Canadian by-elections, 2012

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Borys winning on a personal vote? I'd argue to the contrary: the Tories' position has clearly eroded in their middle to high income urban seats (it was never very strong to begin with, if the NDP surge didn't happen to the extent that it did this would be a comfortable Grit seat) and because of the inherent NDP weakness among this demographic, it's natural that these voters would flock back to their natural Liberal home. There's probably a decent amount of strategic voting from potential NDP supporters going on as well.

I predict that the NDP's support will sink to the single digits and the Liberals will win by a 15 to 20 point margin.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I wonder if the Tories will finally begin to make inroads with Anglo Montreal over the next decade. Their performance last year was so piss poor that it's hard to imagine them ever doing very well there but there are a few seats that should be natural territory for them.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I think the NDP's support in the core areas of Oshawa have been overstated by some of the posters here (just by eyeballing the data, it appears they lost by a sizeable margin in a hypothetical core seat). It's not the early 90s and even with the "orange crush", they were only able to increase support in most polls by 1-3%. That doesn't bode well for the next election. I think the clearest example of the continued erosion of NDP support was shown in the provincial election.  They achieved a swing that was less than the provincial swing even while they ran on a platform that was basically tailored for Oshawa.

If NDP wins the next election, they'll most likely pick it up but I have the feeling it will be by a thread. Mulcair isn't veering from the Layton coalition and, if anything, is moving the party even further in a direction that appeals more to centrist/vaguely "green" urban voters. 

Quick question for Canadian posters: do you think that the NDP needs the Liberals to stay at their current levels of support to win a solid majority in the next election? Also, do you think it's possible for the NDP to appeal successfully to middle class Asians in the 905?