A few weeks ago I posted about the unfounded meme/urban legend to the effect that Calgary had (1) the largest proportion of Americans of any city outside the US, and (2) 80,000 Americans, specifically, residing here. Today I got this gem in my comments:
Interesting insight, good article… but where are YOU getting your numbers? And what’s with the chip on your shoulder…why are you so sure Tiajuana has more permanent residents? It may be true that Calgary is a diverse city, but to say Calgary is one of the least Republican cities in Canada is to have blinders on…compared to the rest of the country, Calgary is universally considered “most American, more capitalist, more conservative”, and if you have seen Alberta’s election results you should know that.
Okay, this isn’t a research paper but I’ll just say I didn’t pull these numbers out of my proverbial ass and I didn’t reference anything that’s not public domain. But at the end of the post I said, “I GUARANTEE that when a poll on the hypothetical ‘votes’ of Canadians is done, Albertans and Calgarians will demonstrate that, as conservative as Alberta might seem by Canadian standards, this is not REMOTELY a ‘red state.’ I guarantee this.”
And, of course and as always on matters like these, I was right. A survey (NOT a phone-in poll or any other stupid non-scientific, non-probability instrument) conducted by Metro News found, on US election eve, that fully 79% of Calgarians would, given the choice, vote Obama. That jibes with returns from, for example, San Francisco County (California, of course) which saw 80% of voters choose Obama. How’s that for “Republican”?
But, you aver, if Calgary saw levels of support that high, then the rest of Canada must have been even higher. Actually, no. According to a nationwide Decima poll from September, overall Canadian support was 66%. Now, the Decima poll gave voice to the undecided, so we might surmise that the rates reported in the two surveys are not comparable, which is fair. But the prediction I made was completely accurate, and supports completely my argument: Calgary is not “conservative,” at least not in an American sense. And it’s sadly this “American” sense that too many Canadians, and Calgarians, presume it to have.
I predicted something else that would happen that I’m very sad to have been right about. In my May 15 post, I said, ” California just kinda-sorta legalized same sex marriage (until a referendum nixes that- don’t start partying now, kids.” And we all know what happened when the loving, liberal, tolerant people of California went to the polls. Here’s a fun fact: African-American support for Obama was a shocking (well, not all that shocking) 95%, and 70% of Californian African-American votes- that’s about 5% of the voter pool- voted AGAINST same-sex marriage. Measure won by 400,000 votes, about 4%. So if these voters had voted in what could be argued a consistent manner- for Obama, for SSM- the measure would have lost, and lost healthily. Does this mean that the “fault” of this “win” was that of African Americans? Well, of course, with plenty of qualification: The measure was the subject of a horrifically misleading campaign by its detractors. The measure was buried under too many others on the ballot. People might not have understood what “yes’ and “no” meant. But regardless, I have to express my disgust at anybody who voted in line with identity politics on one hand (and most of the people who said that race was “important,” per exit polling, voted FOR Obama, not against him), especially where those politics embrace notions of liberation and all the good things associated with having a black-ish US President, and who on the other hand actually believe that it’s good and right for them to deny somebody like me the right to marry somebody like my Brian.
Mind-boggling. Meanwhile back here in “conservative” Calgary, a MAJORITY of voters surveyed after Harper came on board said that they DIDN’T want the same-sex marriage debate re-opened. And my Conservative (big-C) MP, Lee Richardson (somebody I have huge issues with in some areas but not, obviously, on this one) voted in line with those wishes. Imagine any Republican voting that way. Hell, imagine the majority of Dems voting that way. Ain’t gonna happen, because, for Christ’s sake, this is CANADA. Calgary is still part of CANADA.
So there you go. Obama wins, and that’s great, amazing. The rest- just getting it off my chest.
