"orthogonal: Of two or more problems or subjects, independent of [..] each other."
..I guess you're right. I understood orthogonal a bit too mathematically, and since the 'dot product' of both concepts with election results is non-zero... and concepts cannot have negative dot-products (???)... well, that's where I realized I was holding the analogy wrong.
I'm struggling to see how that makes them not orthogonal. Isn't that pretty much the definition?