Nationhood Lab’s director unpacked the implications of the project’s recent analysis of the 2025 Canadian federal election for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, showing why Trumpist-style politics are a tough sell there.
In a recent essay for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Inside Policy, Nationhood Lab’s director shared the project’s recent work on the regional geography of Canada’s 2025 federal election and how it compares to that of the U.S. 2024 presidential contest.
The piece, “The 2025 election and North America’s regional cultures,” argues that Trumpist-style political movements are a non-starter in Canada because the settler-colonizer cultures on which Trump built his movement are not present north of the border.
“While Canada lacks a conservative ‘Dixie bloc’ – and, therefore, a legacy of slavery and apartheid – it has three large, strongly communitarian regions that leave little or no footprint within the United States, pulling its center of gravity well to the left of ours,” Woodard wrote. “The bottom line is that Trumpism is a non-starter on the Canadian federal stage.”
One of Canada’s leading think tanks, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute is non-partisan, but market- and libertarian-oriented. Woodard was invited to write the essay, published July 9, to share Nationhood Lab’s analysis of the 2025 election with a Canadian audience. Nationhood Lab has also released detailed new maps of how the regional cultures described in the American Nations model map in Canada.
Nationhood Lab, a project of Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, focuses on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. One pillar of that project is the analysis of regional influences on various phenomena in American life, from politics and public health to immigration and public opinion.