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.

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).