Ontario 2018 election

[Tintrlvr]

Deb Matthews and Liz Sandals are not running for re-election so huge blows as those are normally fairly safe Liberal ridings, but could be vulnerable based on current polling.  London North Centre could for any the three parties realistically and a key will be turnout amongst university students.  Strong turnout should benefit Liberals or NDP, while weak turnout PCs.  Guelph gets more interesting as Green Party leader Mike Schreiner is running there so maybe he will win.  Also with Tory support struggling to crack the 30% mark there, a three way split on the left makes it easier for them to win.  Will be interesting to see how many more pack it in.  Much as you saw with Harper in 2015, usually this is a bad sign that many don't like the party's chances.  The one exception where you had a lot of resignations but the party still won again was the BC Liberals in 2013, then again at the time of the resignations they were 20 points behind in the polls.

Schreiner's position on the selling of marijuana has been quite unpopular on the left, particularly amongst the Green party core.  I can't see him being a factor with those kinds of positions.

He ran in Guelph in 2014 also and got nearly 20% there (and almost knocked the PCs into third, did knock the NDP into fourth) then, so clearly he is "a factor," even if he doesn't win.

[Tintrlvr]

Union-commissioned 416 poll shows Grits holding only Toronto Centre and St. Paul's. In related news, Kinsella spotted Tim Murphy golfing in California. SAD!

The poll isn't as good for the NDP as claimed. The NDP really need to be winning places like Humber River-Black Creek, Toronto Centre, Scarborough Southwest, Scarborough Centre and Scarborough-Rouge Park if they're going to be competing for government.

(Also, the poll has the Liberals also holding Eglinton-Lawrence, albeit narrowly, and tied with the NDP in University-Rosedale.)

[Tintrlvr]

Leger poll:

PCs 37%
NDP 37%
Liberals 21%

They hadn’t polled since April, but that’s PC -6, NDP +11, Lib -5.

Seems like a lot of pollsters are showing ties. I wonder if we’ll get any polls where the NDP are clearly ahead.

[Tintrlvr]

I can't see a swing like the not having the NDP pick up the low fruit from 2014 from the PCs and Liberals.

There isn't much low hanging fruit on the PC side, remember that even if the PC numbers have tapered off they are still well ahead of Hudak '14.

Right, but the gains are from the OLP, especially in suburban Toronto. In places where the OLP did poorly in 2014, like SW Ontario, the PCs are not going to be seeing similar gains because there's less OLP vote for them to gain from to begin with.

[Tintrlvr]

Innovative Research
PC 36%(+1)
NDP 31% (-)
Liberal 26% (-1)

https://innovativeresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IRG36-Tracking-pre-test-Wave-2-.pdf

Interesting, I guess we don't have a consensus on polls. I suspect maybe early next week we will but don't now.

Innovative Research has a weird formulation where they ask which party you identify with primarily before they ask your vote intention (self-identification is OLP 30, PC 27, NDP 14). This has the rather obvious effect of upwardly skewing Liberal support and downwardly skewing NDP support, so not sure their polls are worth much.

[Tintrlvr]

If the riding polls are right there's a good chance the Liberals will get no seats at all. St. Paul's should be their safest seat in Toronto. And Ottawa-Vanier is their safest seat in Ottawa, but if the NDP are willing Ottawa West-Nepean then they are winning Ottawa-Vanier.

Well, they're leading in St. Paul's still, albeit barely.

And although I think St. Paul's will stay Liberal, I'm not so sure it's their safest seat in Toronto this election. The three Don Valley seats are very anti-Ford in particular even if they might vote PC otherwise, and they're pretty dead zones for the NDP. I think they might end up with larger Liberal margins (over the PCs) than the Liberals end up with over the NDP in St. Paul's, and, given the way polling is going (Liberals seem to have stabilized in the low 20s (other than the Forum poll) recently, but the PCs are starting to slip from the high 30s to the mid-to-low 30s), I think the safest Liberal seats where the PCs are the likely challengers are more likely to stay Liberal than seats where it would be the NDP who were competitive.

I'd like to see a riding poll in Ottawa-Vanier.

[Tintrlvr]

Rewatched the debate - was more focused on Colombia yesterday. Wynne definitely saved the furniture  for the Libs, and probably reversed the bleeding a bit. The interesting thing is that if the bleeding is reversed, this probably pushed the NDP down, since Ford never really was poaching Liberals  beyond those that were in his camp pre-leadership election. On the other hand, it means less Three-Way Tories pickups in Toronto, so perhaps it helps Horwath. The other thing of note is that this probably shuts down the Greens attempts at a seat in Guelph.

Idk, the one riding poll we have puts the Liberals in a distant fourth in Guelph, barely breaking double-digits. Might turn the riding over to the NDP, who have a more solid base than the Greens, or the PCs, who could come up the middle, but very hard to see how the Liberals hold on there.

[Tintrlvr]

Just looking at our numbers now. I'm not going to give the topline, but since we probably won't have regional #s out, I can say the NDP have a decent lead in Toronto. They're up 50-24 in central (Liberals in third!) and down 38-40 in the outer region. (margin of error for both regions is around 9).

I'm assuming that "central" means Parkdale-High Park, York South-Weston, Davenport, University-Rosedale, Spadina-Fort York, Toronto Centre, Toronto-Danforth, Beaches-East York and St. Paul's and that "outer" means all the Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York seats, but where do you classify Eglinton-Lawrence and Don Valley West?

If the NDP is essentially dead even with the PCs in outer Toronto it would suggest that the NDP would likely win at least a few seats in Scarborough and North York...and if Ford himself were not running Etobicoke North would be a likely pick up

I have Don Valley West and Eglinton-Lawrence in central as well.

Makes the outer Toronto numbers look even better for the NDP.

Also, Liberals in third in central Toronto might mean zero seats in Toronto for them.

[Tintrlvr]

So the latest Ekos is out and has it about tied NDP 38.4, PCs 37.9 and Liberals 19.1%...The EKOS polls always have kinda skimpy sample sizes by IVR standards (e.g. n of 1,000 over three days while Mainstreet has n of 2,400)...the marginal cost of adding sample in an IVR poll is so low i wonder why they don't do more

Weirdly, EKOS's report on the poll indicates that they had a poll out around a couple of days ago that showed the NDP at around 41 to the PCs around 37 and the Liberals around 17 (hard to tell exactly) such that this poll actually represents a drop for the NDP and an increase for the PCs and Liberals, but I can't find any record of that poll on their website or anywhere else. Compared to their last public poll, it's an increase for both the NDP and the PCs and a drop for the Liberals, with basically the same gap between the NDP and the PCs (PCs gained a relative 0.2 points).

Showing basically zero age gap is also weird.

[Tintrlvr]

I think it’s different from BC 2002 also in that there was realistically only one alternative party there. (The Greens didn’t really break through into a semblance of relevance until that election.) Here, there’s an alternative whether you’re on the right or the left of the Liberals.

[Tintrlvr]

Does Jack MacLaren have any chance at all of holding on as a Trillium Party candidate in Kanata-Carleton?

[Tintrlvr]

The Final EKOS poll from the 2014 seemed to be the closest from the actual results. However the NDP did better on election night what EKOS had.

     
      Poll vs Actual
LIB  37.3  vs 38.65
PC   31.3 vs 31.25
NDP 19.2 vs 23.75


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_general_election,_2014#Opinion_polls

The Liberals too, to a lesser extent. I think it makes sense that the very, very late deciders (people still saying they are undecided a day or two before the election) are mostly deciding between the Liberals and the NDP as a strategic matter.