2018 Ontario Polls

Let's say the Liberals break 2:1 to the NDP over the Conservatives.  In a perfect world it would be nice for the 1/3 Conservative would stay with the Liberals and the progressives, but that isn't reality.  The Liberal collapse is going to help both sides, even if helps the NDP more.

On the other side the Liberal policy track record is probably 2/3 Conservative, 1/3 NDP.  So people should take a silver lining.  As Dave Barrett used to always say, voters should be provided a stark choice 'us or them' - particularly in a FPTP system.  Getting rid of a party that takes more progressive supporters than conservative yet is more conservative than progressive is a good thing.

That EKOS poll has very strange demographics breakdown, where Ford leads with the 18-34 group and the self-identified "poor", while the NDP leads with the "upper class".   This gives me a Deja-Vu of the Calgary election.   IVR polls were suggesting that 18-34 would suddenly vote right-wing.  Did not happen.  That was an effect of  IVR raw data weighting.

Pogo, was the Rae government a lot better than McGuinty/Wynne?   I don't think so.

NorthReport wrote:

Up until this EKOS poll tonite I thought the NDP still had a chance

I think the NDP still has a chance, but I think it's an outside chance. It always was.

Well, two weeks ago was looking better. But then "BUCK A BEER - DOUG'S BRINGING IT BACK!" We laughed, but that's when Conservative numbers began to rebound. If he wins, the promise of cheap beer won it for him. Which is the most depressing realization as I've had in years.

Andrea Horwath couldn't promise people buck-a-beer?   Laugh all you want, but she should have done it.

Frank Graves used to be a Liberal during Paul Martin's era.   I saw him talk on TVO in January.   He sounded reliably conservative through and through. 

SocialJustice101 wrote:

Pondering, the question is what *percentage* of Ontarians will vote for Ford?   He only needs around 37%, which is significantly less than in the US system.

Yes but the percentage depends on the turnout. He is less likely to get 37% if PC voters don't turnout as they have in the past and if NDP voters show up in larger numbers than expected.

Both are very possible. Only a few percent fewer than usual could hurt Ford a lot. At least some women must be having second thoughts hearing that he hasn't given Renata a dime and she has had to morgage her home to raise her children. The business of transferring shares a zero value stinks to high heaven.

At least some people who think politicians are all the same, especially younger people, will surely see a difference between Ford and Horgan. If anything  could get them out to vote I should think this is it.

SocialJustice101 wrote:

I'd like to believe that most young people in Ontario know who John Horgan is.  But, as a Millennial myself, I doubt it.

Yeah, but Horgan is in BC, Ford is in Ontario.

Something else occurred to me. Presumably some Liberal votes went to the PCs and some to the NDP.

Liberal voters that have been breaking PC could react strongly to the latest news. They could stay home.

Pogo wrote:

SocialJustice101 wrote:

Pogo, was the Rae government a lot better than McGuinty/Wynne?   I don't think so.

I am assuming you were in Ontario for the Rae Government.  I was there for the first 3-4 months before returning to BC. I remember the first big decision of the Government was to cancel the Opera House - I am sure that would have been gone the other way if Peterson had been re-elected.

The reason I left was that the economy was tanking big time. Things were tough all around.  Not saying that the NDP made right choices, but I am pretty darn sure that if a business party like the Liberals were in power that it would have been a lot tougher ("now is not the time to increase the minimum wage" etc...)

Not comparable anyway. Wynne governed in fairly good times -- NDP governed during:

1) Free trade adjustment shutting thousands of businesses in Ontario including whole industries

2) Federal downloading

3) global recession

4) GST brought in during a period of consumer low confidence

5) Starting from a Liberal dishonest budget that hid a large deficit

6) When the government had lost two expensive court cases (one Indigenous re rights and the other pay equality) leaving the finances worse off than even the above books ought to have shown

7) when the right wing decided to tar the NDP -- within a month of taking office -- before a budget -- the "taxed off a Bob Rae" billboards went up all over Toronto so that people fed up with the GST (federal) would blame the provincial NDP government. Conservatives (as Trump says) love the stupid.

Did I miss anything???

Two new polls, Research Co. and Forum:

https://researchco.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tables_Ontario_06Jun201...

http://forumpoll.com/data/61ff94c8-9f04-44cf-92cf-5e623f24e66afinal%20po...

Pondering wrote:

7

NorthReport wrote:

Up until this EKOS poll tonite I thought the NDP still had a chance 

http://www.ekospolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/full_report_june_6_2018c.pdf

Were you not recently claiming all polls are trash?

These are polls, not votes. I don't believe 18-34 year olds are going for Ford. He is  likely doing poorly with women as well.

Frank Graves at Ekos has said he is Liberal but unbiased. The following is from Eric Grenier.

Polls suggest that the PCs are more likely to benefit from the turnout than the New Democrats. A poll by Léger has found that the PCs hold a six-point edge among voters 55 and older, a cohort that traditionally votes in large numbers. The same poll found the NDP ahead by four points among voters between the ages of 18 and 34, a group that has low turnout rates.

Both Pollara and Abacus Data found the PCs leading among votes already cast, with the PCs ahead by seven and four points, respectively, among Ontarians who voted in the advance polls. Those are ballots already in the system and counted, rather than hypothetical future votes that have yet to be cast.

But in the last provincial election in 2014, pollsters experimented with turnout models in an effort to avoid a repeat of the polling miss in British Columbia the previous year. And in every single case, the likely voter models did worse than a standard weighting to the general population.

Turnout was supposed to benefit the Ontario PCs in 2014 and give Tim Hudak a chance of winning. Instead, the PCs under-performed their polls and the Liberals won a majority government.

Polls are based on the past. 55+ people who vote are already turning out in large numbers and do a lot of advance voting. If turn-out increases how much of that is old people? Ford is not traditional PC. The NDP is 4 ahead with the 18-34 group. That sounds low to me. What happened to the people between 34 and 55?

The NDP has upset the applecart in Alberta and BC. I admit the polls are shaking my confidence as I thought by now they would be breaking for Horwath.

But if, based on past turnout, they are under-estimating youth turnout and overestimating 55+ turnout the results could be very different. 55+, especially women, could be discouraged based on the scandals swirling around Doug Ford. Youth could be galvanized by Ford's regressiveness and extreme right wing views.

Could Ontarians really choose Trump north? I must admit I didn't believe the states would do it but surely not Ontario.

Mike Harris wasn’t exactly Tommy Douglas.  And Toronto elected Ford’s brother.

Pondering wrote:

NorthReport wrote:

Up until this EKOS poll tonite I thought the NDP still had a chance 

http://www.ekospolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/full_report_june_6_2018c.pdf

Were you not recently claiming all polls are trash?

They are only trash when they show Liberals in the lead. You should know that by now.

And IVR did better than online.

FYI I just got phone polled by Mainstreet whether I would support a Liberal-Green Party coalition so that both parties could have official party status.

progressive17 wrote:

Except for downtown Toronto, Ontario is a very conservative place.

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If you have ever lived out west (not Vancouver, but east of the socialist coast), you wouldn't be so apt to say this. Ontario has several urban centres that are all relatively progressive. Windsor, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, and Ottawa all have fairly progressive voters. This isn't a small population. The north is fairly progressive (even if socially it may not always be as progressive as downtown Toronto, economically its more left than Toronto).

What really hurts Ontario is the vote rich rural areas that aren't quite as de-populated as the north, inbetween the Windsor-Ottawa corridor. All of these regions have turned staunchly conservative in recent years.

I will never understand the opposition to wind turbines, for example, in the southern rural areas. You don't see this in the north. Sault Ste Marie proudly touts its wind turbine and solar farms, which are huge in proportion to its size. The local residents are proud of it and wear it with a badge of honour. Outside Chatham-Kent (and virtually anywhere in southern rural Ontario) if you speak of wind turbines you will hear the usual Kathleen Wynne was evil and we have to rip them out of the ground. Unless, of course, someone has one on their property and they benefit from the stipends that come from leasing the land. Then of course they love them, and many still hate Wynne anyway. LOL

Its rural southern Ontario that has become the rump of jokes recently, and for good reason. Ontario is just too diverse and large to call it one thing or the other, it has a lot of political views depending on the region. And its consistently 60% or more progressive in the vote.

This is not Alberta or Saskatchewan. Although, if you're in central Toronto and your definition of progressive is defined by things like how many bike lanes a city has and how many cars can be stopped, I suppose your definition is accurate. Although I don't think that is progressive. This is one thing I've never understood about Toronto progressives: the disconnect on unimportant issues vs. a slew of other issues (like true universal drug coverage, minimum wages and income standards, etc.). Bike lanes does not a progressive make. There are tons of libertarians in Toronto that hate cars, ride bikes everywhere, and also hate the government.

P.S. what we need is vote reform so that the voters' true voices are heard. In this last election, Wynne was a goner. We knew that from the get-go, she made huge errors and couldn't recover from them. 60% of Ontario voted for progressive parties in this last election. That's a pretty progressive province. Ontario is generally progressive. The problem is that the left split, the Liberal leader gave up the election before even waiting for the votes to be counted, and then Doug Ford came running up that split with a majority government without a majority of support.

We need vote reform. If we had preferential balloting, the vast majority of Liberals who wanted to remain loyal to their party would have clearly chosen NDP as the second party. The NDP would have likely had Liberal as a second choice, but it wouldn't matter since the NDP had the stronger result in most progressive ridings.

If we had preferential balloting, I have no doubt we'd be speaking about Premier Horwath right now. And we would be having a discussion about how OHIP+ would be expanded for everyone, nullifying the need for private drug coverage altogether. Instead we're talking about Dougie cutting OHIP+ in literally the first several hours of his premiership.

Vote reform matters!