Ontario 2014 (June 12th)

[DL]

It seems close to certain that Ontario will go to the polls this Spring and if not this Spring then sometime in the next year.

The latest poll by EKOS points to a 3-way dead heat:

Ontario Liberals - 32% (down 6% from the 2011 election)
Ontario NDP - 29% (up 6% from '11)
Ontario PCs - 27% (down 8% from '11)
Greens - 8% (up 5%)
Other (whoever they are) - 3% (up 2%)

http://www.ekospolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/full_report_ontario_april_9_2014.pdf

Time to start discussing!

[DL]

Hatman: What's changed? My guess was she'd abstain, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Why wouldn't Horwath want an election? She has everything to gain and very little to lose - every single solitary poll over the last two years shows Ontario NDP support to be higher than in the 2011 election and that she is the most well-liked leader in Ontario. She has been winning byelections all over ontario in three cases leapfrogging from third to first place. Also, right now the Ontario Liberals are in trouble over the gas plant scandal etc...why give Kathleen Wynne a year to put more distance between herself and McGuinty.

There may be reasons i am not aware of why Horwath might not want an election now - but I cannot imagine what those reasons are - unless the NDP wants another year to raise more money.

[DL]

Interestingly, that last Forum poll which projected a Tory minority said most Tory gains would come from the NDP. Not that it'd be a first.

I'm not sure where you that. According that the Forum snapshot (and I am very dubious about Forum) the OLP is down seven points since the last election, the PCs are up three, the NDP is unchanged and the Greens are up four points.

[DL]

With what happened across Canada in the last years, except maybe Quebec just recently which was not so poorly polled (albeit underpolling CAQ a bit), we can expect the result in this to be diametrally opposed to polling...

You are confusing the accuracy of final polls with whether support for parties will change dramatically during a month long campaign....in Quebec the final polls were quite accurate but the final results and polls were also dramatically different from what we saw when the election was called when the PQ was leading.

[DL]

Nanos is out: 36/36/22. He also says there's some NDP/OLP tactical voting going on.

Let me get this straight - two straight polls have shown no change whatsoever in OLP support but PC support has gone up and NDP support has gone down - and Nanos thinks there is NDP/OLP "tactical voting" going on??? is the guys nuts? First of all "tactical voting" (ie: where you vote for the party you hate to stop the party you despise) doesn't happen before and election is even called - it happens in the final two or three days of a campaign. Secondly, given the pattern - its seems far more plausible that some NDP voters who really really hate the Liberals over the gas plants have shifted to the PCs recently because maybe they see the NDP as being "accomplices" to Wynne (how else do you explain NDP down and PCs up??). Of course the moment Horwath actually does pull the plug - she will ipso facto no longer be a "Wynne-enabler" and those votes could swing right back...Of course that requires nanos to do something that pundits never seem to be able to get their heads around - namely to acknowledge the existence of people who swing from NDP to PC and back by-passing the Liberals entirely - there are wayyyy more of those people than is commonly believed.

[DL]

First Forum poll: 38/33/22/6. Not that different from their last poll.

As usual their seat projection model is totally preposterous - there is no way whatsoever that the the Liberals could remain the largest party if they trail the PCs in the province wide popular vote by 5 points. I think they have a big their model that they refuse to acknowledge or fix because it is nonsensical...yet of course the Toronto Star (who's payroll ought to be classified as a Liberal party campaign expense) play up this kooky model because it fits in with their strategy.

[DL]

Four seats back is very different from four seats in front!...the thing is in Ontario elections there are parts of the province where things don't change much and other parts where things are more volatile. The PCs swept rural Ontario by such wide margins last time that they probably won't gain much ground there...at the same time there PCs are so non-existent in inner city areas they probably won't do much there either. I suspect that if there is a 4 point OLP to PC swing it will be accentuated in swing ridings in suburban 905 Toronto and more muted elsewhere

[DL]

I think I have figured out the secret to Forum's so-called seat projection model. They apply a uniform swing across the province to the 2011 election results - then they arbitrarily subtract 10 seats from the NDP and give them all to the Liberals for no other reason than that the principals at Forum are Liberal supporters and that is what they like to believe will happen. Its highly unprofessional and misleading - but if you are them - who cares?

Here is an excellent blog posting that shreds the ridiculous Forum seat projection model

http://tcnorris.blogspot.ca/2014/05/turning-poll-results-into-estimated.html

"Forum would have us believe that almost identical polls taken less than four months apart would produce two quite different outcomes for the Liberals and PCs even though their vote shares are identical. It simply isn't believable. A second and in my mind more serious issue is that even though the NDP in these polls has a vote share less than 1% different from its 2011 vote percentage in both cases, the seat projection suggests the NDP would lose 8 seats from its 2011 total. This would occur despite the fact that most of its competitive races are run against the Liberals, who are down significantly from their 36.5% vote share in 2011 in both Forum surveys. Again it isn't believable. Newspapers use Forum and that dominates secondary and social media coverage, but my recommendation would be to pay attention to the seat forecasts of 308 or LISPOP or any of the others before taking Forum seriously. For what it is worth my own seat projection using Forum's latest numbers is PC 49 seats, Liberal 36 seats, NDP 22 seats (a majority is 54 seats). Almost never would a party trailing by five points finish ahead of its rival in an election. It is true that the Liberal vote is more efficient as Forum says, but there limits to vote efficiency."

[DL]

How do you like this? Hudak's ad on job creation uses stock footage of people at work - in RUSSIA!

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2014/05/06/hudaks-ontario-job-creation-ad-uses-video-clips-outsourced-from-russian-federation/

[DL]

Hatman, i have to take issue with one thing in your projection. you say at the end

"Pumping the regional numbers from both polls into my new Ontario election model, I get a very narrow PC lead, with the Tories at 46 seats, the Liberals at 43 and the NDP at 18. This would result in a minority Progressive Conservative government in the 107 seat legislature."

Its correct to say this would result in  PC "plurality" in the 107 seat legislature...who would actually form a GOVERNMENT if that was the seat distribution is a whole other question....In fact, i suspect that if the PCs were only a couple of seats ahead of the Liberals there is a strong likelihood that the Liberals would form another minority government with a more explicit accord with the NDP.

Anyways, it just irritates me when people project that such and such a party is projected to form a "minority government". - we don't elect a government, we elect a legislature and which party forms a government is not always the party with the most seats. in 1985 Ontario elected 51 PCs, 49 Liberals and 25 NDPers - the results was a Liberal minority government.

[DL]

In 1985 Ontario elected 52 PCs, 48 Liberals and 25 NDPers - the result was a PC minority government that lasted approx. 8 weeks.

True, but keep in mind that in 1985 the PCs were the incumbent party therefore Frank Miller was premier until the Liberal/NDP accord pushed him out - but he never passed a throne speech or established confidence so there never really was a PC minority government - there was just an interregnum that in effect was a continuation of the pre-election PC majority government.

[DL]

Returning to the discussion on 1985, was the post-election PC government sworn in, or was it still in caretaker mode?

Premier Frank Miller's new Cabinet was sworn in on May 17, 1985.  David Peterson didn't take office until June 26.

But it was still a caretaker government whose "confidence" was based on the pre-election PC majority government. They never passed a Throne Speech so it was never a "real" government

[DL]

Today's roundup.

Star says Horwath's bumbling, compares her to Ford on populism and gravy train.

Boy the Toronto Star is really in "campaign mode" now - Regg Cohn in particular doesnt even make the slightest pretence to being fair - his columns literally read like they were ghost written by the Liberal war room. This is such a total hatchet job on Andrea Horwath - big deal if she didn't have a bus for the first two of the unofficial campaign. Ontario election writs are dropped on Wednesday's and I'm sure the NDP was caught slightly off-guard by Wynne announcing the election last Friday - 5 days before it could legally start - in the overall scheme of things - so what? Then he goes on to accuse Horwath of not saying how she would pay for her promises - well fair enough but his beloved Kathleen Wynne just brought in a budget with BILLIONS of dollars worth of expensive commitments and no way to pay for any of them other than jacking up the deficit - that doesn't seem to bother him at all.

[DL]

New poll by Ipsos:

PC 37% (unchanged)
Liberals 31% (down 1)
NDP 28% (up 1)

72% say its time for a change and Wynne is now running THIRD as best premier

[DL]

[
The NDP is at 28% in that poll, not 27%.

I'll believe it when other pollsters show the NDP there.

Wasn't the NDP at 29% with Ekos just a few weeks ago? And Oracle polled by phone and released a poll last nighht that had the NDP at 25% whcih is not that far from 28%

[DL]

Yes well what goes up can come down and what goes down can come up again!

[DL]

I always felt bad for Eves. He was stuck with Harris' mess and doomed since the day he was elected as PC leader.

Does that make Kathleen Wynne the Liberal version of Ernie Eves?

[DL]

New Grit anti-NDP attack ad: Horwath voted against the budget. I must admit seeing Grits run to Dippers' left is rather amusing.

Political ads cannot legally be broadcast until the last two weeks of the campaign - this is just an online ad that Liberals can tweet to each other - it won't be seen by any "real people" and they likely hope that there media will do a story about it and get "earned media". This is a common ploy - create an ad and try to make a big deal about it and hope no one remarks on the fact that it isnt actually running!

[DL]

This was tweeted by OFL President Sid Ryan

NDP poised to win Oshawa according to EKOS poll taken this past weekend. NDP 29 Libs. 23 PC. 20

[DL]

The NDP came close in Oshawa last time - so it wouldn't be that much of a shock to win it...btw the Tories have a longtime incumbent there - the NDP doesn't even pick a candidate until Monday!

[DL]

Sid Ryan is releasing our internal polls I see.

Internal polls for the OFL or does he have a mole at Ekos giving him scoops on what Ekos is doing for itself?

[DL]

No one pays Forum for any of their polls you see in the newspaper, they are just done as a publicity stunt.

[DL]

So to clarify - Ryan is leaking HIS internal polls - not Ekos's internal polls - i assume the OFL must have commissioned some polling and so the results are their property. Hopefully we will hear about other ridings...

FWIW, it seems very odd that the latest wave of province-wide polls show the PCs in the lead and running ahead of their 2011 province-wide vote share - and yet apparently in Oshawa - a seat they have held since 1995 - they are supposedly running third!

[DL]

I think i have figured out the formula for Forum's bizarre seat projections in Ontario. Take the the results of the 2011 election and then apply a uniform province-wide swing - then arbitrarily add 15 seats to the Liberal total and subtract about 7 from the PCs and 8 from the NDP and there you have it.

Today's Forum poll would indicate a popular vote split that is almost identical to the results of the 2011 election. Can someone tell me how the OLP could possibly go from 53 seats to 68 seats with no change at all in the popular vote from 2011? Thought so.

[DL]

When you see a province-wide IVR poll with regional breakouts - its almost guaranteed that those regions are based on area codes. This is because a province wide poll likely includes a chunk of cell phone numbers and the only way you can know where those people live is by area code. So I am 99% certain that when Forum refers to "northern Ontario" they actually mean area codes 807/705 - and 705 and actually comes as far south as Peterborough. Its also very likely that their definition of 905 is literally the 905 area code which includes all of Hamilton-Niagara.