Ontario Election 2022

[adma]

And in a way, much of what I say about the ONDP also presently pertains to the OLP--after all, they're going into this election in far worse parliamentary shape than the NDP was going into 2018, and Del Duca would seem to be far less personable a leader than Horwath is.  I'm making no bold claims for them expecting to win *now* (unless they are)--they're playing a longer game.

Elections aren't standalones; they're part of a chain.  So if Horwath fails and yet leaves her party in good enough shape that it can be passed on to the next set of able hands, no problem.  And ditto with Del Duca.

[adma]

*Could*.  But the initial indications seem to be Ford by status quo autopilot, barring something big jolt midcampaign.  (Yet because this is Ontario, such big jolts can never be ruled out.)

[adma]

As things begin, Nanos is showing PC 36.9, Lib 30.4, NDP 23.7, Green 4.3--fairly consistent with recent figures.  (It'd be interesting if the Tories get more seats on less share, due to Lib inefficiency.)

[adma]

Shocking in the sense that even Kathleen Wynne won her seat as Liberal leader in the last election despite the party's dismal finish.  Has there ever been an Ontario Liberal leader (provincially) who has not won their own riding?  That would be pretty remarkable, at least historic. I would call those things shocking, but guess we all interpret things differently.

David Peterson in 1990 immediately springs to mind; I think you have to go back to Mitchell Hepburn in 1945 to find another one.

John Wintermeyer, 1963.

Of course, there's no reason to fixate upon this being a "Liberal thing"; think of John Tory in 2007 (versus one Kathleen Wynne--and of course, then there's his subsequent HKLB byelection disaster)

[adma]

Another fabled Conservative leader to lose his own seat:  Premier George Drew in 1948 (to CCF temperance crusader Bill Temple).  And of course, the hapless Larry Grossman in 1987.

The NDP, though, hasn't seen defeated leadership since Ted Jolliffe (twice over) in the 40s and 50s.

[adma]

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.

Robert Bourassa was personally defeated *both* in the Levesque election of 1976 *and* in his successful return to power in '85.  (And Quebec saw consecutive defeated-in-their-own-seat premiers more recently: Jean Charest in 2012, and Pauline Marois in 2014.)

[adma]

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.

Yes, that equals - or even exceeds - Macdonald's 1878 loss (though Bourassa's riding was a natural PQ seat that he'd only taken at a by-election).

Just like Christy Clark's riding was an NDP-trending seat that *she'd* only taken at a byelection.

[adma]

In every federal and provincial election since the reconfiguration of the map, the "downtown three" (Spadina-Fort York, Toronto Centre, University-Rosedale) have all voted the same way.  Will the streak continue?

In University-Rosedale, former environment commissioner and high-profile environmental lawyer Dianne Saxe is running for the Greens and is very visible.  I'm guessing she takes relatively equally from NDP and Liberal voters.

Though U-R (and T-S before it) is a place where Tim Grant has typically run the most visible Green campaign in Toronto in recent years--so there's some infrastructural foundation in place.

Because of the still-relative-freshness of the "downtown 3" configuration, I'm not sure how much I'd read into the "all voting the same way" pattern--federally, the picture's been skewed by the Justin sweeps, and provincially it's been skewed by the scale of '18's promiscuous-progressive Wynne rejection.  Though in all 3, it must be said that the Libs face some significant speedbumps--in TC, KWT's candidacy; in S-FY, hangover from the federal Kevin Vuong misfire; in U-R, Saxe's candidacy as a potential non-incumbent opposition-splitter...

[adma]

The Liberals still have not nominated a full slate of candidates, only 116, less than the Greens even (120).  The PC and ONDP both have candidates in all 124 ridings.  Some of the ridings you would think would at least be competitive Liberal ridings, like Barrie-Innisfil, Liberal Ann Hoggarth's riding prior to the last election I believe, no Liberal candidate yet.

Hah, I lived in what's now Barrie-Innisfil for a couple of years when I was a kid, I should give the OLP a call.

It wasn't so much Hoggarth's riding prior to the last election as it contained half of her old riding (the old coterminous Barrie riding having been split into two rurban entities), it was actually the less Lib-congenial of the two, and she only ran there under the presumption that Patrick Brown was running in the other one.  And in the process, she became the only Lib incumbent to lose her deposit.  (Still, given the 2nd place polling, one'd expect better than a Manitoban incomplete slate for the OLP--though yes, it's less than a week into the campaign)

[adma]

A more impressive streak that is likely to be break this time: Toronto's two "Jewish" ridings: Eglinton-Lawrence and York Centre.  They've voted the same way federally since Eglinton-Lawrence was created in 1979 and provincially in 1999 (and the somewhat similar old ridings of Lawrence and Wilson Heights stayed Liberal in both '90 and '95).  The main difference between the two of course is the "Brahmin" North Toronto component of Eglinton-Lawrence.  The breaking of the pattern was evident provincially in 2018 of course when there was a "Tory vs. Lib Dem" pattern in Eg-Law.  Ironically in the 80s Eg-Law would probably have gone PC if had its modern-day boundaries (since then Brahmin Liberalism, the rightwing shift of the increasingly Orthodox-dominated Jewish community and Ford Nation populism has flipped the pattern).

Note that Eg-Law also has the "west of Allen" component which is less Jewish, but still very "ethnic" (Italian, Filipino, black). York Centre has this too. In recent years, this demographic has been another reason the Liberals have usually held off the Tories despite their major decline in support among Jewish Torontonians.

But that latter element is where the undermining effect of the aforementioned "Ford Nation populism" kicks in--those parts of Eg-Law still did generally go Lib in '18, but w/much more sluggish non-landslide shares than in the past; by my e-day calculation, W of Allen + Lawrence Heights went 39.99% Lib vs 32.54% for the Tories and 24.19% for NDP, and that's even accounting for such continued Liberal vote-sink factors as the Villa Colombo complex.  (By comparison, Mike Colle got 38.67% riding-wide.  It's only in N Toronto where his shares at large rose into the mid-to-upper-40s and beyond.)

[adma]

The Liberals still have not nominated a full slate of candidates, only 116, less than the Greens even (120).  The PC and ONDP both have candidates in all 124 ridings.  Some of the ridings you would think would at least be competitive Liberal ridings, like Barrie-Innisfil, Liberal Ann Hoggarth's riding prior to the last election I believe, no Liberal candidate yet.

Hah, I lived in what's now Barrie-Innisfil for a couple of years when I was a kid, I should give the OLP a call.

It wasn't so much Hoggarth's riding prior to the last election as it contained half of her old riding (the old coterminous Barrie riding having been split into two rurban entities), it was actually the less Lib-congenial of the two, and she only ran there under the presumption that Patrick Brown was running in the other one.  And in the process, she became the only Lib incumbent to lose her deposit.  (Still, given the 2nd place polling, one'd expect better than a Manitoban incomplete slate for the OLP--though yes, it's less than a week into the campaign)

I'd say the demographics of South Barrie have changed the riding's political leanings a bit, and I think make it more competitive than when Hoggarth won.  It's a lot of former GTA and Toronto dwellers who moved out for affordability, but want to be able to commute. Regardless this is not the place I would expect no Liberal candidate, they are at least somewhat competitive.

Actually, those "changed demographics" were already basically in place when Hoggarth won, which is how she (and Aileen Carroll before her) came to win in the first place; previously, Barrie was assumed to be too archetypally whitebread too-far-from-the-inner-GTA Common Sense Revolution Tory.  However, the Innisfil part really has more political kinship with York-Simcoe (which it came from); and in a way, it's a tug-of-war btw/"urbanizing" and "exurbanizing" impulses here, with "exurbanizing" so far having the upper hand.  And a lot of that "affordability" argument could just as well be used on behalf of York-Simcoe (particularly in light of booming suburban growth in Bradford and East Gwillimbury); yet nobody's calling *that* on behalf of the Libs any time soon.

So it may be "generically" moderating, but let's not jump the gun here.  In practice, all it might mean is the difference btw/a Tory majority and a Tory submajority.

[adma]

Interestingly the NDP did win three outer Toronto "Ford Nation" seats, showing that Ford explicitly under the PC banner was a bridge too far for some.  But only in Scarborough SW was it really a commanding victory.  In YSW and Humber they had a voting base and sort of came up the middle to win (thanks to the PCs becoming much more viable and turning them into three-way races because of the Ford effect).

Compounding it all was the NDP winning both of the latter with a *lower* share of the vote than they lost with in 2014.

[adma]

Indeed, the LPC wins NW Toronto and Scarborough with huge margins, but they were also bulwarks of support for the Fords municipally which had significant carryover into provincial politics too.

This is why I'm kind of skeptical of the NDP's chances in this election.  GTA is obviously crucial and the GTA is filled with "Ford Liberals." So either they stick with Ford or they return "home" to the Liberals.  What is the NDP's case to the Ford Liberal voter?  I don't think "we're just 10 seats away from forming government" cuts it.

And on top of that, the NDP is likely to suffer from the old "oh, they can't win" phenomenon. This happened post-Layton too. In fact, the ONDP's current predicament is pretty similar to the federal NDP's in 2015. They had improved continuously in the Layton years, generated a lot of hype in the 2011 election, leapfrogged the Liberals, but alas it wasn't enough and it was a Tory majority. Basically the same thing happened provincially in 2018. So there's sometimes a sense that the NDP just can't win, even at their strongest. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because if people don't vote NDP because they "can't win", well, of course they won't win.

Though '15 was complicated by Layton dying, Mulcair tanking, and Justin being, well, the new Jack.

In '22 provincially, besides the fact that major media gatekeepers have *never* been at ease w/the NDP camp, Andrea Horwath's been unavoidably a sitting duck for Doug Ford's manner of governance--which gives new meaning to the notion of "she can't win".  (That is, the moment she *tries* to assert herself as Leader of the Opposition, you can picture Doug Ford turning a key and making her skitter off like a mechanical toy, like Spike does to Droopy in a Tex Avery cartoon or something)

[adma]

COVID also had a "reset" effect I think. For the past two years, your average Ontario voter was mostly tuning into provincial politics to get the COVID updates, new measures, etc, which Ford and his cabinet were doing basically unilaterally. Some were popular, some unpopular, but it was very much about the government, people didn't have much time for an opposition that effectively couldn't do anything. So the fact that the Liberals had 7 seats to the NDP's 40 didn't really matter. In the end, it was Ford vs not Ford, which leveled the non-Ford playing field, which really was an advantage to the Liberals because they're Ontario's traditional non-PC party.

Yeah, ironically, a pandemic's just the thing to play into Doug's "I'm in charge here" hands.

And as for traditional advantages, I'm already sensing this election spun in terms of Ford landslide simply on grounds of his "defeating" Del Duca, while the NDP's treading water because that's all they ever do, tread water, that's the official media narrative.  "Officially", it's still a Doug vs Del Duca race, and the polling's meant to bear that out.  By that telling, you'd almost think it's the Libs who came out of '18 with 40 seats, and the NDP with 7--and according to said "official media narrative", that's the way it *should* have been...

[adma]

Looking like with the PCs ahead in Northern Ontario, and places Timmins, Mushkegowuk-James Bay, Algoma-Manitoulin, Kiwentinoon are learning PC, we are headed to super majority status.  Looks like it could be only Gélinas and Vanthof who will be back from the Northern ONDP caucus. I think these areas have voted for Andrea for the past 3-4 elections, it's almost like the "change" vote here is Doug.  

It can be very. Is leading to try to apply uniform swings to these northern ridings. Politics is much more personality based and there is a lot more loyalty to incumbents. Also a riding like Kiwetinoon is mostly Indigenous and the NDP incumbent there is very high profile

And of course, the Indigenous vote is notoriously hard to poll--the Kiiwetinoong numbers could well be overly plumped in the largely WWC resource towns...

[adma]

Mainstreet poll out today has the NDP ahead in St. Catharines. Very interesting if true. Also an earlier poll has the NDP only back 1 in Ottawa West-Nepean.  OWN seems like it's getting more and more progressive these days.

It's crazy to think that John Baird was consistently elected under virtually the same boundaries as OWN. Suburban Ottawa has definitely shifted left rapidly.

True, though OWN is a 'suburb' in the same way Scarborough or North York is.

I find that pretty interesting about Ottawa's older suburbs, there's a lot of socio-economic diversity. But a mix of low-income immigrants in high-rise towers and middle-class government workers is a pretty bad fit for Ford's PCs - not to mention the Franco-Ontarian factor, which probably eliminates any chances of flipping Orleans. I still expect them to hold Carleton, Kanata-Carleton and Nepean, but OWN is probably gone, unless the NDP-OLP split is particularly deadly.

Kanata and Nepean (which is mostly Barrhaven) are more 'true' suburbs, though they are trending left (read: Liberal) as well. Of course, west of the Rideau, the Franco population isn't particularly significant, so the ingrained Liberal vote is weaker. Might explain why the NDP did better in OWN in 2018 than in Ottawa-Vanier or Ottawa South, the former I thought the NDP would have had a better shot at the time.

It might also be said that given the present-day (and probable future-day) Nepean draw, Lisa MacLeod would be endangered if it were more of a PC-unfavourable election.  And as for John Baird: even *he* never won OWN with/by terribly much (i.e. w/43-45% of the vote, even in supposedly Tory-favourable '11), so the seeds of future vulnerability were already there...

[adma]

Scarborough Southwest is perhaps the most interesting.  As I said before, Doly Begum's win was quite decisive, it wasn't an "come up the middle" victory like YSW and Humber.  Does Duverger's Law work in her favor there? 

I really think Doly Begum was one of the ONDP's most underrated sleeper successes of '18--it seems like she just hit the ground running, ran to win, almost like a demonstration project for the party's urban/suburban strategy that year; and unlike YSW or HRBC, the party didn't even have a foundation of '14 overachievement-in-loss to build upon.  However, it *is* the successor riding to Stephen Lewis's 70s stronghold; and maybe, in a way, Begum perfected an ethno-millennial update on Lewis-style grassroots campaigning--like, she truly deserves more credit than she usually gets...

[adma]

For Parry Sound-Muskoka:

Green base: 5%
Persuadable Greens: 15% (a good chunk of this are NDP swing voters)
Promiscuous progressives: 10%
Tory base: 40%
NDP base: 10%
Liberal base: 10%
Liberal-Tory swing voters: 10%

So, I don't think the Greens have a path to victory, unless they're able to win over Liberal-Tory swing voters.

But they nonetheless have a path to Liberal proxy, i.e. win or lose, this is a provincial version of a "Mike Morrice" wet dream situation.  Like, this was *already* their top 2nd-seat-in-the-Legislature target--and you can be sure now that there's some kind of Red/Green campaign-coalition deal in the works.

Indeed, PSM has already been a node for a Red/Green crossover dynamic: Richard Thomas, who came within 6 votes of defeating "Landslide Ernie" Eves in 1981 and then ran for the provincial Liberal leadership in '82, went on to join the Green Party and become by far their most successful candidate in Ontario into the beginning of this century...

[adma]

But they nonetheless have a path to Liberal proxy, i.e. win or lose, this is a provincial version of a "Mike Morrice" wet dream situation.  Like, this was *already* their top 2nd-seat-in-the-Legislature target--and you can be sure now that there's some kind of Red/Green campaign-coalition deal in the works.

Indeed, PSM has already been a node for a Red/Green crossover dynamic: Richard Thomas, who came within 6 votes of defeating "Landslide Ernie" Eves in 1981 and then ran for the provincial Liberal leadership in '82, went on to join the Green Party and become by far their most successful candidate in Ontario into the beginning of this century...

All Greens need to win PSM is for some scandal to cause the PCs to have to disown their candidate two weeks before the election!

That's why I stopped short of declaring "path to victory".  Or, given the kind of riding it is, Matt Richter is more of a Shane Jolley than a Mike Morrice in practice...

[adma]

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...

[adma]

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.

However, judging from the actual bullet-point polls within the week shown, there seems a bit of "Trump blue/orange sharpie" speculative dubiousness about the PC and, even more so, the NDP trendlines.  There simply isn't enough variation to draw any such conclusions about trajectory.

Sure, it's how extrapolation works; but it's also what gives this kind of "exponential algorithming" a bit of a psephological-quackery rep, up there with (as has been mentioned re Kiiwetinoong) using uniform-swing to project landslide PC seat totals in the North...

[adma]

Quite right; the lines are beginning to settle down a little more now (will update the graph if/when any polls from yesterday come in).

For those interested in the minutiae, the data from which the trendlines are derived are from 13 Mar to the present, and the trendline formula itself is a six-order polynomial (normally I use four - see the poll graphs for other elections - but it didn't produce very good lines for the 2018-22 period). Nothing nefarious involved.

Still, it looks less like an actual reflection of ground reality, than some kind of graphic-cooking wishful projection on the Liberals' part, eager to assert themselves as the *only* realistic electable alternative to the PCs.  "See!  This the trendline!  The New Democrats are going nowhere, folks!"  Pushing the notion of a Mulcair '15 (or Wynne '18) tailspin-in-the-works that isn't really there.
In fact, the NDP's been fairly stable in the low-to-mid-20s range for some time now, and that already could have been inferred from early in the campaign.  An "inconvenient" kind of "stable", sure, esp. for those invested in that more Lib-centric strategic-defeat-of-the-FordCons bugaboo: "gee, that New Democrat support isn't quite rolling over and playing dead the way we wish--maybe we ought to engage in some graphic push-polling"...

[adma]

Re Timmins & Parry Sound-Muskoka

Timmins --> Easiest riding to campaign in the province since it's relatively small geographically AND in terms of population (40k ish) after the 2 New Northern ridings were created.  Any remaining Liberals are pretty much die hards (only got 8% of the vote last time), most would have jumped to NDP/Con in the last election.  Despite that even if you give those 8% of voters to the PCs, they still fall short. It's more about how much of an ONDP --> PC swing happens, might happen. Still too hard to say.

Parry Sound-Muskoka --> I think it's the perfect storm here for the Greens.  Not only will the Liberal voters change to Green, it might actually also have an effect on would-be NDP voters to swap to Green seeing as now there's one clear alternative. The PC Candidate is not an incumbent, so there's an opportunity to get former PC voters too. The new PC Candidate is also not the most attractive guy, this shouldn't matter, but these things do tend to affect voters.  If you look at Graydon Smith, and then Matt Richter, the people of Muskoka especially the skiers, wakeboarder, under 40s who are all about active lifestyles, will not be moving for Smith.

Actually, I'd almost argue that Graydon Smith *does* have a sort of "attractiveness"--that is, if electing an MPP who bears an uncanny resemblance to Peter Griffin is your thing.  (And when push comes to shove: sure, Muskoka might project "active lifestyle" to the outside observer, but the silent majority/plurality of PSM's constituents are, well, "folks", to use that Doug Ford-ism.)

[adma]

The story in Ontario is that while the CCF/NDP has occasionally become official opposition, they have never done for two elections in a row. The CCF became official opposition in 1943, then 3rd in 1945, then OO in 1948, then back to third in 1951, the OO again in 1975 and then back to 3rd (by 1 seat) in 1977. Of course one exception to this was 1987 when the NDP became official opposition to the Liberals and then WON in 1990!

Ontarians and the media and punditocracy tend to react the the NDP coming in second as if it was some fluke or flash in the pan...in 2018 the NDP took 40 seats and the Liberals took 7 and the refrain is always (oh people were just mad at Kathleen Wynne but deep down they were still Liberals). I have a hunch that the PCs will win a majority and the Liberals will have a bit of a "dead cat bounce" from 2018 - but in seats we may have the NDP around 30 seats and the Libs back in the teens - and then it will not longer be a fluke that the Liberals are the third party in Ontario. My pie in the sky prediction after that is Horwath retires, Marit Stiles is acclaimed as the new ONDP leader and she becomes premier after the 2026 election!

I wouldn't jump *too* much to conclusions there (after all, who knows who'll be leading the Libs in '26)--however, the OLP should have known going into this election that given the scale of their '18 defeat, recovery *could* be, at least when it comes to seat numbers, not a single-stage process.  And that even their present apparently favourable polling figures are exceptionally soft.  But of course, if they were assuming that they'd be "obviously" roaring back to a clear and obvious Official Opposition status under Del Duca right *now*--as opposed to a more equivocal '75/77-type result, which'd open up those "anti-Ford coalition government" possibilities but, y'know, is a bit more complicated than the Libs having the upper hand...

What'd probably be most dismaying to the Liberal camp is the likelihood of Horwath's relinquishing her leadership *not* being a knives-out-for-her affair; but a rather civil passing of the baton (to Stiles or whomever else)

[adma]

Del Duca is not going to even win Woodbridge, is he?

All the fundamentals suggest that Woodbridge should be a pretty easy PC hold in this election, except for the major factor that a leader is running there. He did get swept in 2018, but used to get very strong results before (I remember in 2018 people genuinely thought Woodbridge would be competitive). Del Duca's a Woodbridge boy, certainly no parachute candidate, and has represented it before. That said, Woodbridge is also Ford Nation.

Yeah I remember those, saying he'd be among the surviving 7-10 Libs.  Some universal swing models have him competitive because the margin in 2014 was deceptively large.  Or because "Italians are Liberals" (lol).

He didn't even lose in a semi-dignified way, Sousa/Flynn kind of way (Mississauga-Lakeshore and Oakville).  It was a blowout.

Well, he still had over 30%--but that was more the dead cat bounce of where he was coming from.  That is, conventional "historical" wisdom had Vaughan-Woodbridge far more on the Libs' plate than Oakville or Mississauga-Lakeshore (the predecessors which went Tory or near-Tory in '87's annus horribilis).