EKOS Poll: PC Majority Government

The latest figures released by EKOS and fed into our projection model suggest that the PCs would end up with a solid majority government and bring the Ontario Liberals below 19 seats.

The Ontario NDP, meanwhile, would gain a handful of seats and Andrea Horwath would become the leader of the official opposition.

This is something to keep in mind as the Liberals and NDP negotiate over the upcoming budget.

Perhaps the NDP's list of micro-demands are a very deft move, as Horwath's reasonable gains for various constituencies in the middle of a jobs crisis wouldn't be seen as precipitating an election. If she obtains them, people may thank her. If she does not, and the Liberals take a my-way-or-the-highway approach to the budget, causing an election, the Liberals will look bad for having nothing to offer on youth unemployment.

The prize of earning Official Opposition status might be very valuable symbolically for the NDP, even though it would actually represent a net loss of power for them.

On the other hand, Hudak's preferred policies are extreme enough to likely prompt the NDP and Liberal bases to pressure their leaders to find a solution to avoid an election, which looks set to lead to an even more austerity-prone government.

My g-g-generation - Young people for Anyone But McGuinty?

In Ontario politics, Dalton McGuinty may be yesterday's news, but his Liberal troops live on to fight another day. The new leader, Kathleen Wynne has a lot of territory to cover if she wants to get her government back up to a majority.

"Let's pretend you'll have careers..."

Where will she start? We already looked at where the Liberals in 2011 gained support compared to their 2007 score. Obviously this wasn't enough, as they went from a majority to a minority, meaning that afterwards they merely held the plurality of seats at Queen's Park, the provincial legislature. So we're going to look at what went wrong for them in the October 2011 elections.

NDP vote in the 2011 election, continued

Last time, we looked at the greatest gains in support for NDP among various segments of Ontario's voters for the 2011 election. This time we get to be the bad news bear and look at their biggest drops in support. The results are not exactly what one might expect.

Remember, we are using basic correlations (CORREL) data, the number-cruncher caveman's club, and there are a few issues with ages represented in the data: the people the census data describe are now five years older. But let's have a look anyway. Scroll down to get past the rather messy numbers.

High School Swingers - The NDP Party vote and the 2011 Election in Ontario

Having downloaded the numbers and put them together in our Excel file, we can begin poking around the underbelly of Ontario politics to see which voters have been moving around the most between elections.

As you know, there were elections in Ontario for provincial parliament in 2007 and 2011. The first saw Dalton McGuinty's Liberals returned with a majority, while the second saw them reduced to a minority government, or a "major minority", as Premier McGuinty put it at the time, as they were one seat away from being able to withstand a confidence vote.

One of the factors that led to a minority government in Queen's Park, was the fact that the third-party New Democrats under new leader Andrea Horwath increased their seat take: they nearly doubled their seats, going from winning 10 in the 2007 election in Ontario, to 17 after the polls of 2011.

What's the secret behind their relative success? We're going to be prodding around at the numbers to see what we can make of them, using advanced statistical techniques, and some not so advanced. For now we're going to use the caveman's club, the simple correlation between the increase in two sets of numbers, or CORREL in Excel.

Then we're going to do it massively, abusing numbers and figures and all of science. We should take this opportunity to note that we're aware that looking at riding-level census data to find patterns among individual voters is not the ideal way of going about things. And that due to the limitations of the 2001 census, this data is only for southern Ontario (ROO as we've called it on this site a few times, i.e. not the 11 ridings of northern Ontario).