Alberta 2012

[Smid]

Leger's Calgary sample seems too favourable to the PCs for me. I think most polls have confirmed that Calgary is now lean WR or something.

It certainly was lean WR, or possibly even more favourable than that under Stelmach. I'm sure everyone is familiar with Smith's background on the Calgary Herald (? or is it another paper?) and with the PC Premier hailing from Edmonton and surrounds, WR was able to establish a stronger position in Calgary. I somewhat expected the new Premier to be able to claw back the WR lead in Calgary, given that she is also a local, so from that perspective, I wouldn't be surprised by the Leger result. Of course, I know that there's a fair degree of dissent in the city, so I also wouldn't be surprised if the Forum Research poll was correct. It seems out of step with all the other recent polls, so I would hesitate to give it much credance yet (until such time as it's backed up by at least one other), but if another poll came out supporting those figures, I wouldn't be surprised... in short, I don't know how the election will go, and would be prepared for anything from PC slightly in front, to a fairly strong WR victory (in popular vote terms, not necessarily reflected in number of seats).

Comparing PC vs Reform federally in days gone by could possibly give an indication of regional trends that may be repeated in this election.

EDIT: Just to emphasise, this is just my gut talking, and also the feel I get from friends and family in Alberta, but not based on anything scientific.

[Smid]

In terms of strong incumbents, I'd rank Ted Morton highly. He's somewhat more Conservative, and a fair amount of the PC to Wildrose change came after he lost the leadership ballot. This suggests to me that some conservatives may see him as almost defacto Wildrose. I could be wrong, and no one has said this to me, it's just my own hunch. Of course, Wildrose performed quite well in his riding last election, I think, so I could be wrong.

One Wildrose candidate I'd rate highly is the guy who had previously been elected to the Senate - the first elected as an independent, I believe.

[Smid]

Someone commented on my blog saying they werent going to vote WRP because Smith doesnt have children.

Lol. Sounds thirdworldy Christian to me.

The number of people who would base their decision on that would have to be less than half a percent. Sounds like a partisan hack to me, trying to make an issue of it.

[Smid]

By the way Smid, you can stop doing the vote redistribution, Hill and Knowlton have already done so for their election predictor: http://predictor.hillandknowlton.ca/#/alberta+2012/swing

ETA: There are a few errors in it though, eg Calgary-Shaw and Lacombe-Ponoka gave wrong numbers to the NDP.

Oh, that's great!

I'm going to copy their estimates across... will be interesting to see how similar we are in the ridings I completed. My method was transferring polls as per normal, as anyone else would do, but my treatment of declaration votes (that's what they're called here, and include pre-poll and postals and absentee ballots... so I'm using a similar term for the mobile booth, etc, at the bottom of the vote tables on the Elections Alberta website) - lengthy sentence, I'll start over. My treatment of declaration votes was that they were divided according to the partisan makeup of the polls being split off. By this I mean, instead of saying "Out of the 20,000 ordinary votes cast in polls in Riding A, 5,000 are going to Riding B. There were 800 declaration votes cast in Riding A, so I will transfer one quarter of the PC declaration votes, one quarter of the Liberal votes, one quarter of the NDP votes, one quarter of the Wildrose votes..." instead, I treat each party separately, which mainly affects polarised electorates - if the parts being split off Riding A were heavily NDP, the proportion of declaration votes transferred would be weighted accordingly.

I'm not explaining this well...

I will post an example later this afternoon, so you can see what I mean... probably my calculations in Calgary West, since it doesn't gain anything, just loses parts.

EDIT: Here are my calculations from Calgary-West, to demonstrate the way I've been treating declaration votes. It's not so much a "hey, look at how I do it, so you can do it this way, too" but more of a "this is what I've done, and I only have high school maths, so if I'm doing it wrong, perhaps someone could correct the record for me..."

In 2008, election results in Calgary-West were:

(rather than re-typing, the two numbers in brackets are Ordinary Votes/Declaration Votes)
Enrolment: 44,306
PC: 8,428 (7,572/856)
Lib: 5,693 (5,222/471)
NDP: 401 (360/41)
Wildrose: 2,273 (2,101/172)
Green: 773 (730/43)
Informal: 33 (26/7) (Informal are Rejected and Declined ballots, not spoilt ballots, because spoilt ballots are re-issued, and therefore the voter is counted in one of the party totals already).

Polls 1-13 and 86-100 are transferred to Calgary-Bow. Half of poll 81 is, as well, but it doesn't look like anyone lives in the part that is transferred. Polls 40-50 are transferred to Calgary-Currie. These are totalled as (ordinary votes, just including the actual poll votes, not any of the declaration ones):

Transfer - Voters - PC - Lib - NDP - Wildrose - Green - Informal
to Bow - 13,018 - 2,020 - 1,542 - 105 - 589 - 216 - 8
to Currie - 5,677 - 750 - 527 - 79 - 183 - 120 - 5
Remaining - 25,611 - 4,802 - 3,153 - 176 - 1,329 - 394 - 13

As a proportion of total ordinary votes,

Transfer - PC - Lib - NDP - WR - GRN - Inf
to Bow - 0.266772 - 0.295289 - 0.291667 - 0.280343 - 0.29589 - 0.307692
to Currie - 0.099049 - 0.100919 - 0.219444 - 0.087101 - 0.164384 - 0.192308
Remaining - 0.634179 - 0.603792 - 0.488889 - 0.632556 - 0.539726 - 0.5

So 26.68% of the PC votes were transferred to Calgary-Bow, while 29.53% of Liberal votes, 29.17% of NDP votes, 28.03% of Wildrose votes and 29.59% of Greens votes were transferred there as well. The parts of Calgary West transferred to Calgary-Currie were even more strongly weighted to the NDP (or another way of saying it would be, the NDP performed most strongly in that part of the riding, while PC and Wildrose performed worst in that part). The parts of Calgary-West remaining in the new Calgary-West were the strongest PC and Wildrose parts of the riding - 63.4% of PC voters and 63.26% of Wildrose voters and 60% of Liberal voters remained in the new C-W, whereas fewer than half the NDP voters, and only just over half the Greens voters remain in the new C-W.

Multiplying the number of declaration votes cast for each party, by the proportion of party vote being transferred or remaining gives (after rounding):

PC - 228 to Bow, 85 to Currie, 543 remaining
Lib - 139 to Bow, 48 to Currie, 284 remaining
NDP - 12 to Bow, 9 to Currie, 20 remaining
Wildrose - 48 to Bow, 15 to Currie, 109 remaining
Greens - 13 to Bow, 7 to Currie, 23 remaining

These figures are added to the original vote totals of transfers (ie, ordinary votes transferred), which gives the totals in my earlier post from a week or so back.

[Smid]

Actually... their results in Calgary are looking just... bizarre.

They say they've attempted to come up with notional figures on the new boundaries, but the numbers don't seem to be any different from the actual 2008 results. I realised this when I decided to just temporarily plug in the NDP figures from Calgary-Shaw from last election, and disregard their obvious data entry problem there, and realised that their PC figures were the same as last election, too. Thought that perhaps the boundaries hadn't changed (but too lazy to look it up), so started comparing results in other ridings to actual last election results...

Calgary-West has very obviously changed boundaries, losing (on my estimates) 13,018 voters to Calgary-Bow and 5,677 voters to Calgary-Currie. My new figures (as listed in the earlier thread, gave it as 5,345 PC votes, 3,437 Liberal votes, 196 NDP votes, 1,438 Wildrose votes, 417 Greens votes, for a total of 10,833 votes cast in polls remaining in Calgary West (including a proportion of the declaration votes cast in the old Calgary West).

Polls 1-13 and 86-100 were transferred to Calgary-Bow, and polls 40-50 were transferred to Calgary-Currie.

The Hill-Knowlton estimates were 8,428 PC votes, 5,693 Liberal votes, 401 NDP votes, 2,273 Wildrose votes and 773 Other votes. Meanwhile, Elections Alberta's Report into the 2008 election (Part 11 - PDF following this link is 4.42MB) show the 2008 election results were: 8,428 PC votes, 5,693 Liberal votes, 401 NDP votes, 2,273 Wildrose votes and 773 Greens votes.

I think they've only estimated new results in ridings which were completely split, like Fort Mac or Airdrie, although I'm still looking more deeply. Once I've finished collating their figures into a spreadsheet, I'll compare them to last election's actual figures and find out which ridings differ.

[Smid]

Okay, I have no idea what they've done because even the radically altered Airdrie-Chestermere being split in half to become Airdrie and Chestermere-Rocky View isn't done properly. The new Airdrie riding is exactly the same as the old results for the old Airdrie-Chestermere riding. The only thing they've done, it would appear, is transfer the results of old electorates into new, renamed electorates. The results for the new Calgary-Greenway are identical to the results of the old Calgary-Montrose. I'm yet to find any ridings with notional results that are any different to the actual results at the last election on the old boundaries. The new Chestermere-Rocky View is identical to the old Foothills-Rocky View.

I think the most cringe-worthy, however, is their handling of Fort Mac...

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (old) was split into two ridings. It was completely split, from what I can tell, there were no areas from other ridings added to either one of the new ridings, it was completely just split down the middle to form two new ridings. The relevant numbers are:

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (old):
Enrolment: 26,701
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Greens - 300

Fort McMurray - Conklin:
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Other - 300

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (new):
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Other - 300

All they did was directly transfer the results from the old riding into BOTH the new ridings!

[Smid]

lol, oh dear! I should've taken a better look. Oh well, I guess it's back to the drawing board

Why would they advertise "why are the results different?" when they aren't?

My query, exactly!

[Smid]

Earl, great work on your Edmonton analysis. I guess Ray Martin was from the part of his old riding that got shifted into the new riding where he's competing this election?

Those polls showing vote switching since 2008 would be are very interesting!

[Smid]

May not be a formal requirement, just a personal attachment to the area? There were parts that transferred in from his riding, not substantially, but a small amount did.

Interesting that over half the PC voters last election are intending to vote PC this election! Just incredible! Given Wildrose's dramatic rise in the polls, unsurprising that they have the highest voter retention. Interesting that the NDP has the second highest voter retention figures.

[Smid]

At this rate, I'm wondering if Wildrose might wind up doing to the PCs what the federal NDP did to the Bloc Quebecois a year ago.  (Or if we might even be facing a retro-Lougheed circumstance in which no opposition party has official party status)

I would laugh so hard if Ted Morton was last pC standing... They should have elected him leader.

Thanks for fixing that earlier error for me, Earl!

[Smid]

Fantastic job, mate!

[Smid]

I've updated the blank map in the gallery (and also on the first page of this thread) to remove the Greens as an option, and to change the Wildrose colour to green.

[Smid]

New prediction: http://canadianelectionatlas.blogspot.ca/2012/04/2012-alberta-election-prediction-april.html

Does Calgary really vote that uniformly?

I think this link to Krago's poll-by-poll maps has been posted previously. Scroll down to Calgary. I believe there are some provincial ones out there, too.

[Smid]

Calgary is like one big suburb. There are a few areas that are more left leaning, but they will be drowned in roses.

What's with the Liberal strength in the city's northeast? Not where you'd expect it.

High number of immigrants from South Asia (my understanding is Vietnam and more recently, India). I think lots of manufacturing up there, too, and aircraft noise from the airport. I'll try to post a link to the demographic maps thread (although it's listed in the "special threads" thread).

[Smid]

Here is the demographic thread. There are some federal maps of Calgary near the bottom of the first page and some additional language maps on the second page. You'll note the combination of generally high % of low income, low % of high income, high number of manufacturing employees, low number with degrees, high number of trades, etc. Additionally, in the language maps, the highest proportion speaking a non-official language at 35% (the next highest is below 30%).

I asked my brother-in-law about it and he said mostly the immigrants are Indian, but I asked about Vietnamese and he said you can get good Vietnamese food there. Also a large number of generally low income immigrants, including from Europe.

[Smid]

So I guess the complete lack of red in the city centre is the only genuinely surprising bit.

Possibly vote splitting with the NDP? It's fairly red at the provincial level. Perhaps hometown advantage for Harper? Or low expectations for the Liberals leading to low turnout?

[Smid]

LOL at the 11% who thought Sherman was the best speaker.

"Looked and sounded like a Premier" was an interesting question. Especially considering you have two women, and Indian and well, the NDP guy. Not traditional Premier qualities.

Sounds to me like the 11% made their mind up about that before the debate began... Perhaps 11% really is the Liberal floor this election?

[Smid]

Liberals switching to PC could mean a PC pickup in Edmonton-Gold Bar. Federally it voted Conservative over NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona, so I think it's more likely to be one of the areas which could possibly even see a swing to PC, especially if the Liberal vote continues to decline (and Earl makes the point of Liberal-PC vote switching). PC strength/Wildrose weakness in Edmonton probably makes this riding more favourable to the PCs than many other ridings.

It would be quite interesting if, despite losing swathes of ridings across the province, the PCs could actually gain a seat.

[Smid]

Liberals switching to PC could mean a PC pickup in Edmonton-Gold Bar. Federally it voted Conservative over NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona, so I think it's more likely to be one of the areas which could possibly even see a swing to PC, especially if the Liberal vote continues to decline (and Earl makes the point of Liberal-PC vote switching). PC strength/Wildrose weakness in Edmonton probably makes this riding more favourable to the PCs than many other ridings.

It would be quite interesting if, despite losing swathes of ridings across the province, the PCs could actually gain a seat.

Anybody have the federal results for each provincial riding.  It would be interesting to see how the federal parties fared.  Also in maybe another topic, we should try and do this for all provincial ridings across the country.  In Ontario, only the Northern Ontario ridings are necessary as the Southern ones are identical to their federal counterparts.  I also believe the Liberals won Calgary-McCall although I could be wrong, while I think the NDP won 2 or 3 in Edmonton federally.  I think they also took Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood despite losing Edmonton East as the NDP was strong in the southwestern corner of the riding.  I think Edmonton Centre went Tory federally although they probably got in the 30s only, but the NDP and Liberals I think split the centre-left vote here unlike elsewhere in the city.  Could be the effect of Laurie Blakeman as well as the holdover from Anne McLellan who although out of politics, still is quite popular.

Krago did some great maps of city-wide federal vote, and the506 also did poll maps of individual ridings (his show winner and also support for each party, but only within one riding, whereas Krago's only show winner, but across the whole city for geographic trends, so I'd recommend looking at both. Krago's maps are at the Rabble website (I think I posted a link last week in this thread) and the506 has his own website, which I've linked to above.

[Smid]

They have failed. Polling hasn't suggested any late movements... so far.

BTW, this is a great site whose webmaster just emailed me: http://changealberta.ca/winnablecandidates.aspx

I saw that site last week, but it seems a bit heavily weighted for the Liberals. Of course, I'm glad when the "united" left gets it wrong, but I think if I were them, I'd switch E-Riverview and E-Gold Bar around. Both are largely covered by the E-Strathcona federal riding, but Gold Bar generally voted Conservative, while Riverview (south of the river) voted NDP federally. Of course, of the two, Riverview is probably the riding more likely to stay in the hands of either the Liberals or NDP, which is part of the reason I think the site is a bit biased to the Liberals.

[Smid]

Fair enough - you have more reason to be sensitive to Liberal vs NDP bias than I do, indeed, anything other than a balanced assessment of those two parties is likely to benefit the party I support, so I'll accept you vouching for them.

[Smid]

As always, some great work, Earl!

I plan on sharing on Facebook later today (perhaps over lunch, or after 5), when all my work-related friends won't think I have it open at the office all day...

[Smid]

What's the most conservative provincial riding in Alberta (by federal Conservative vote)? Cardston-Taber-Warner, the only seat the AA won in 2004? How high would the federal Conservative vote be there?

I believe the Wildrose leader ran in Cardstone-Taber-Warner last election, which could explain the higher vote there. The most conservative riding federally was Crowfoot. Provincially that's Drumheller-Stettler, Strathmore-Brooks and I think Little Bow. Maybe parts of other ridings. If I've misspelt any ridings or left out obvious provincial ridings in Crowfoot, I apologise. I'm not on computer and away from my maps and tables.

[Smid]

This can be potentially interesting. I care more about how it'll influence federal politics than the actual results, though. I would say hardly. Switching Harper's PCs for another right-wing party, lead by a federal Conservative. Who cares?

There may be some federal implications, the oft-ignored-by-the-party "Conservative" part of its name has been a bit of a negative, I think, in some of the federal polls, because of the unpopularity of the provincial government. At least, Alberta always seems to be far lower in the polls than at the election (although I could be wrong).

BC will also be important federally. Again, the BC Liberals are probably seen as having more in common with the federal Conservatives, and the unpopularity of the provincial government, and the strength of the provincial NDP opposition, may be flowing through to NDP support in federal polls. From that perspective, it really doesn't surprise me that the NDP currently out-polls the Conservatives in federal polls in BC... and I suspect a provincial NDP government may help the Tories claw back some support in the province.

[Smid]

Elections Alberta results page seems to be temporarily down. Here's the link, in case anyone wants to check it out once it starts working again: http://results.elections.ab.ca/wtResults.cfm