Hudak's Heroes - Cows, Coal and Government Cash

Don't change horses midstream, goes the saying. Something that could apply to the 2011 Ontario Election and this website as well. How's that, you ask? Well, we've recently tweaked our methodology just in time for the last episode of this mini-series on the greatest electoral shifts among the parties in 2011. Soon we'll be going back and adding in the adjustments, and changing our commentary accordingly.

In any case, we're going to be looking at where Tim Hudak managed to get out the vote for his party in 2011, by comparing over time the correlations to a bunch of demographic indicators from the 2006 Census (the 2006 census being the latest reliable census in Canada, naturally).

Because the data for Northern Ontario ridings comes from the 2001 census, it is rather dated, and lacks a lot of the finer detail of the 2006 survey. So, once again, the following is for the Rest of Ontario only: 

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).