesson though was ideology. The United Conservative leaders all had learned the lesson that Iowans generally wanted to keep their welfare – a message of reform rather than revision was what people wanted. A small minority of politicians though took a different path. Instead of moderating their message, these MPS wanted to double down on the cuts. They saw their path to victory running through the southern suburbs and the western rurals, rather than the UCP who aimed at fighting the Labor-Progressives on their own, eastern turf.

    What all this meant is that the first big UPC convention in Dubuque, 1975 was a total failure. What should have been the Rights first big symbol of unity in opposition to Red-Green became their first great moment of loss. The Far-Right MPs walked out in opposition to the Mainliner’s platform, forming their own party – the Reformed Conservative Party. Despite their lower numbers of MPS, the Reformed Conservatives successfully were able to split the Right with the UCP- Deutchspartei coalition, returning Red-Green to power.

    Faced with political alignment divided, nobody expected the right to return to power – at least until even more unity could be found. However, 1980 was that year. The UCP- Deutchspartei pact turned to Terry Branstad. His moderate platform in addition to a general backlash against Labor and the Progressives gave Iowa its first working conservative government in generations, despite the unlikely odds of victory. Subsequent elections returned the UCP alliance to government, with Branstad making electoral impossibilities reality.

    Branstad’s success forced the RCP to the table. The party understood that the UCP was in control, and they wanted in, before the entire idea of Right Wing welfare destruction was purged from Iowa forever. The resulting pact saw the Reformers and the United Conservatives make amends, agreeing to a complex intra-party selection system that would decide which of the three conservative parties would stand in a seat.

    The Branstad years couldn’t last forever and in 1993 he announced that he would resign his post in Iowa in favor of a potential cabinet position in Philadelphia. With this announcement, the Conservative bloc fell 10 points overnight, and the Labor-Progressive alliance would return to government in subsequent elections. After being thwarted in Philadelphia Branstad returned to Iowa to once again to become Iowa’s conservative father figure. He would maintain this position through ballot box defeats, triumphs, and party infighting.

    All things must end. In 2016, Branstad once again announced his retirement, but this time for good. Citing age, the father of Iowa’s unique brand of fiscal conservatism retired to an honorary position on Iowa’s state board of education.

    Once again, Iowa’s political alignment would reshape in an instant. This time it was the right who would see the most change. The Reformed Conservatives had long sidelined their rivalry with the United Conservatives, preferring instead to work alongside Branstad. With him gone, all this pent up partisan movement that should have occurred naturally over 25 years occurred at once. Nominating conventions, now dominated by grassroots conservatives, chose to put RCP candidates up for election. For the first time, the Reformers had a chance at a plurality of the Right, giving them control of government. Expectedly, the 2017 election featured a shift back to the left. What many predicted though did come to pass. The RCP, once the weakened junior party, now had control of the opposition.

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    Parties​

    Left

    Labor (34 Seats) – Urban wing of Iowa’s left. Born from working class plight, the Iowa Labor Party gradually grew to dominate most urban cores. Their message and base gradually shifted, as the urban left-wing voter became both more affluent and more educated. Labor gained control over the left in 1950s, and never looked back.

    Progressives (14 Seats) – The Rural wing of Iowa’s left. An old party, the progressives have seen their fortunes wax and wane over countless generations. It was the progressives’ choice after all to enter the Worker-Farmer government that birthed Iowa’s welfare state. Today, the disappearance of the family farm in favor of consolidated agricultural giants has weakened the Progressive base, but not entirely killed it off.

    Right

    United Conservative Party (UCP) (15 Seats) – Iowa’s merged conservative party from the 1970s. From 1978 to 2017, the UCP was the vehicle that Terry Branstad used to achieve or maintain power. The UCP is generally called the moderate wing, but it affiliates with the national Federalist part. Balanced budgets and fiscal reform were the platform that the UCP was elected on under Branstad’s leadership, and it has not changed since his retirement.

    Reformed Conservative Party (RCP) (17 Seats) – The Far-Right separatists form the UCP. While originally against the moderated vision of the UCP, the RCP joined the Conservative bloc to get a voice in the Branstad governments. It was RCP policy to not challenge Branstad’s leadership – his favorability and long-tern experience in government made him the only candidate who could truly lead the conservative block. With Branstad’s resignation, the grassroots movement that powered the modern RCP seized control of the nominating conventions, putting the RCP in control of the conservative block for the first time. The party aligns with the federal Reform Party and Heritage Party.

    Deutchspartei (8 Seats) – The Iowa Deutchspartei, despite their main emphasis being German Culture and preservation, is Christian Democratic Party economically, which has long aligned them with the Right. Iowa’s Deutchspartei however is not afraid to break this block agreement if the Right marches too far away from the center. With the triumph of the RCP, rumors have begun to spread of Deutchspartei abandonment of the Right, but so far, none have come to pass.

    Independents (1 seat) – The lack of true third party options in every race (they are all always one right vs one left) mean that independents and minor third parties do better than usual in Iowa. Currently, only one Independent is elected.

    48 Left Seats – 40 Right Seats - 1 Indie, Results: Left Majority, Roy Buol (Labor – Dubuque) Elected Speaker
     
  • Index

    • Codae

    Some rough numbers toward the ethnic constituencies of Indiana:

    In OTL 1830, the year of the Indian Removal Act, Alabama's population was 309527, including 117549 slaves, and Mississippi's population was 136621, including 65659 slaves. The sum for the two states was thus 446148 total, 183208 slaves.

    Wikipedia presents a table of the Five Civilized Tribes "before removal treaty", which enumerates
    20054 people affiliated with the Choctaw
    23600 with the Creek
    6070 with the Chickasaw
    23500 with the Cherokee
    5000 with the Seminoles
    which adds up to 78224. 4556 of these were black slaves, and 73668 free.

    Does a ratio of 372480:73668 whites:Indians make sense? That would be close to 5:1.
     
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