Quebec election, 2007

[Verily]

Could you possibly do a set of maps showing ADQ vote by county?

I dont think that's possible. By region, perhaps.

Wikipedia has the vote by region on their page. The ADQ's worst region was Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine, with 14.92% of the vote. Their best region was  Chaudière-Appalaches, with 51.69% of the vote.

[cp]

While there's definitely truth to the contention that the ADQ rise was a part of a protest vote by Quebeckers, the size and extent of the rise indicates there's something else at work too.

Protest parties rarely do as well as the ADQ did in Quebec. The NDP nationally is a good example of this - rarely more than a handful of seats, and most of them via a split in the vote of the major parties. But the ADQ got within a hair of winning a minority. Granted, there's probably a certain electoral inertia to this, but a close look at the 2006 federal returns shows that there's something bigger at play.

The ridings where the ADQ broke through, or nearly did, almost perfectly match up to the areas where the Tories brokethrough in 2006 or where they made stunning gains (keeping in mind that they were so low to begin with, any gains could be seen as stunning). It looks like a watershed has broken with sovereignty no longer dictating the electoral allegiances of Quebeckers. The Mulroney-era coalition of soft nationalists and traditional conservatives seems to be reasserting itself.

However, it's not so cut and dry. The BQ is still locally popular in terms of individual candidates in their ridings. As well, the conservative populism of the Tories and ADQ is located outside the Montreal/Outaouais region. There's Quebec City/Montreal rivalries apparent in their rhetoric, as well as a rural/urban values split.

What this means, I think, is that the Tories will have to work very hard to pry the Bloc's ridings out of their cold, dead hands. As well, the Liberals will probably make some gains in Montreal as the Tories ally themselves more and more with the non-Montreal mentality of the rest of Quebec. Provincially, the next election will probably see the PQ continue to languish while the Liberals and ADQ duke it out, most likely to the benefit of the Liberals.

[Verily]

While there's definitely truth to the contention that the ADQ rise was a part of a protest vote by Quebeckers, the size and extent of the rise indicates there's something else at work too.

Protest parties rarely do as well as the ADQ did in Quebec. The NDP nationally is a good example of this - rarely more than a handful of seats, and most of them via a split in the vote of the major parties. But the ADQ got within a hair of winning a minority. Granted, there's probably a certain electoral inertia to this, but a close look at the 2006 federal returns shows that there's something bigger at play.

The ridings where the ADQ broke through, or nearly did, almost perfectly match up to the areas where the Tories brokethrough in 2006 or where they made stunning gains (keeping in mind that they were so low to begin with, any gains could be seen as stunning). It looks like a watershed has broken with sovereignty no longer dictating the electoral allegiances of Quebeckers. The Mulroney-era coalition of soft nationalists and traditional conservatives seems to be reasserting itself.

However, it's not so cut and dry. The BQ is still locally popular in terms of individual candidates in their ridings. As well, the conservative populism of the Tories and ADQ is located outside the Montreal/Outaouais region. There's Quebec City/Montreal rivalries apparent in their rhetoric, as well as a rural/urban values split.

What this means, I think, is that the Tories will have to work very hard to pry the Bloc's ridings out of their cold, dead hands. As well, the Liberals will probably make some gains in Montreal as the Tories ally themselves more and more with the non-Montreal mentality of the rest of Quebec. Provincially, the next election will probably see the PQ continue to languish while the Liberals and ADQ duke it out, most likely to the benefit of the Liberals.

This pure sensationalism. It's happened before quite recently in Ontario (1990), and there's no reason to expect that the consequences of this election will be any different.

Moreover, the ADQ didn't actually rise as dramatically as you make it out to have - from 18% to 30% is large, but not phenomenal. They did well in seats because the PLQ and PQ were both also very close in votes, and merely managed to bring their seat count to near proportionality (4 seats for 18% was obviously not proportionality).

The NDP federally is a terrible point of reference because the NDP has been around a long time. It wins relatively few protest votes any more because it is an established party; at the beginning of its existence it won more (see the dramatic rise of the CCF in 1945). Today, there are NDP voters and NDP-Liberal swing voters and even a few NDP-Conservative swing voters, and the boat doesn't get rocked very far.

A better comparison might be the Progressive Party back in the 1920s, a flash-in-the-pan protest party that rose from near-nothing to second place on a huge protest vote in 1921 (sounds like the ADQ, doesn't it?), then faded away over the next few elections, subsumed into the Liberals by 1930.

Now, I'm not calling the doom of the ADQ just yet, but be wary of calling this a titanic shift in Quebec politics. Remember 1990 in Ontario.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Remember 1990 in Ontario.

The thing about that election is that the NDP did too well; one of the biggest problems Rae had is that about half of his caucus were nobodies who would (under normal conditions) have never have had a hope in hell of winning. And most of the rest (including many in Rae's cabinet) weren't much better; the party wasn't really fit for government yet. But if it had made large gains but still lost, it would have been fit for government five years later and politics in Ontario (and perhaps Canada in general) would look completely different to what it does now.

[Verily]

Remember 1990 in Ontario.

The thing about that election is that the NDP did too well; one of the biggest problems Rae had is that about half of his caucus were nobodies who would (under normal conditions) have never have had a hope in hell of winning. And most of the rest (including many in Rae's cabinet) weren't much better; the party wasn't really fit for government yet. But if it had made large gains but still lost, it would have been fit for government five years later and politics in Ontario (and perhaps Canada in general) would look completely different to what it does now.

The NDP had come in second place in Ontario in 1975 and 1943 (as the CCF), both times behind the Conservatives and ahead of the Liberals, and things didn't change radically then.

Even in a place where that did happen, Nova Scotia, federal voting patterns have hardly changed at all as the provincial Liberals faded away over the last few elections.