Canadian by-elections, 2016 (next event: Quebec provincial byelections [Dec 5])

[DL]

I think you guys are all wrong about this riding. First of all, while it went Liberal by a wide margin in the last election the Soo does have a lot of NDP history and was NDP federally up to 2011 and it has been NDP provincially off and on since the 1970s. You cannot compare it in any way to Ottawa-Vanier which is a riding with no NDP history of any kind. In the last Ontario election the NDP ran Celia Ross the president of Algoma College who apparently was regarded as having been a top notch candidate her results notwithstanding and there are NDP leaning city councillors in the Soo as well.

The Ontario Liberals are astonishingly unpopular these days with Wynne at an abysmal 16% favourability and while she may have some vestigial support in downtown Toronto and downtown Ottawa - northern Ontario is the epicentre of where she is now dead meat - especially since skyrocketing hydro bills his northern Ontario very hard.

I also don't think the NDP needs or even wants a strong PC campaign to win here. These northern Ontario blue collar ridings are the kind of place where there actually is a big blue-orange swing vote and there will likely be a large "strategic vote" in this byelection as people try to figure out which opposition party is most likely to beat the Liberals. I expect this byelection to be referendum on Kathleen Wynne and if the PCs run a strong campaign it will split the anti-government protest vote. The best thing for the NDP is for the PCs to be seen as a non-factor and for people to see the NDP as the best protest vote to cast

Provincial Sault Ste. Marie: David Oriazetti is quitting politics. First Red-Orange battle in a while.

If it is a straight "red-orange" battle, than the Liberals will win. The NDP only can win the Sault if the Tories do well.  The Tories may very well do well in the Sault though (don't forget it went Tory federally from 2011-2015).

Much of the "red" here was only "red" for Oriazetti and not for Wynne or the party.  That along with the unpopular hydro fiasco and a higher Ontario PC will certainly help the ONDP pick this up. 

Could we even see an orange-blue race?

Problem is the provincial NDP has been rather incompetent lately. I can't imagine they will be able to find a very good candidate. I mean, all they could find for Ottawa-Vanier was the brother of an MPP no one in the city has heard of from far away riding.

[Hatman 🍁]

The NDP has a bit of a hard ceiling in the riding: about 40%, I'd say. And they've only beaten that with Tony Martin as a candidate. In the 1990 orange wave, the seat was open, and he only won 36% of the vote. He actually gained support in 1995 (only NDP positive swing that election?) In the 2011 federal orange wave, he only won 37% of the vote, of course long guns had a lot to do with it.

So, even if Tony Martin is the candidate, there needs to be some dissension in the anti-NDP vote. When there are large swings in the north, it is usually anti-NDP voters swinging between the Liberals and Tories (just look at the 2008 federal election or 2003 provincial election). The NDP vote in the Sault is usually fairly stable (25-35%).

[Hatman 🍁]

Let's look at some numbers:

Since the late 1960s, the lowest the NDP has ever got in Sault Ste. Marie was actually in last year's federal election (22%). This was even lower than in 1993 when the NDP won just 6% province-wide (this was because the NDP candidate was the incumbent). The highest vote total was in the 1987 provincial election (49%). 22% is a remarkably high floor for the NDP, but 49% is a pretty low ceiling. The most they've got without an incumbent is in 1985 (45%).

The NDP is clearly not as popular in the Sault as they once were. In 2003, despite a 2 point gain in the province wide result, Tony Martin lost 11 points and the seat itself to the then political neophyte Orazietti. It didn't help matters that the Tory vote collapsed from 28% to 8%. Where do you think most of that vote went?

Since then, the NDP vote total has continually dropped compared to their province-wide numbers both federally and provincially. In 2003, Martin's 32% was 17 points more than the province wide mark of 15%. In 2007 it was only 9 points more (OK, no Martin on the ballot). In 2011 it was just 8 points more and in 2014 just one point more. Federally Martin was able to consistently poll about 20% more than the NDP's province wide margin when he won the seat in 2004, 2006 and 2008. However his loss in 2011 was just 11 points more than their province-wide margin, and their all time (well, since the late 60s) low of 22% in 2015 was just 5 points above the 17% they won across the province.

And this drop has occurred regardless of how well the Liberals have done. Again, in 2011 the Liberals won just 19% of the vote.

And yes, the NDP has benefited from vote splitting. In provincial elections, they have not won the seat with the next two parties below 20% since that big win in 1987. This did happen federally in 2008, but it was very close between Martin and the Conservative candidate, and the Liberals still won 17% (a 17 point drop from 2006 by the way, while Conservatives gained 14 points). Martin's 2004 and 2006 wins were definitely helped by a split in the anti-NDP vote.

All this to say is that with a generic candidate, the NDP will at best poll a few points ahead of their province-wide polling, based on recent trends. That is not even enough to win with a split vote.

What's Tony Martin up to these days?

[Hatman 🍁]

And what about the Liberals? They have an even lower floor, somewhere in the teens. In federal elections, their lowest % was 17% in 2008 and provincially it was 11% in 1977. In 2008, the NDP won, so the NDP can benefit from a depressed Liberal turnout (harder to do with a depressed Tory turnout though). So, there is some Liberal-NDP vote shifting in the riding. Just not as much as potential Tory/Liberal shifting.

The Tories have an abysmal floor in the riding, maybe 7%?. In recent elections whenever it's been in single digits, the Liberals have won huge margins, again indicating a large Tory/Liberal swing constituency.

So, an NDP-PC race is more promising for the NDP than an NDP-Liberal race. There may be enough soft Liberals who will vote NDP in the former scenario, but many more soft Tories who will vote Liberal the latter.

[toaster]

And to be fair, NDP support in the Soo is more of a mix of progressive and labour "left", as opposed to the almost uniformly labour/blue collar NDP left in Timmins and/or Sudbury, which is why a lot of that orange vote was able to bleed to Oriazetti and the Wynne Liberals.

[Hatman 🍁]

Perhaps, but the Sault also has a strong populist streak. In 1990, the CoR Party had their strongest showing in the entire province in the Soo (20%), which was part of the reason why the NDP didn't do as well as you'd think given their result across the rest of the province.

[DL]

I think the days of Ontario Liberal and PC voter feeling they had to "vote strategically" to stop the "socialist hordes at the gate" in the NDP are long gone. I'm sure the PCs will make a serious effort here since Brown has made a lot of noise about want to make a breakthrough in northern Ontario and the federal Tories did win the Soo in 2011. I'd be surprised if ther PCs got less than 20% here. But, I predict that in the context of a byelection with an Ontario Liberal government that is about as popular as Ebola virus - especially in northern Ontario - the "ballot question" in the byelection for about 80% of voters is going to be "who can beat the Liberals?" and a lot of the "swing vote" will be people who are no fixed affiliation and just want to send a message to Kathleen Wynne. If a poll is published days before the byelection showing the NDP leading and the PCs out of contention - the PC vote will collapse and go NDP - and vice versa if the polls say the PCs are best positioned to beat the Liberals.

[Hatman 🍁]

I think the days of Ontario Liberal and PC voter feeling they had to "vote strategically" to stop the "socialist hordes at the gate" in the NDP are long gone.

Except this large swing I described happened as recently as 2008 (~15%), and was intensified in 2011. So, I think it's still around!

And again, the NDP share of the vote relative to the provincial average has declined both federally and provincially for over a decade.

There's no evidence in this riding's history to show that would-be Liberal voters are more likely to prefer the NDP than Tories. Whenever the Liberals do poorly in the riding, most of the swing has gone to the Tories.

[adma]

There's no evidence in this riding's history to show that would-be Liberal voters are more likely to prefer the NDP than Tories. Whenever the Liberals do poorly in the riding, most of the swing has gone to the Tories.

Actually, I see Orazietti's massive personal mandates as more of a "grand coalition" thing than a "stop the socialist hordes" thing.  (And to a certain degree, ditto with Terry Sheehan federally--though with more of a sunny-ways "Trudeau coalition" assist.  After all, the Cons lost less share than the Dippers there.)

And re 1990: for whatever reason (mostly related to then-Soo mayor Joe Fratesi), the Soo around that time became ground zero for Ontario's "language wars"--that's what gave Confederation of Regions its populist boost.  Plus, it was an open-seat free-for-all, as ONDP incumbent Karl Morin-Strom declined to run again; so in a way, newbie Tony Martin barely prevailed within a smouldering electoral ash heap...

[DL]

The level of antipathy towards the Ontario has gotten so extreme lately that polls show that PC voters have the NDP as their second choice by a 2-1 margin over the Liberals and even Ontario NDP voters are starting to increasingly have the PCs as their second choice. We are going into uncharted territory now that Wynne is getting to be as unpopular as Brian mulroney circa 1992

[adma]

I  spoke with Lotuslander today.  He tells me that the NDP will get -10% of the vote in Sault Ste. Marie!  He was surprised the NDP is even more unpopular in Ontario than in B.C.

Well, technically, when has the ONDP *not* been more unpopular in Ontario?  They don't have the same, consistent "serious contender for power" record (Rae notwithstanding--indeed, the Rae interlude might have even *further* entrenched the "non-serious contender" factor).

But at the same time, putting the shoe on the other foot, I feel LL's drawing his judgment too much from message-boarding partisans on "the other side".  After all, for all her stumbles, Horwath's remained surprisingly stable in overall (i.e. not just 416 partisan-chattering-class) leadership approval or projected vote share--it's not like she's skidded to single digits or anything, even if she's arguably had to sell her party's soul to get to where she is.  Traitorous Horwath might be, but we're not exactly looking at an Audrey McLaughlin to Wynne's Kim Campbell here.

Though it's funny how Lotuslander's non-sequitur "-10% of the vote" judgment and superficial readings of forum posts (which, as *he* should know, are skewed by partisan bias;-) ) contradicts his call for "analytically intelligent" electoral discourse.  He calls for us to not make asses of ourselves while making an ass of himself.  (If anything, he reminds me of a weasel who used to post on Milton Chan's EPP under "I'm Always Right" and other such pseudonyms, ham-fistedly predicting that the Cons would win Niagara West-Glanbrook by Alberta-level landslides and the Liberals would be totally sub-deposit-level humiliated...not from the POV of an overeager CPC partisan, but rather from a likely dirty-trick Grit operator who got shafted in the nomination race.  And he had a Trump-ian way of digging in and doubling down whenever he was "called out".)

[RogueBeaver]

Calgary Heritage: Lee Richardson is considering running as a Grit. Njall, how would you rate his chances?

[Njall]

Calgary Heritage: Lee Richardson is considering running as a Grit. Njall, how would you rate his chances?

Good question. I imagine that he'd be just about the most well-positioned candidate the liberals could hope for here (although his ties to former Premier Redford could be troublesome). The Conservative candidate here, Bob Benzen, was (from what I've been told) the most conservative of the CPC nomination candidates, so that could push a few more moderate voters towards Richardson. That all said, while I certainly imagine he'll narrow the LPC-CPC margin here, I'd refrain from suggesting that he'd have a real shot at winning.

[Hatman 🍁]

haha! The only "Liberal" that would have a chance in Calgary Heritage is Nenshi. And that aint happening.

[adma]

Going over the 2015 polls,  I *do* find it interesting that Harper didn't sweep the Calgary-Heritage polls; a trio near the Chinook Centre far NE actually went Liberal (as did--less surprisingly in Western Canada context--the Special Voting Rules Group 1 poll).

Likewise next door in Midnapore, Jason Kenney fell short of a sweep (2 Lib polls, again close to Chinook Centre).

That said, I still feel that under the present circumstance, there's a Liberal ceiling (maybe a third of the vote?  possibly higher?)--and if they do gain ground (Lee Richardson aside), it'll most likely be by tokenly squeezing out whatever energy remains in the NDP/Green camps...

[adma]

It only dawned on me now that the most recent Ontario byelections reused the 2014 polling subdivisions, rather than adopting Whitby-Oshawa's "superpoll" system--was this just a momentary-convenience move, or was Elections Ontario heeding my kind of criticism that superpolls were insufficiently granular?  Crossing fingers...