Was the last German Election already decided in 1650?
Well, certainly not – or better not completely. It was the post at strangemaps which inspired me to check for something which I somehow always suspected, but never went after.
With the end of the 30 years war in 1648 and the reinstitution of the Augsburg religious peace of 1555 the german map was set between protestants and catholics – depending on what the dukes, counts and earls defined.
So here is the Wikipedia map, showing the distribution of protestants and catholics in Germany in 1893 – green indicates a majority of catholics, beige a majority of protestants:
and here is the map of the last Germany election, with all election districts highlighted where the conservative party (CDU/CSU) has a margin of at least 1% over the socialistic party (SPD, lets forget about things like pseudo environmentalists or left-wing extremists for now)
Overlaying the two maps gives a quite convincing result; although we could have fine-tuned the election maps a bit to get a more precise overlap …
(don’t be fooled by the missmatch at the uncovered area in the south west; those guys elect the french president and not the german chancellor.) 
