The question for the NDP has always been the same, can it make significant gains in the 121 seats in Ontario. The party has never been and never will be viable unless it supplants the Liberals in much of Ontario. The Liberals are not progressive and maybe Trudeau has taught that lesson to a new generation. Mulcair only got 8 seats in Ontario and lost most of the Quebec seats so Jagmeet has a very low bar to follow. Even Jack in the 2011 Crush only won 22 seats in Ontario. To be a contender for government in the next election the NDP needs to up its Ontario seat count to at least the 2011 high if not closer to 30. It is the Liberals who the NDP needs to make gains from as some of the Liberal vote looks for a real progressive alternative and Jagmeet excites the new voters because he appears to be the real deal not a used carpet salesman nicknamed Aladdin.
Iagree -- I believe the greatest gains will be made in Ontario this time due to better splits in part but they will not be to the levels you rightly say the party needs.
I think there will be losses in Western Canada that will be heartbreaking due to Liberal vote declines where the NDP vote holds but is not enough. I hope this does not happen but this is what I expect now.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I helped on Blaikie's campaign in Elmwood last time, and based on the lawn signs I saw I would have never guessed that the Liberals would have had as much support as they did. That tells me that people all across the country turned out on larger numbers to support Justin Trudeau. Where will these Liberals go? Was Singh able to connect with them and convince them that he is the change they thought Trudeau represented 4 years ago? Will they simply not vote, leaving the race to the usual Conservative-NDP dynamic? Where will this all go?
I am confused by this response. I also do not think that this is necessarily the case and I worded it that way to make it clear. However the NDP won many races where there was a split between the Liberals and the Conservatives and has good reason to worry that a Liberal collapse to a two party race will cost seats.
This comes down to a single question: Can the NDP be relied on to take the majority of votes that the Liberals lose? I do not think so. If this is the case half the time then the NDP loses half of the seats it won in a three way split,
Losing half of those seats is a major loss. Half still does not mean it is necessarily the case. It just means half. Three quarter success even is still a big loss. There are many ridings where the Liberals in 2015 got a substantial vote that I think will no longer be theirs this time. Many of those ridings have voted Conservative recently. To assume the NDP gets the bulk of support that flowed to the Liberals and has now gone from the Liberals is a long shot.
It is true that math based on universal movement of support shows a different dynamic than what we will see. One variable in NDP support is how much strategic voting is out there. If it is a lot then the NDP support would expect to pile up in the best seats winning some of these and being lower in Liberal seats. If there is less strategic vote then there are seats that will be lost due to Liberal collapse.
When I ran the math I saw the same thing in Quebec. There is a real reduction in NDP support. This, I think, could cost the NDP 12 of 16 seats or there about. The same dynamic would cost the Conservatives one and the Liberals 5 with no other support changing other than an NDP loss of some support to the BQ. There were tight 3-way races the NDP did not win where if their support goes BQ the winning Conservative or Liberal will lose. a point is that the BQ came close second in many races and not just to the NDP.
The same dynamic exists in parts of BC and Saskatchewan to the detriment of the NDP. The rise of the Greens has limited NDP rise where it needed to have it in some places. ThisGreen rise has slid back but not all the way. It also exists in Ontario, very much in the NDP's favour. Loss of Liberal vote to Conservatives can deliver many NDP-Liberal races to the NDP without much of an NDP increase or even without any change for the NDP. This is why in my projection I saw many NDP seats lost in Quebec but significant gains in Ontario and a couple in Atlantic Canada. I have the NDP almost even with the result from last time at the Ontario Manitoba Border (down just slightly).
At this point, we know that the NDP is down significantly in parts of the country and up significantly in other parts to a national total that is close to the last election. What we do not know is the distribution of that vote. We have no reference: the 2015 and 2011 results are very obviously a different distribution and going beyond that is a fantasy given demographic and riding changes. the seats are just too close to use data that old. We really have no idea how efficient the NDP vote will be this time -- it it will pile up deep enough in three way races to take many of them or produce heart-breaking seconds. All we can say is not necessarily to every single hope and every single fear. The pollsters know this and you can see the widest confidence band ever in their predictions in part due to this. It is the distribution of the NDP vote that is likely to decide this election for just about every party.