Electoral Extremes

I have been listening to "John to Justin", which is a podcast from some (as far as I know) lone ranger in Alberta named Craig Baird, in which he spends about an hour on each PM up to JT. Craig Baird has several Canadian history oriented podcasts. I am also casually listening to his "Canadian History Ehx". I really like his style, and I like that he seems to be following a passion for, I suspect, little hope of much fame or riches.

Anyway, listening to the PM stories, I had the idea that there have been a lot of extreme Canadian election results eg. where one party or the other got crushed; more than in USA.

This would not obviously make sense, since in the USA system, with the exception of ME and NB, all the electoral collage votes goes to a single candidate. So the candidate who wins in CA gets all 54 of their EC votes, even if they only got 50.1% of the vote. Aside: this seems significantly more egregiously more wrong than the failures of the Canadian FPTP system, and I've never heard it questioned. Also, the USA is in general way more nuts and insane than we are, so surely their elections should be too?

Anyway, it turns out, it indeed would not make sense because it's not true. I quickly calculated the standard deviation of USA election result margins, and by my method, it's 25, vs. only 14 in Canada. Also, USA had 16 elections where the Democrats got 60% or more of EC votes; Canada had 9 where the Liberals did the same. Canada has about half as long a history as a republic and has had about half as many elections, so, they seem roughly the same on this crude measure.

Another crude way of looking at it:

Worst Liberal result: 2011, Ignatieff, 11%

Best Liberal result: 1940, WLMK: 73%

Worst Democrat result: 1984, Mondale, 2%

Best Democrat result: 1936, FDR, 98%

Whether having consistently big swings is good or bad is, I suppose, debatable, but it seems less ideal. On the other hand, never having a different party win despite a credible electoral system, eg. Singapore, sounds a lot worse!

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