Who's been losing support since Ontario's 2007 election?

What exactly happened in Ontario's 2011 election? How did we go from a Liberal majority to a "major minority?" To find out, we took another look at our Ontario clusters, this time checking out who each cluster supported in 2007, which we added to our analysis from the other day. Then we added our signature, 4am-style commentary to the whole shebang.

Read more - Who supported who in 2007?

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.

How to Classify Your Neighbors - Ontario Geodemographic Segments

We've completed our segmentation system by adding with even more Dissemination Area segments.

We now have a full 40 micro-segments, which we think offer a pretty good level of detail about particular blocks of territory that equate to about a city block each.

Technically there are 54 different segments, but fourteen of them contain 5 or fewer Dissemination Areas in the whole of Ontario.

Anyway, you can now browse the whole province of Ontario, in all its newfound geo-demographic-segmented glory!

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).