Ontario 2018 election

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Constituency polling is terrible in All Nations, but none more so than Canada...

When I saw that you had posted, I knew exactly that was what you were going to say.  I was wondering how long it would take you to swoop in with that hot take.

Not a hot take, just an empirical observation that needs to be repeated (apparently) at regular intervals...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Depends on vote-splits and where the electoral movement is. The funny thing about this insistence that the existence of a large number of rock-solid rural Tory ridings operates as a structural advantage for that party is that, while it can do under certain circumstances it would have the opposite effect.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Elections are not strategy games!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A Guide to the Parties of Ontario

Ontario Liberal Party - currently led by Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals are a rather dull managerialist centre party and have been the dominant force in provincial politics over the past decade as Ontario's voters finally tired of drama and decided that, frankly, they preferred things to be bland, insipid and uninspired thank you very much. They were re-elected on much the same platform in 2007, 2011 and 2014 despite objectively sucking at actually running things more complex than a lemonade stand. Which tells you something. The Liberals are effectively a party of urban Ontario, particularly Toronto and its surrounding suburbs. Most of its remaining rural bastions in the South West and East of the province were lost - quite probably forever - in 2011. In the cities where it thrives it is mostly strong in upscale districts and amongst minorities. Until very recently the Liberals gave off the distinctive whiff of a party of power, but this appears to have been a typical Canadian illusion and the party now faces a desperate fight not to remain in power but to retain as much of the furniture as possible. History gives added reason for fear: ousted from power in 1943 the Liberals spent the next four decades in perpetual opposition and spent much of this period as a repository for rural voters unhappy with the Big Blue Machine. This changed in 1985 as the PCs disintegrated in a mess of unpleasant factional infighting: a deal with the NDP allowed for the formation of a minority Liberal government under the charismatic/arrogant leadership of visionary leader/hubristic blowhard David Peterson. The Peterson government was re-elected in a landslide in 1987 but suffered an unexpected landslide loss to the NDP in 1990 after Peterson foolishly called a snap election despite corruption scandals, a dodgy economy and a Canada-wide constitutional crisis. The Liberals were unable to seriously exploit the failings of the Rae government, nor of the ultra-right wing Harris government that followed and remained in opposition - and always leading the opposition - until voters had enough of all that drama sh**t and fell in love with the creepy Norman Bates look-a-like Dalton McGuinty who promised them the mildly ineffectual tedium that they now craved. Following a succession of minor scandals and by-election defeats, McGuinty resigned and was replaced by Wynne who led the party to a surprisingly emphatic re-election in 2014. Nothing has gone right since. A needless and badly managed energy privatisation and ill-thought out environmental policies have caused utility bills to soar - the combination of this and the Wynne government's decision to go full #woke has led to populist rage from left and right and an electoral atmosphere of profound toxicity.

Ontario Progressive Conservative Party - currently led by Doug Ford (the crass and charmless brother of the crass yet charming Rob Ford, Toronto's late and legendary crack-smoking suburban-backlash Mayor), the PCs were once more or less what the Liberals have been since 2003 (i.e. a principle-free party of power based in the province's major cities), but have spent the past few decades as a party of remorseless hardline Thatcherites. The frankly unnerving ideological zealotry of the 1990s is gone, but the transformation seems permanent. Successive poor performances have left much traditional PC territory in and around Toronto in Liberal hands, leaving the PCs as a party of rural Ontario (including those parts that were traditionally Liberal) and of Toronto and Ottawa's outermost suburbs and dormitory settlements. Under the leadership of various extremely dull and extremely Upper Canadian figures (with names as clichéd as 'George Drew' and 'Leslie Frost'), the 'Big Blue Machine' ran the province - though not always with a majority - from 1943 until 1985, when pent-up factional issues exploded on the election of the overtly right-wing Frank Miller as party leader. Miller alienated many urban voters and was also damaged amongst rural Protestant voters by the decision of his moderate predecessor to extend funding for Catholic schools in the province. The PCs rightward shift solidified in opposition and culminated in the long leadership of humourless Thatcherite hatchet man Mike Harris (1990-2002). Harris led the PCs to an unexpected landslide - Ontario has a thing for these - over both the hapless Rae government and the overconfident Liberal opposition at the 1995 election. Significantly he did so on an openly hard-right platform: the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution'. Traditionally ineffectual opposition from the Liberals and the sad state of the demoralised and broken NDP meant that the PCs won a second term in 1999. The Common Sense Revolution was every bit as insane as its name suggested, and Harris's poorly planned Thatcherite 'revolution' ultimately led to the deaths of seven people in the small town of Walkerton as regulatory failure caused by a botched privatisation resulted in the pollution of the town's water supply with human excrement. One may wish to reflect on the symbolism of this. Harris suddenly resigned in 2002 and was succeeded by an old crony called Ernie Eves who led the PCs to a landslide defeat in 2003. Since then the PCs have flopped around in a rather purposeless manner (including a period when they were led by the gloriously incompetent John Tory) but have not fundamentally changed the message. Following the resignation of the graceless hack Tim Hudack after his second defeat, the PC's elected the smooth and slick Patrick Brown as their new leader and he seemed set for power... right up until he was #metooed. Farcical scenes followed - Brown even made an abortive and entirely surreal bid to retain the job he had resigned from, arguing, not very convincingly, that he had not really quit at all - and the victor of the clown car race that followed was Doug Ford, an otherwise entirely unremarkable man who had attained a high media profile and a questionable reputation as a 'populist' (in reality it always comes across as forced and astroturf in tone) because of the antics of his dead brother. Shortly after Ford's ascendancy one poll put PC support as high as 50%, but to say that Doug Ford lacks his brother's naive electoral genius would be quite the understatement...

Ontario New Democratic Party - currently led by Andrea Horwath, the NDP is Ontario's social democratic party of record and while it usually finishes third it has occasionally challenged for power (and on one occasion was luckless enough to actually win it). It is a party of Ontario's manufacturing towns and its remote industrial North. It also retains a degree of strength in Toronto, but is a shadow of its pre-Rae strength in the city: recovery there is essential in order for the party to have any realistic prospect of truly competing for power. Both its strength in working class areas outside Ontario's great cities and its relative weakness within them have been reinforced by the populist approach of the Horwath leadership, though Howarth has adopted a more 'traditional' tone for this election and, if the polls are to be believed, it is likely to bring dividends. The Ontario NDP is officially the Ontario wing of the national NDP and like the national party it was formed out of the more overtly left-wing CCF - which had come heartbreakingly close to power in 1943 - in the 1960s. Under a succession of urbane Toronto-based right-wingers it made steady progress in the 1960s and 1970s and for a time had a larger caucus than the Liberals. A swing to the left under a new leader in the early 1980s resulted in the inevitable electoral rebuff and another leader in the traditional ('right-wing', urbane, Toronto) mold: Bob Rae. Initially quite successful - under his leadership the NDP worked with the Peterson Liberals to topple the Big Blue Machine and then avoided serious electoral damage in the 1987 landslide - things started to go horribly wrong for Rae and for the NDP the moment the party was unexpectedly swept to power in 1990. The Rae government was an abysmal failure and put back the cause of social democracy in Ontario back several decades. Details can be found elsewhere; for now it is enough to observe that the Rae government managed to alienate both the NDP's working class base and the new voters it gained in 1990 and that the loathing it inspired at all points rightwards contributed directly to the appeal of the Common Sense Revolution. At the 1995 election the NDP were beaten into a poor third place. Leadership of the shattered party passed to the well-meaning but ineffectual Howard Hampton who led it to a further electoral collapse in 1999 as the logic of 'strategic voting' saw the NDP relegated to near irrelevance. Hampton remained leader until 2009 and presided over a slow rebuilding of the party, a process aided by fading memories of the Rae government (and quite probably by Bob Rae's contemporaneous decision to enter federal politics as a Liberal). Hampton was succeeded by Andrea Horwath, who in 2011 led the NDP to their first credible result since the defeat of the Rae government, despite running a campaign that clearly alienated many voters in Toronto. A repeat performance followed in 2014. The unpopularity of the Wynne government and the PCs travails have now placed Horwath and the NDP on the verge of a major electoral breakthrough.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, Parry Sound is more WASPy and Muskoka is more Granola-y, so there you go.

Surely the latter are mostly the former in Ontario?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course the thing about constituency polling is that... cont. p. 384

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Historically the PCs always had a large working class vote: the Big Blue Machine was very much founded on 'class collaboration', in much the same manner as the federal Liberals of the same era. The NDP's core was working class however defined (and definition is always a big issue regarding this issue) but they never dominated. The Liberals were also always the preferred party of Catholics of whatever class (overt sectarianism being the other key element to the Big Blue Machine), which presented further problems for the NDP in certain proletarian districts. Even in 1990 the absolute dominance of the NDP in most working class ridings owed much to the favourable split between the Liberal and PC votes. Avoid the big talk and look at the facts, as unfashionable as that is in these times...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you know what you're looking for - it's a big if but some people do - then signs can be a good indicator of under the radar electoral movement. Last year I noticed about two thirds of the way through the campaign or so that there were suddenly a lot more Labour posters up in the sketchier parts of a lot of small country towns around here, more than I'd seen for quite a few years. And, sure enough, it became clear on election night that Labour's traditional hick vote - that had largely abandoned the Party after the financial crisis - had returned. Not many seats flipped as a result (though it did bring David Drew back to the Commons) but it had an important impact on the national popular vote total.

They're certainly more reliable than constituency polls

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I did explicitly point out if you know what you're looking for - i.e. it's not a question of counting signs and saying that the party with the most in a given district will win (lol no), but looking for certain patterns. Essentially they're a good way to gauge electoral enthusiasm.

As for constituency polling... ahem... if we're being honest, certain companies this time are using them as a money making scam. Beware.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's a poll in Canada. The chances therefore, no matter who it shows ahead, are that...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We already have deduced that there is a 4-5% geographic advantage against the NDP vote

You have done no such thing as that's not how these things work.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But that's electoral suicide!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Contrary to others, I actually think it will strengthen the Liberal vote in places like Ottawa Centre, Spadina Ft. York, Willowdale, Eglinton Lawrence and even places like Beaches East York. Will it be enough? Who knows.

...how?

Look, most voters don't know who placed where in their riding last time round. Admitting her party's electoral irrelevance opens the Liberals up to the same nightmarish logic that saw the NDP further pulverised in 1999...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Are people more likely to refrain from telling pollsters their true intention if they are backing Doug Ford? I think so and I suspect PCs will do fine.

That’s an old theory . Nowadays rightwingers are very aggressively proud to support pigs like Ford

Ford is hardly a break for the PCs anyway - Harris led them into three elections and o/c won two. Not everything is about or like Trump...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How acurate traditionally are these polls of early voting anyway?

Polling subsamples are not particularly accurate in any country (and are not polls themselves and shouldn't be treated as such) and polling in Canada is amongst the least accurate in the industrialised world and has been for many decades. So to answer your question, what does two plus two equal?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Pollara

PC 37% (+5)
NDP 37% (-6)
Liberal 20% (+3)
Green 5% (-)
Other 1% (-1)

https://www.pollara.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Pollara_ONElxn2018-MethoDataBrf_May30-Jun2.pdf

I don't really know if this should be compared to their other polls. Their methedology has completely changed. It was all online last poll, and is a mixture of phone/online in this poll (1080 phone calls, 367 online surveys).

It's unusual for herding to be this blatant, lmao.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The problem isn't insomuch the polls themselves, but the volatility of the electorate, I think.

Yeah, party loyalty and party identification are both unusually low in Canada, which creates very difficult conditions for polling firms. It's not that polling misfires totally all the time or even that regularly, but that even more than in most places you should always affix 'roughly' or 'approximately' before any figures.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

OTOH, there is a tradition of right-of-centre overperformance and NDP underperformance in advance polls.  When NDP overperforms, it's either when the demos most prone to advance voting tend leftward (as in many cultural-class urban ridings) or the campaign momentum shifts dramatically away t/w the end of the campaign (as in 2015 federally).

Though given "Ford populism", it could well be that the PCs are, well, underperforming their usual advance-poll overperformance.

Keep in mind that if it were all about the advance polls, 1990 would have seen something like a 3-way seat split.

Do they skew elderly as e.g. postal votes do in most places?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

God bless the politics of Ontario!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Voters are often better at working out who to pick 'strategically' if that's the aim than organisations that try to promote tactical voting. You sometimes wonder how they know, but then crowd behaviour is one reason why elections are fascinating.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That would be an increase of thirteen points for the NDP compared to the last election - hardly ugly. Of course at 17% the Liberals might be struggling to win any seats at all (broadly speaking when your vote more than halves in an FPTP system you get wiped out or close to it...), though they'd probably fluke a few on split votes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Voters are often better at working out who to pick 'strategically' if that's the aim than organisations that try to promote tactical voting. You sometimes wonder how they know, but then crowd behaviour is one reason why elections are fascinating.

I agree the organizations are terrible at this, but I'm not sure I would agree with the crowd knowing what to do. Especially in these kinds of 'realigning' type elections... at least in Canada.

A better record than the various organisations anyway!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah - doing the following as a thought experiment: take every Liberal percentage from last time and halve it. It won't quite work out like that even if the polls are broadly correct (in some places the fall won't be so sharp; in others you'll see a total collapse) but it gives an indication of the scale of the problem.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Wouldn't read much into subsamples, especially not from fairly sketchy outfits like Mainstreet...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If there's a polling error in which direction do you think it'll be?

Could easily be in any direction. This is the most ridiculously uncertain election possible...