John Brewin on Politics

E-Day plus 6 (or E-Day minus 1,455!) LPC 39.5% (184 seats), CPC 31.9% (99 seats), NDP 19.7% (44 seats), BQ 4.7% (10) and Greens 3.4% (1). It turns out the 42nd Parliament will look like most of Canada’s Parliaments since 1935. Congratulations to the Liberals. They won a clear political victory. We now know why the Conservatives focused their pre-election advertising only on Justin Trudeau. They had discovered something that wasn’t indicated by the polls at that time: the Liberals were their chief threat. In the end, the pollsters got it right – especially after their final polls were completed on the last Sunday of the campaign. They landed very close to the actual result and pointed to the Liberal majority. Most of them probably got it right throughout the campaign. They accurately told us who was ahead and picked up the steady shift of anti-Harper voters from the NDP to voting Liberal in significant numbers. The seat predictors didn’t perform as well as the pollsters. They ...

E-Day minus 1 (!) If the polls are correct, tomorrow’s election will not produce a majority government. The Globe Forecaster says there is a merely 15% chance the Liberals will win a majority. Not a single poll, nor any combination of polls or seat prediction sites, gives the other parties any chance of a majority. In the final hours, projected results can change for any number of reasons. The continuation of a swing in voters. The return of voters to an earlier choice more consistent with their history or values.   The efficiency of a party’s E-Day organization and its ability to “pull” its vote.   Possibly a combination of all three. In the recent UK election commentators identified a handful of voters as “shy Conservatives.” They suspected that these voters didn’t tell pollsters the truth during the campaign. Instead they kept what they feared might be unpopular opinions to themselves until Election Day. A Liberal majority would not be a complete surprise althou...

E-Day minus 8 As we enter the final week of the election campaign, the Conservatives haven’t moved any closer to a majority. In fact, they may have fallen back. The latest Nanos poll reports a 2% point drop in CPC support in the past two days to 29% – back to where it was when the campaign started. The trade deal and niqab controversy haven't helped them. The Liberals have moved ahead of the NDP in projected seat counts. Will a Liberal surge of strategic voting cause the NDP vote to collapse, or will the NDP regain ground in the last eight days? The polls cannot be relied on to answer this question. The final election results will be determined in part by the effectiveness of the two campaigns, including their capacity to get out their vote, and the NDP's ability to hold off the Bloc’s challenge in Quebec. For the most part, however, the results will turn on how anti-Harper voters resolve the tensions created by having to choose between three parties – and, in Quebec, ...

E-Day minus 15 Anxiety is like a virus – it spreads from host to host quickly. It's contagious. When anxiety is high, people lose their capacity for reflection. Everyone left of Jason Kenney has been flattened by at least one anxiety attack this past week. Not only are the politics of division stirring up deep-seated fears, there is persistent anxiety that somehow Harper will pull it off in the end. There is anxiety amongst NDP supporters that the opportunity of a lifetime will be lost. Dramatic swings toward and away from the Liberal Party are making their supporters dizzy and disoriented. Progressive voters, looking for any port in the storm, have become desperate for reliable strategic voting advice. All of this is very bad for morale and weakens our collective capacity for clear-headed analysis and decision-making. Let’s see what the numbers actually say – not what the media says they say – to regain some perspective. None of the public polls show the Conservatives c...

E-Day minus 22 This week, the average of the national polls show the Conservatives and Liberals at 31% and the NDP at 28%. Grenier’s weighted averages are similar (with last week’s percentages in brackets): CPC 30.7% (29.7), LPC 30.8 (29.7) and NDP 29.1 (31.1). The NDP has dropped 2% points. The others have picked up about 1% point each. Despite the slide, the NDP still leads the Liberals in most seat projections. And seats are what count most.  If the NDP can maintain support even at this week’s level, Mulcair will be the Prime Minister after October 19. The week’s polls and seat projections show that the Conservatives have not made any significant progress towards a majority – the only way Harper can stay on as Prime Minister.  As noted in earlier posts, it doesn’t matter if the Conservatives have the most seats as long as they don’t win a majority. The others will find a way to defeat him. Their constituents will demand it. What matters is which party – the NDP or ...

E-Day minus 29 This week’s report on the state of the race: 1.  The Conservatives show no signs of movement towards a majority. They continue to be stuck around 30% of the vote and around 120 to 130 projected seats in the next Parliament. You'll recall that a majority is 170. The Globe and Mail Forecaster advises that there is only a 1% chance that any party, including the Conservatives, will get a majority. In other words, there is more than a 99% likelihood that Harper won’t get a majority and will have to resign or be voted out of office in the House of Commons. This isn't likely to change over the next month. 2.  The NDP continues to lead the Liberals in projected seats. The  average of eight election prediction sites put the NDP and the Conservatives at around 120 seats in the next Commons, and give the Liberals about 100. Half have the NDP with the most seats, half the Conservative. In all of them the NDP leads the Liberals from a low of five (Grenier’s CBC...

E-Day minus 36 This week the polls seem to have different and conflicting stories to tell. The Liberals are on the move. The Conservatives are sinking fast. Wait, the Conservatives are recovering. The NDP is sliding. Hold on a second, the NDP is still in the lead. Here’s the weekly summary: the Grenier CBC Poll Tracker weighted average at the end of the week, with the numbers from the very beginning of the campaign in brackets, show NDP at 32% (33.2), CPC 29.7% (30.9) and LPC 29.4%(25.9). The NDP and the Liberals are virtually unchanged from last week, with a difference of .1% each. The Conservatives are up 2.0% points. If one simply averages the polls that reported during the last week without weighting them, the results are the same as Grenier’s weighted average at week’s end, NDP 32, LPC and CPC 30 each. Grenier applies a weighting to each poll that he incorporates into his averages -- favouring Nanos, for example, and discounting Forum. His weighting is based on an assessm...