Who's Voting for Who? Ontario Political Parties and Voter Segments

To see how our Ontario demographic segments relate to votes for different parties in Ontario's elections, we decided to look for some basic correlations (wiki) in the voting data.

Here are the results. You might consider this a test, to see if the segments make intuitive socio-political sense.

Happy Chinese New Year!

The pols are on Twitter, Facebook, shaking hands, and out wishing you a Happy Chinese New Year! But who is winning the Chinese vote?

Total Population - Chinese Correlations to Vote (% Electors)	2007	2011	Difference
Liberal	0.17	0.22	0.05
PC	-0.28	-0.32	-0.04
NDP	-0.10	-0.11	-0.01
Green	-0.21	-0.16	0.05
Non-Turnout	0.43	0.41	-0.02

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: