The Messy Job of Finding the Ontario Swing Voter

Today we're going to look for the Ontario swing voter.

On Election night, when we're standing there in front of the TVs, red-faced, waiting for the vote totals to trickle in from some uncalled riding, who's fault is it? Whose hesitation between parties is keeping us from getting some sleep that night?

Building on our prior experience with correlations, we decided to look for the census data that corresponded the closest with small electoral margins.

Small margins = swing voters, according to our thinking. Opportunities for growth for the parties.

The result of our search was rather surprising.

The Front Lines of Ontario - Battleground Clusters

Number crunching and statistical analysis can get you some pretty strange things.

You've probably heard of the idea of "battleground ridings". But in this entry, we're going to take a look at battleground clusters, a name we've just made up for different k-means clusters of Ontario electoral districts.

How We Did It

We told our statistical software program to divvy up all Ontario ridings by party votes in 2011, as a percentage of electors. This puts a party's relative attractiveness into the context of how well it was able to get out the vote on election day.

We might think of these Battleground Clusters as battle fronts on a map. A battle that I must sadly view from the sidelines (for now!), as I don't work in any paid capacity for a political party, consultancy, etc. I will let the professionals be my judge.

(I am also pleased to finally be able to offer some insight into Northern Ontario ridings, because this data doesn't depend on inconsistent, well-dated census data).

What are immigrants anyway? Conservative Progress on City Dwellers

PC - it's a brand of food at the grocery store, a type of computer, a rather dated pop culture epithet, and also a political party in Ontario. The Progressive Conservative party, under its relatively new leader, Tim Hudak, didn't manage to seal the deal for a majority government in 2011.

Rather like his transatlantic counterpart Michael Howard in 2005, the PCs failed to capitalize on fatigue with a would-be third term government, and were outshone by a third-party upstart, in that case Charles Kennedy's Lib Dems (though we all know how that turned out). 

Here is a rather extensive comparison of the 2011 Progressive Conservative platform against the NDP and the Ontario Liberals, although it all reads much like the instruction manual for a microwave.

How to Lose Toronto

One bump in the road encountered by the Hudak team was its controversial criticism of tax credit programs for hiring immigrants. Having been seen, rightly or wrongly, to boldly go after one of the sacred cows of globalization, the shifts in support between the 2011 and 2007 elections certainly reflect that: