August 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election

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5) Only 38% think the party is too socially conservative and only 24% think the party represents "the past". Interestingly enough, possible conservatives are less reticent about Tory soconism than actual Tory voters.

Wonder how much of the non-reticent is "swing ethnoburbans", i.e. the Ford Nationals who returned to Justin federally...

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After all my talk about the West-centric Tory party, it looks like there might not even be an MP from the Western caucus in the race

Or even former MPs, if we count Rona Ambrose.

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Its interesting that in the last CPC leadership contest there were several social conservatives in the mix such as Scheer, Trost and Lemieux (at the time Bernier was supposedly more of a libertarian but he has since revealed himself to be a social conservative too). So far in this year's contest its not clear if there will be ANYONE who is an unabashed SoCon even running.

There might be but some unknown name.  I think after loss, its pretty social conservatism is a vote loser and most people committed to the party want to win not just be leader to promote a certain agenda, they also want to implement it too.

Nevertheless, it'd be strange if there weren't a Trost/Lemieux standard-bearer (Scheer was more of a soft-pedal case, since he was actually running to win, rather than to simply advance an agenda).  At least it makes sense as a Conservative equivalent to socialist-caucus NDPers like Niki Ashton...

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I have a hunch Scheer is one of those guys who will remain an MP until he either does or is defeated. His whole life is politics and nothing else. He has no profession (not even as an insurance adjuster) so there is nothing for him to do other than to be an MP

Or collect a parlliamentary pension, or be appointed to various boards, etc.  The usual kind of "post-political-career" drop-in-the-bucket stuff...

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Just bang on about immigration in an economic manner, racialise islamic fear and win the election its easy.

That worked so well for them in 2015.

Harper was unpopular by 2015.

Running on a far right platform is a terrible way to win a majority. Maybe 30-35% of the country thinks that way, but that won't win them anything. They need suburbanites (and the minorities that live in them) to win. We are not Australia. We have lots of racists sure, but not enough of them for the Conservative to appease to them.

The liberal party here got swings to the liberal party in lower-middle class/working class suburban areas and especially amongst minority voting groups, alongside massive swings amongst your small-town working class people, especially those that worked in mining industry.. 

I'm not saying run on a far-right platform, but a right-populist message that talks about about reducing immigration, stoping refugees and "excessive" climate action, that message could win.

Analogous to Ford Nation in Ontario, in fact (and to a certain extent, the federal Jason Kenney ethnoburban-outreach approach)

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Just bang on about immigration in an economic manner, racialise islamic fear and win the election its easy.

That worked so well for them in 2015.

Harper was unpopular by 2015.

Running on a far right platform is a terrible way to win a majority. Maybe 30-35% of the country thinks that way, but that won't win them anything. They need suburbanites (and the minorities that live in them) to win. We are not Australia. We have lots of racists sure, but not enough of them for the Conservative to appease to them.

The liberal party here got swings to the liberal party in lower-middle class/working class suburban areas and especially amongst minority voting groups, alongside massive swings amongst your small-town working class people, especially those that worked in mining industry.. 

I'm not saying run on a far-right platform, but a right-populist message that talks about about reducing immigration, stoping refugees and "excessive" climate action, that message could win.

Analogous to Ford Nation in Ontario, in fact (and to a certain extent, the federal Jason Kenney ethnoburban-outreach approach)

Ford won due to "special circumstances". Anyone would've won that election. The only thing that could've stopped him would've been a competent NDP campaign.

All the same, it was a measure of *where* he won, or where the PCs gained (or lost) most ground relative to previous elections...

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https://twitter.com/candicebergenmp/status/1222692571203493891

How much of her profile in Canadian politics is related to people immediately recognizing her name because she shares it with a '90s sitcom star?

Well, her namesake was the daughter of Edgar Bergen, and the previous Conservative leader was sometimes compared to Charlie McCarthy; so, there you go. ;-)

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Higest percent of membership growth:
Surrey—Newton (BC), then three from Ontario, Brampton East, Humber River–Black Creek, Scarborough North, then three from Quebec, Laval–Les Îles, Papineau, Saint-Léonard–Saint-Michel,  Labrador (NL), Avalon, (NL), Cumberland–Colchester (NS).

Lots of minority ridings or ridings with low Conservative numbers to begin with (except Cumberland-Colchester, weird).

Good news for Lewis?

Relative to the last leadership race, the Ontario trio probably got a bump from the intervening "Ford Nation" provincial effect.

And Scarborough North is next door to where Lewis ran in 2015, though I'm not sure whether the demos are "her sort" except maybe at the Malvern end.  (But on the whole, I don't think there's *too* much pressure on her to run somewhere--despite the novelty of her race and gender, she hasn't exactly been a hey-look barnburner, even as a kingmaker.  Or relative to the NDP, she's more of a Martin Singh than a Jagmeet Singh.)

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for those who say Erin can't beat trudeau, i can respect and understand that point of view. However to say this is a bad result for the tories is wrong. Peter mckay is the jeb bush of Canada. He has always been an electoral loser outside of his home riding.

Erin is an airforce veteran, a lawyer, ran a foundation to help our troops and is a proven winner in the all important GTA! This is a great man and I am proud to support Erin. Congrats to Erin on winning. Peter mckay winning would cause defections to PPC and ensure a loss. I'm glad that the party is back. Erin has a monumental task against him from the state run media, and the same forces against trump. Lets go Erin!

His seat is "barely" GTA and very white and small-town Ontario culturally.

His performances in the seat have not been particularly impressive at any election he's stood in, either.

Considering what and where he represents and when he's represented it, O'Toole hasn't been *that* bad at assembling a coalition of voters--except in 2011-type circumstances, the outer GTA isn't exactly a place where one expects Prairie-scale solid-majority Conservative landslides.

But yes, Durham is more of a "rurban" riding, even if more urban with each redistribution--sort of an east-GTA version of Carleton relative to Ottawa or Flamborough-Glanbrook relative to Hamilton.  (Which'd make two consecutive rurban leaders for CPC, in fact)

One thing that's helped O'Toole get relatively cozy margins by urbanish Ontario standards is a weak local Liberal infrastructure--perhaps a carryover from Oshawa's Lib-NDP split--but growth (particularly in N Oshawa, judging from 2019 results) definitely favours the Libs, and I can picture a post-O'Toole Durham flipping much like Whitby did post-Flaherty, particularly if places like Port Perry/Scugog get distributed away

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Another weird thing to consider: O'Toole is a year and a month *younger* than Justin, though he looks much older.  (And one can definitely see the Cons spinning that to their anti-Justin/anti-Peter Pan advantage)

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Results by riding are up:

https://www.conservative.ca/leadership/

Scroll to the bottom and click "see the full report" (pdf warning)

It's interesting how some well-meaning but ill-informed progressives projected "hope" on Leslyn Lewis due to the face value of her race, educational background and articulation--yet her strongest nodes tended to have a Bible Belt tinge like Niagara West, or much of rural Western Canada.  (And the sheer numbers of so-disposed card-carrying voters might explain why she was first on the second ballot in terms of votes-not-points--it's a little like Scheer's being ahead of Trudeau in 2019 votes thanks to his plumped gigamajorities in the West.)

Another observation: MacKay seems to have done particularly well in ridings with a significant South Asian base (in Brampton and Surrey most notably, and also discernable in places like NE Calgary)

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The ethnic vote is always interesting in Conservative leadership elections, considering unlike most right wing parties in the world, they actually do well with minorities. Interesting to see that Chinese Canadians didn't go strongly one way or the other; it seems it went for O'Toole with the same margins as White Canadians.

But again: it's more distinct with Indo-Canadians--notice the deep shades of MacKay red in Brampton and in Surrey.

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There's also the "where would Leslyn Lewis run?" question--and for all the hoopla over her, there's no guarantee that *she'd* have sufficient Liberal-giant-killing star power, either.  (Though in a weird way, I have this notion of her running in Etobicoke North on Doug Ford's coattails.  I'm not saying it'd be a *winning* sort of big; more a reflection of where the Conservative mindset is at)

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There's also the "where would Leslyn Lewis run?" question--and for all the hoopla over her, there's no guarantee that *she'd* have sufficient Liberal-giant-killing star power, either.  (Though in a weird way, I have this notion of her running in Etobicoke North on Doug Ford's coattails.  I'm not saying it'd be a *winning* sort of big; more a reflection of where the Conservative mindset is at)

Presumably, O'Toole would just parachute her into a safe riding. Which one, who knows?

Though it's hard to think of the kind of "safe riding" where she'd be a good fit.  (Oshawa?)

For better or worse, we're at a point where Conservative leadership stars might not actually have that much star-quality half-life beyond the closed loop of Conservative politics.  Or if she has a "bright future", it's more a reflection of the kind of party it is, than of the kind of bright-future figurehead she might be...

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Why did Sloan overperform?

SoCons gonna SoCon.

Perhaps SoCons who were too racist to vote for Lewis; or, the "PPC Lite" types of voters (how much Bernier '17/Sloan '20 crossover might there have been?).

But I'm wondering whether Sloan winning Thunder Bay-Rainy River has anything to do with that being home turf for controversial Senator Lynn Beyak (would she have been in a position to influence voting?)

There's also the "where would Leslyn Lewis run?" question--and for all the hoopla over her, there's no guarantee that *she'd* have sufficient Liberal-giant-killing star power, either.  (Though in a weird way, I have this notion of her running in Etobicoke North on Doug Ford's coattails.  I'm not saying it'd be a *winning* sort of big; more a reflection of where the Conservative mindset is at)

Presumably, O'Toole would just parachute her into a safe riding. Which one, who knows?

Though it's hard to think of the kind of "safe riding" where she'd be a good fit.  (Oshawa?)

For better or worse, we're at a point where Conservative leadership stars might not actually have that much star-quality half-life beyond the closed loop of Conservative politics.  Or if she has a "bright future", it's more a reflection of the kind of party it is, than of the kind of bright-future figurehead she might be...

Tbf, she doesn't have to be a good fit for such a given riding's voters nevertheless casting their votes for the CPC. A safe riding is "safe" for a reason.

Even so, Canada's a much more awkward place for parachuted outsiders than, say, the UK.

Somehow, I can't sense the "get Leslyn Lewis in ASAP" urgency here--or if anything, I can see her making the leap to *provincial* politics, where there's many more compatible presently-held Conservative GTA seats and she'd likely be a cinch for a Ford cabinet...

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Can’t say that I expected my new home riding (Kitchener-Conestoga) to have a higher % religious right than my old riding (Oxford) at all.

Perhaps in the case of K-C, those who fall within the statistical-category proxy are more "ancestral" than ideological and likelier to be affected by the moderating influence of suburban K-W?  (Plus, some of the deeper Mennonite sects are notorious for low turnout.)


Anyway, I added up the vote totals for those Ontario seats alone

Round 1: Lewis 2213, MacKay 1308, O'Toole 1392, Sloan 1487
Round 2: Lewis 3273, MacKay 1357, O'Toole 1625
Round 3: MacKay 1695, O'Toole 3386

And the *total* votes for those seven seats is just a touch above half of those for the 25 Toronto seats.

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And also, I'm wondering if there's a "Rob Ford in reverse" argument on behalf of Leslyn Lewis--that is, just as Rob Ford (and Doug by extension) had a nonwhite/ethnoburban core following that belied his white-trash facade, Leslyn Lewis had a white-evangelical core following that belied her ethno-diverse facade.  (And which led a *lot* of armchair observers to misconstrue where their respective true strengths--or weaknesses, for that matter--would lie)

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Can’t say that I expected my new home riding (Kitchener-Conestoga) to have a higher % religious right than my old riding (Oxford) at all.

Perhaps in the case of K-C, those who fall within the statistical-category proxy are more "ancestral" than ideological and likelier to be affected by the moderating influence of suburban K-W?  (Plus, some of the deeper Mennonite sects are notorious for low turnout.)

I'd also throw out there that the census "Other Christian" category is very messy. Per my review of the detailed breakdown of what groups and their #'s, "Other Christian is mostly Evangelical sects but it also includes non-Evangelical groups like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, a few mainline Protestantish groups and generic "Christian" people.

It's still a perfectly fine rough metric (it's not like I expect Kensington to manually tally 20+ Evangelical groups by riding ), but the noise in the metric may account for some of the oddities like K-C.

Which is why I referred to it in terms of "statistical-category proxy".  And you'd probably find such overrepresentation wherever there's a heavy demographic contingent of those of "Germano-Netherlandish Protestant" background--and cultural urban/suburbanization has rendered the Waterloo Region version thereof more ideologically flexible: (politically) Promiscuous Oktoberfesters, so to speak.

Re social conservatives and polling: I wonder how much of the issue these days is that active, leadership-voting Conservative membership is being "sorted" in that direction more rapidly and thoroughly than pollsters have been accounting for.  (Similar "sorting" underlies registered Republicanism in the States, which is why Trump approval among that cohort remained cultishly high even at the worst of times--those who didn't approve, withdrew their registration.)

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What do Rainy River, Kitchener Centre and Bourassa have in common? Beats me!

Kitchener Centre was the seat of Stephen Woodworth, whose single issue was abortion, may have had effects in the composition of the riding association (and may explain how a 2008 Harper seat is now a Liberal-Green fight).

Ironically, Woodworth was an ex-Liberal (he ran in Waterloo in 1988).  And it's also worth pointing out that provincially, Laura Mae Lindo won Kitchener Centre for the NDP by a landslide in 2018--so whichever way you slice it, it'd seem as if KC's terminally strayed from its onetime Con-compatible bellwether status.  (As far as the Greens go, though, 2019's race really had to do more with Mike Morrice's star power, so it's far from certain that it portends a Guelph-style "Green shift", as opposed to a Morrice-Lindo progressive-crossover dynamic)

And I mentioned how riding-association-composition *might* explain Rainy River as well, if Senator Lynn Beyak had anything to do with it.

Speaking of Derek Sloan, I earlier dropped the notion of Oshawa as a potential "Leslyn Lewis parachute riding"--it dawned on me that Oshawa also happens to be the headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist Church of Canada, and the home of the SDA-affiliated Kingsway College which Sloan once attended.  So, who knows...

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Note that when I mentioned Etobicoke North earlier, it was with a bit of "knowing them" sarcasm directed at the Cons, rather than as a realistic target.

I realize Peter Kent isn't Jewish, but I reckon the Tories would rather find a Jewish candidate to replace him there.

True, a Jewish candidate gives you an instant advantage in the Yonge-Bathurst corridor. But it's a strong enough CPC riding that Lewis could still keep it. Certainly more likely to win there than elsewhere in York Region.

The problem for a black/Caribbean tory like Lewis is that there's no real right-leaning riding with a significant Caribbean population. I'm sure she could get a demographic bump in the likes of Scarb-Rouge and York South Weston, but those places are titanium LPC short of a landslide like 2018 provincial. Her (and my) native York Region has significant pockets of Chinese-Canadians (Richmond Hill and west Markham), South Asians (east Markham and increasingly Vaughan), Jews and Persians (Thornhill, Richmond Hill), Italians (Woodbridge), and WASPs (Aurora-Newmarket). No real Caribbean/Jamaica/general black bloc, however.

Also don't forget the York-Simcoe far north of Georgina and East Gwillimbury--the most ancestrally solid "Old Stock Canadian Conservative" part of the riding.  (Or for that matter, the pockets of well-heeled WASPiness in Old Markham and Whitchurch-Stouffville where Jane Philpott found most of her indy strength last year.)

And incidentally, I know Oshawa isn't the best option from a raw "safety" level; but it *is* incumbent, and the repeated ability to prevail over a rare-for-the-905 split-opposition circumstance has a way of generating its own infrastructural strength (remember: they nearly took it back provincially in 2018 after their spectacular upset by the NDP in 2014).  And as I pointed out re Kingsway College and SDA, there's other right-boosty undercurrents here, while Toronto's Afro/Caribbean diaspora has been palpably inching into Durham Region so it might not seem *that* much of a stretch.  And of course, none other than the national leader is next door, bordering the riding on two of its three landward sides.  So Oshawa might not be ideal if the  Cons want something absolutely rock solid; but it wouldn't be implausible from a firming-their-base standpoint...

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Remarkable how Lewis led the popular vote on the second ballot. Imagining her as leader seems as unlikely and surprising as imaging Trump as the nominee in 2015 (no intention to compare the two at all).

Again, it's a reflection of where the critical Conservative leadership-voting blocs exist in this day and age.  And for perspective's sake, there were fewer *total* first-round voters in the Ile de Montreal *at large* (and even that total was vestigially plumped within the "white Anglo establishment" electorate) than there were social conservative voters in the single riding of Foothills.

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What Scheer Cabinet?

The Shadow Ministers, many of whom endorsed MacKay.

I don't think there's as much of a gulf btw/ MacKay and O'Toole as there was btw/ Christine Elliott and Doug Ford in Ontario in 2018.  That is, those who endorsed MacKay aren't exactly in a grinning-and-bearing-it/plugging-their-nose situation re O'Toole.

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I wouldn't be surprised if the Liberals were a distant third among Blacks in the 2018 provincial election. They make up a big part of the Fordnation constituency, and the NDP may have done well as well among Blacks (they certainly elected a lot of Black MPPs, enough to form their own caucus!)

The Liberals were a distant third among most demographic groups, to be fair. 2018 Ontario isn't really a good benchmark because it was a PC-NDP race, which is a rarity in both Ontario and federal politics.

If the Liberals remained buoyant with any group in 2018, it was with Islamic voters--though there, one has to deal with isolated nodes to deduce that fact.  (Even in Cambridge, the "Muslim poll" stood out for its solid support for the otherwise third-place Liberal incumbent.)

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Scheer has announced he will be running for re-election. His seaf is pretty safe, so he should have the job as long as he wants it. I suppose we'll see him in a future cabinet which has got to be the first for a former leader since... Joe Clark?

Don't forget Stockwell Day.  (Or, for that matter, Peter MacKay, even if he never led in a general election)

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The Liberals also benefit from a fairly weakened NDP, and Trudeau campaigns and governs just progressively enough to bury the NDP vote. 

It could well be the case by e-day, as it's so often been (and throw the Green vote into that, too).  But one can argue that except in 2011 (and in Western Canada in the 80s), the federal NDP has *always* been "fairly weakened"--in fact, with Leger currently showing them at 21%, the NDP's actually holding up quite well by traditional standards.  (But of course, come whatever moment that O'Toole shows signs of catching on, watch the Libs bid to cannibalize that support yet once again)