Ottawa West-Nepean/Leeds-Grenville by-elections

The Greens aren't specifically targeting anybody, especially the ndp. Under Schreiner the Greens have returned to their centrist if not center-right views and will be a very appealing choice for former pc'ers, disgruntled Liberals, and rural non-union ndp'ers.

The Greens traditionally don't do well in by-elections as in most ridings we don't have the machine the liberals and conservatives often do to get out the vote, nor do we have significant amounts of habitual voters who will always vote the same way like the Libs and PCs and to a smaller extent the ndp.

Still can't believe Steve Clark took 67%, even more suprised the Mazurek took only 20%. He won't be back again and frankly, I'm not sure who will replace him seeing as the federal candidate lives in Ottawa and their aren't going to be many recognized persons wanting to take over at 20%. They've completely lost the hope of attracting the wannabe career politicans that they need to do well. (polished standard bearer like they've found in Loveys from Ottawa, who despite being a non starter in Leeds-Grenville, is a great candidate! just not here.)

Interesting to see the Greens win polls in Leeds-Grenville too! Greens won two polls in North Leeds, Liberals won one in Brockville. Cons took the rest. NDP candidate gets 18 votes in his home poll. yikes.

As per Stokholms earlier comments - I'm a partisan player too. Don't try and pull off cheap shots at established party hotshots like Jim Harris while being an obvious ndp hack typing away on a chat board. I don't know you personally but I'm gunna guess that Jim's done more for his political career then you will ever do for yours. Won't go on, but comments like that aren't winning you any cred.

Jim Harris is not a marginal player in the GPC either. But he aggravates even a lot of Greens with his mathematical games-though he seems to have toned it down before elections becaue of the inevitable dissapointment that followed.

That siad, there are a lot of other Greens who buy into those puffery numbers games.

Stockholm wrote:

So, I say good for the Greens - I hope they keep right on targetting those rural and exurban seats where there are lots of disaffected ex-Tories and that they stay out of low income urban and northern ridings where they would likely be spoilers.

Just because they do well in some Tory held ridings doesn't mean they primarily appeal to "disaffected ex-Tories."  The PCs just took 67% in Leeds-Grenville, how many disaffected Tories could be there?

Meanwhile, the NDP fell to about 5%.  Looks like to me they take more from the NDP, somewhat less from the Liberals and hardly at all from the Conservatives.

The two byelections in fact showed tiny movements in the NDP and Green votes. In Leeds the Greens went from 7.2 % to 7.7. The NDP from 7.0 to 5.2.

In OWN, the Greens increased from 6.2 to 8.3 and the NDP fell from 9.7 to 8.4.

The NDP maintained its dismal third place finish in OWN, the Greeens maintained their dismal third place finish in Leeds. The bylection resullts provide no evidence that the Greens will come close to winning a single seat , let alone overtake the NDP.

The real news, unfortunately, is that the Cons made significant gains in both seats, up 10.5% in Leeds and 7.1% in OWN. The Libs vote fell 8.6 and 7.1 respectively.

When talek with the Toronto Centre results I suspect that we may have differential swings to the opposition parties in the next election. The Cons may take a lot of Liberal seats where they are the contenders, mostly in rural areas and the east, and the NDP will take a few seats where they are the alternative, in Toronto, Windsor and the the north. 

adma - Greens won polls 1 and 4 which are both in Ridaeu Lakes twp (specifically Westport and Crosby areas). Not sure how the greens did in Merrickville as i didn't see those numbers, however the Greens got 25% in Merrickville in 2008 so I would imagine those number to be about the same in that area.

As to who the Greens attract, the answer is just about everyone as Green politics doesn't fit neatly on the spectrum and people come in to the Greens because of different issues. Conservatives primarily would find their economic very appealing while the NDP would find their stance on various social issues very appeal while the Liberals, being the big tent they are, have supporters vote Green for a variety of different reasons.

The greens appeal to different party voters depending on how they present themselves. Mark and Neil were businessmen who would appeal more to the right then the left. Mike schreiner would appeal the right, Elizabeth May to the left.

Stockholm wrote:

I'm not sure we can draw much in the way of conclusions about who takes votes from who looking at the byelection in Leeds-Grenville. Its a super-safe Tory seat and the NDP vote was so low to begin with that there wasn't much to lose.

Except that the NDP standard-bearer, Steve Armstrong, got 13.85% to the Greens' 9.6% (and Grits' 17.2%) federally in 2008--and he even cracked 15% in 2006.  I mean, yes, the Green share dropped from 2008, too; but if it's all about optimizing the vote even in nominally no-hope seats and setting a pattern for other such optimizations, the optics of simply shrugging off an abysmal result like this aren't great.

Maybe if it were more of a "paper candidate" situation than Steve Armstrong, I'd be inclined to think differently.

Although thats partly true, the NDP support shouldn't drop from 14% to 5% with the same candidate running. Especially when the Recorder and Times reports that Steve felt this was was his strongest campaign yet, and had the largest team to work with. He went on to call his current level of support bizarre and unexplainable and of very disappointing

These elections are certainly bad news for the NDP. Almost three of three by-elections outside of Toronto the NDP has placed fourth. All three times they ran strong local candidates and each time faired poorly.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

I just looked it up, Stock. The NDP got 6.97% in the last provincial general elections in 2007. The NDP vote seems to fluctuate up and down by 1 or 2% since the mid 1990s, where there was a huge drop of 17.5% or so.

I don't think that L-G is at all winnable for the NDP. It is as Tory a stronghold as you can get. I mean, for the by-election it seems that they got 66.6%. A percent of the vote like that signifies some sort of deal with a certain shady character

brockboy wrote:

Conservatives primarily would find their economic very appealing

These people would also find Common Sense Revolutionary Mike Harris even more appealing.

brockboy wrote:

Stockholm, a trend involves more than one. You know, like an ongoing occurance....Outside the 10 ridings the NDP holds there aren't too many that are winnable for the NDP provincially...So yes, if your happy with the Greens doing poorly in the 10 to 15 ridings the NDP has a chance then I'll take that. They'll just have to take the other 92 ridings and do something with those.

Well we could also look at the recent byelection in St. paul where NDP support went up a bit while Green support went down. We could also look at the four federal byelections in November where the NDP gained a lot of ground in all four ridings while Grene support literally vanished - 4% in a riding in the middle of vancouver? how do you explain that away???

I can think of lots of winnable seats for the Ontario NDP. Right now there are NINE ridings that the federal NDP holds which the Ontario NDP does not hold - those will all be prime targets - plus places like Oshawa and York South Weston which were near misses last time. That makes 21 target seats for next time - and maybe more.

With regard to byelections we saw a similar pattern between '03 and '07 where the NDP made massive gains and picked up Hamilton East, Parkdale-High Park and York South-Weston. But in other byelections in non-winnable seats like Markham, Burlington and Nepean-Carleton - the NDP vote barely budged.  In the end in our FPTP system its all about winning seats. No one cares if the Green party goes from 6% to 7% in every rural seat in the province - you have to start winning 35-40% of the vote in one riding.

Well one thing the Greens did, that I don't think the NDP did that might have moved some votes was grab onto the NFUs campaign around the loss of small abbitoirs and local food.  In a riding like Leeds-Grenville that's likely to move a few votes either out of populism or genuine understanding of the issues.

Maybe my point is that Brockville shouldn't need those kinds of resources to optimize--and maybe, too, there's a trumped-up stigma attached to "campaigning in L-G"?  Perhaps, among NDP wonks, there's a need to take off the urban-lefty blinders here.  Maybe it won't be good enough for 35-40%, but better 15-20% than 5-10%, optics-wise...