Ontario 2018 election

[DL]

The poll has the NDP at 23% not 22%. To put things in perspective in the 2014 election the Liberals won every single seat in Toronto with 49% of the vote, now they have collapsed to 30% and at that level they could be totally shellacked dropping seats to the PCs all over Etobicoke and North York and Scarborough while the NDP would likely win back a couple of seats in the downtown areas. The Liberals could be reduced to seats you can count on one hand in very very wealthy highly educated midtown ridings

[DL]

The NDP was a pretty close second to Deb Matthews in LNC last time. They could easily win that seat especially since they are running a popular local city councillor

[DL]

"Progressives" won't vote Tory, but the challenge for the ONDP is that there is a large chunk of voters who don't label themselves and who just want a change of government. many of those people are currently parked with the PCs and the NDP has to find a way to get those people to see the PCs as unacceptable and to vote NDP instead.

[DL]

How many people in Ontario even know what it means to be an “urban progressive”? In my experience about 90% of voters don’t even know the difference between “right” and “left” in political terms

[DL]

You know what you said it better, more detailed... the two main types of ONDP groups would be those two I think
-Urban Progressive's/Leftists; your Democratic Socialists, academic/artist, white collar types, Big idea policies, government regulation/ownership, etc. typical of DT TO, Ottawa, but also enclaves in University cities, like Guelph and Kingston and in London and KW.
-Progressive-Populist's; your blue collar, organized labour workers, bread and butter politics type. I would say these people don't care if its big government (don't call it that) as long as it's affordable or lowers the cost. Pocket book policies play here. Then you have Northern Ontario, which falls under this progressive-populist group

And group 2 outnumbers group 1 by about a 5 to 1 margin...especially since most people in group 1 talk about voting NDP 364 days a year and then invariably on election day they go poo-poo in their pants and vote Liberal

[DL]

New poll by Forum shows more crushingly bad news for Kathleen Wynne:

PCs 40% (down 5%)
NDP 26% (up 4%)
OLP 24 (unchanged)
Greens 8% (up 1%)

http://poll.forumresearch.com/post/2811/ontario-horserace-november-2017

Wynne continues to be ridiculously unpopular with 15% approving and 74% disapproving.

Looks like weeks of negative ads aimed at Brown have only succeeded in shifting some votes from PCs to NDP. Also, the unveiling of the PC platform seems to have had no positive effect on Brown's popularity or that of his party.

[DL]

On top of that, I think Wynne is very abrasive and just rubs people the wrong way. She some across as very haughty and condescending and finger waving.

[DL]

On top of that, I think Wynne is very abrasive and just rubs people the wrong way. She some across as very haughty and condescending and finger waving.

Which is all basically code for sexist double standards.

Really? I find Wynne haughty, condescending and finger waving and every time i see her on TV its like fingernails on a blackboard...on the other hand I think Andrea Horwath is terrific! How is that sexist?

[DL]

Note that this poll has Liberal support down 1% and yetbthe Toronto Star headline claims the Liberals are gaining ground. That new math from the Liberal Star

[DL]

Look for Forum to come out with a poll in the next day or two that will show a bigger than ever PC lead. They posted a poll on attitudes towards the minimum wage and in the crosstab banners it has party support of 448 PC (46%), 238 OLP (24%) and 187 NDP (19%)...note that these would be UNWEIGHTED numbers and the weighting typically boosts the NDP and lowers the PCs since younger people are typically so grossly undersampled in IVR polls.

In their December poll on party support which had the PCs at 40%, ONDP at 26% and OLP at 24%, the raw unweighted numbers were PCs 341 (42%), OLP 218 (27%) and ONDP 159 (19%)

The headline will likely be how despite high support for raising the minimum wage, Ontarians just hate Kathleen Wynne too much to be any more likely to vote for her...

[DL]

IMHO the reason the minimum wage issue isn't moving any votes is that people may agree with the idea of increasing it in principle, but they see it as an act of desperation by Wynne and as being poorly implemented - also its not a wedge issue, the PCs won't roll it back and only say they will take a bit longer to go from $14 to $15 (which likely makes sense to a lot of people) and the NDP is even more in favour of raising the minimum wage than are the Liberals.

[DL]

There is also Jagmeet Singh's brother and closest confidante...I wouldnt be surprised if he ran for the NDP in Brampton East

[DL]

Two points on this.

1. The Liberals better be careful what they wish for. If this had come out during the writ period it would have been a total catastrophe for the PCs, but the election is still five months away and the PCs likely have some "quickie" emergency process for picking a new leader - perhaps caucus agreeing on someone. Whoever they pick could very quickly put all this behind them and turn out to be more popular than Brown was.

2. PC voters tend to absolutely LOATH Kathleen Wynne and polling data i have seen says that by about a 3-1 margin they have the NDP as their second choice not the Liberals...this could actually be a good opportunity for Andrea Horwath

[DL]

There is also the example of Wildrose in Alberta being ditched by Danielle Smith and picking Brian Jean a week before the writ drop

[DL]

The best way for the Tories to diffuse this situation would be to pick a woman as leader. So naturally, they're going to pick Vic Fideli as leader. I guess the Tory caucus is just as dumb as its base. Oh, and remember the last Tory leader for North Bay? Worked out wonders for this province.

There are plenty of women who would be disastrous choices for the PCs. Does anyone think Kellie Leitch would be at all appealing to anyone? And anyone who has seen Lisa MacLeod in action knows she is a loose cannon with very poor political instincts

[DL]

The Forum poll has Ontario NDP support at 23% not 22%

[DL]

The NDP still have about 70 or so candidates to nominate.  Will they place a hold on nominations until after the P.Cs have chosen their new leader?

No, why on earth would they???

[DL]

The NDP still have about 70 or so candidates to nominate.  Will they place a hold on nominations until after the P.Cs have chosen their new leader?

No, why on earth would they???

To see what they're up against first.

The NDP and the PCs don't tend to fish from the same pond of voters (though that is changing)...but in any case local candidates don't matter that much. I mean seriously, give me a scenerio where i living in the downtown riding of University-Rosedale and an NDP member would say to myself "gee, if the PCs are led by Vic Fedeli we should run candidate X as a the local NDP candidate and if the PC leader is Rod Phillips, then we should run candidate Y". I'm sorry but i just cannot come up with a credible scenario like that.

There was some speculation the federal NDP might choose a different leader depending on who the federal Tories chose...but in the end, does anyone think that if the Tories had picked Bernier instead of Scheer it would have made any difference whatsoever to who the NDP chose? Would vast number of NDP have have said to themselves "Jagmeet Singh would have been good to run against Scheer, but since they picked Bernier, I guess we better go for Charlie Angus" 

[DL]

There are now an awful lot of Ontario Liberal vacancies in the middle of Toronto. They still have no candidate in Toronto Centre. They still have no candidate in University-Rosedale. They now have no one in St. Paul's and in Spadina-Fort York they have low profile back bencher Han Dong.

I guess no one talented wants to be an opposition backbencher

[DL]

 Ôte that this Angus Reid poll asks the vote question reading party names only and not mentioning the leaders. From what I have seen the moment you utter the name Wynne, Ontario Liberal support drops another 5 points and the moment you mention Horwath, ontario ndp support goes up

[DL]

Why on earth were Christine Elliott's people saying she'd run in St. Paul's?

To avoid an unseemly situation of her having to coerce an already nominated candidate to stand aside for her...of course if she has in fact lost the leadership i don't expect her to run at all

[DL]

Wynne is a formidable campaigner.  Horwath is OK.  I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the NDP is going to displace the Liberals on the center-left of the spectrum. 

Is Wynne actually all that good a campaigner or is that just a myth left over from the 2014 election? As I recall for most of the campaign she ran a pretty pedestrian campaign and by all accounts she diud very badly in the leaders debate. What really happened in 2014 was that Hudak totally flopped and Wynne was there to reap the benefit from that

[DL]

Forum is already hot off the mark with a post-Ford poll. They have:

PCs - 44% and projected to win 84 seats
NDP - 27% and projected to win 29 seats
Liberals - 23% and projected to win 11 seats (!!)


http://poll.forumresearch.com/post/2835/doug-ford-leadership-march-2018

[DL]

Which ridings would the OLP likely retain on 25% of the vote?

St. Paul's, Ottawa-Vanier, Ottawa South, Kingston for starters.

Ford kind of throws a monkey-wrench into simply transposing the previous numbers though...

Don't be too sure about the Liberals holding on to Kingston. In 2014 they only beat the NDP 42% to 30% and with Liberal support down by about 15% across the province (i.e. from 39% to 24% or so), on a uniform swing Kingston would be an easy NDP pickup.

[DL]

Its very weird, Mainstreet uses the same IVR methodology as Forum and yet such vastly different results...but in recent other provincial elections Mainstreet has been quite accurate so I can't figure out why their Ontario numbers seem so crazy