Ontario Election 2022

[Хahar 🤔]

26% of Ontarians expect the Grits to win, while only 12% expect the same of the NDP. Should this kind of gap remain, it's good news for the Liberals, bad news for the Tories, and horrible news for the NDP - as we talked about recently in this thread, strategic voters in Ontario tend to rally behind whichever centre-left party they think more likely to win, and that's probably why the Grits are 9 points ahead of the NDP.

During the last election campaign I was talking to an online acquaintance who works as a lecturer at Ryerson U. She told me that even though she was unhappy with the Wynne government's privatization policies, she was still going to vote Liberal because the OLP was the only viable non-PC option. If she could think that in 2018, imagine how many people will think that in 2022. For all the talk that you hear about "tactical voting", in practice a large section of the electorate just interprets that as "voting Liberal".

Even with the Liberal Party almost absent from the legislature, when asked to contemplate an alternate government Ontarians opposed to the current government think of the OLP led by some guy they've never heard of rather than the NDP of Andrea Horwath, someone they presumably have known for years. There are a variety of reasons for that, but one that can be fixed is the leader. It's inarguable that Ontario voters don't view Horwath as a credible choice to be Premier.

Over the course of recent Canadian history, when a party has formed government after several decades out of power it has usually been with a new face. There's no real indication that the ONDP under Horwath can go any further than it's gone. If the goal of the NDP is forming government rather than self-actualization, then they need to seriously think about what they can do to get themselves there. These numbers indicate clearly that the present approach isn't working.

[Хahar 🤔]

Yes, I'm well aware (as, presumably, is everyone else in this thread) that the memory of the early '90s NDP government has caused problems for the NDP since. I'm interested in ways that the NDP can overcome those problems. As you allude to, Bob Rae was still relatively new in 1990, having been NDP leader for eight years. Andrea Horwath has been leader for half a decade longer than that and there's no indication that she successfully has made or will make Ontarians rethink the way they see her. The results of the last election put the NDP in a straightforwardly favorable position, but they don't have a leader who can take advantage of that. The NDP can't go back and change the '90s, but it can change its leader.

As I'm sure you know (as does everyone here), in the Westminster system the parliamentary minority is effectively powerless. The choice is far more binary than in other systems: either a party wins and has power or it loses and does not. This is why I added the clause about my analysis hinging on an assumption that the NDP's goal is forming government rather than self-actualization. Somehow this seems to be the end result of every discussion of the NDP on this forum. If the NDP by and large is able to conceive of politics and elections as a never-ending string of moral victories, it's no wonder Ontario voters don't perceive the NDP as a plausible future government.

[Хahar 🤔]

People can debate the pros and cons of Andrea Horwath but the fact that she has lost three elections (though gaining ground each time) is neither here nor there. Gary Doer lost three elections as NDP leader in Manitoba and was dismissed as a loser who was past his prime, then he won a majority in 1995 on his fourth attempt and went on to win three more elections after that!

Similarly Darrell Dexter lost three times as NDP leader in Nova Scotia and then won a majority in his fourth attempt. 

Dexter became Premier in his third election as leader (official opposition in 2003 and 2006, government in 2009) and at the time of victory he had been NDP leader for eight years, which is significantly less than the timeframe we're talking about. Doer is a reasonable comparison, although his case is obviously rare and in any case I doubt that the Manitoba NDP was in third place in the polls in the year of his fourth election.

In any case, I am not an expert. I do not live in Ontario so I am not exposed to Ontario media and I have no particular inside knowledge. I was merely offering a suggestion for the NDP's poor performance in recent polls. Even if it had made sense, it would obviously be too late to change leaders now, but I would be genuinely interested in hearing an affirmative case for Horwath from the perspective of someone who thinks that the NDP should be trying to win the election. What about Horwath makes her the one to lead the NDP back into government?

[Хahar 🤔]

1948 was that very rare bird: a party winning the election but the leader losing personally. Other examples off the top of the head are Mackenzie King in 1945 (federal), Sir John A. Macdonald in 1878 (also federal), Don Getty in 1989 (Alberta) & Clyde Wells in 1989 (Newfoundland). No doubt there are plenty more.

Macdonald's loss in 1878 was perhaps the most curious: the Tories didn't just win that election, they went from opposition to government in one of their (then) biggest victories, up from one of their (then) biggest defeats in 1874, in which Macdonald had held his riding.

And Christy Clark in 2013.

Indeed; a leader's loss coinciding with an increased majority for the government is also pretty unusual.

The classic example (at least in my mind) is Robert Bourassa losing his seat in 1985 amidst the Liberals winning one of the largest victories in the history of Quebec.

[Хahar 🤔]

As promised, here's a graph of polls for the first week of the campaign; trendlines carry forward three days from the final figures, which can come in handy for making final forecasts in the last couple days but aren't particularly significant at the moment.

Looking back at this chart, through the individual poll indicators I can't see how this indicates a north-of-40-PC/south-of-20 NDP trendline--or it's like there's "liberties" taken in drawing said trendlines...

I don't know the specific math used to calculate the trendline, but it looks like what I would expect. This is how extrapolation works; there's a slight upward trend in the PC vote over the week shown and the exponential algorithm naturally projects that trend to accelerate. The fact that the results look so strange is why you should not take it seriously right now, as DistingFlyer notes himself.