Ontario: Progressives’ Absurd Focus

On Vote Splitting, Deals, And The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Doug Ford’s PCPO, in his 2022 reelection, got 40.82% of the popular vote. In 2018, he got 40.50%, and the fact that the PCPO vote ended up higher after four years of Ford was supposed to be a great sign of failure from the left. And now, after the close of nominations, we have two seats where a major Opposition party didn’t get a candidate, so there’s now talk about how this is how we beat Ford. And I feel like I’m going batshit crazy.

Here are the PCPO vote shares in every pollster’s most recent polls in the last 10 days: 43, 45,, 45, 44, 49, 47, 46, 41, and 40. In every pollster but EKOS the PCPO vote share is up or flat, and in EKOS it’s down by a point. And what some people want to talk about is deals? Wasting time in a campaign trying to move the opposition vote around more efficiently, like that’s going to do fuck all?

After 6.5 years of Doug Ford’s government he is more popular than he’s ever been. I wish I was more surprised, but I’m not. This site has chronicled the last two years pretty damn diligently, and this result has been fucking obvious to me since the moment the Ontario Liberal membership made the decision they made on the leadership. But we’re here now, and Doug’s at 45% on average. That’s the crisis.

There’s been a staggering lack of progress from the Liberals and NDP. Neither of them have captivated the attention of the public, with Bonnie managing to steal a few points of support that the PCs have promptly gotten back from orange to blue switchers in the southwest and the north. It’s the political equivalent of moving the salad around to pretend you are something while waiting for the entree. It’s a joke.

The idea that if you could magically optimize the Liberal and NDP votes, somehow Ford would be defeated is nonsensical. Not every vote who is voting for one or the other is a vote for the other. Not every Liberal trusts the NDP on fiscal policy or some of their more out there social values ideas (remember safety zones around drag bars?), while plenty of New Democrats are union, working class, blue collar voters who oscillate between the NDP to advocate for more health spending and the Conservatives because they’re mad at progressives, wokeness, and the general fact that the world isn’t how it was in 1995. Only 62% of Liberals and New Democrats think the OLP and ONDP should merge into one party, per a Friday Research Co poll. As a proxy for what you’d get if you had some formal collaboration, it’s not a bad one. February 2024 Federal polling had 66% of New Democrats preferring Trudeau to Poilievre as PM, and a slightly higher share of Liberals preferring Singh to Poilievre. (It is worth noting at the time of that polling, the vast majority of LPC-CPC switchers were voting CPC, so the Liberals that remained were pretty left wing.)

Even if you assume you’d net out 50% from this collaboration - something like 75-25%, with minimal to no leakage to the Greens (we’ll get back to this) - and you could model the province perfectly so that the optimal outcome was always chosen beforehand (not always easy!), Doug Ford would still easily win majority government again. He’d also likely break 50% of the popular vote in that situation, if he got some boost in most seats. The unfortunate truth is that if you were to do head to head polling, Ford would easily beat Crombie’s Liberals, Stiles’ NDP, or some merged entity. He is what Ontario wants.

The reason he’s what Ontario wants is in large part because the Opposition have not been good enough, and a lot of the focus should be on the Opposition for not being good enough. But when you’re polling 45% and your closest opposition is in the mid to high 20s depending on the poll, you win. You win big. The idea that there’s some magic way to reconstitute the vote to block the 45% - like every other voter in the province is a rabid anybody but Conservative voter who is just too stupid to figure out how to stop the Tories - is ludicrous. If the options are Stiles, Crombie, and Ford, the public wants Ford.

If there was some option of a merger or a deal, the Greens would also be a big impediment to it working. Green voters aren’t idiots who think the Greens can win, they’re about building slowly and adding to the conversation through presence and generally not making the compromises that the NDP and especially the Liberals make. It’s a party that is on some level about being anti-Liberal and anti-NDP more than it is about the environment or ecology or whatever else. It’s a statement of principles, and about one’s self. The NDP is that too in plenty of ways, too. The idea that if there was some dirty deal with the Liberals the NDP’s anti-compromise, pro-stand on principles forever wing would sit there and take it - as opposed to giving up on electoral politics or leaving for the Greens - is laughable.

What both parties of the left have failed to do is create a coherent narrative for why they need to be elected. I have been begging for more than just good policy but a throughline to these announcements for fucking months now. There was a decent Liberal announcement on reducing TTC and transit crime, a policy that has been completely and utterly abandoned by the rest of the campaign. Where’s been the focus on safety and law and order? When we announced the doubling of ODSP - a great policy - why didn’t we tie it into any other broader themes of the campaign?

Remember in December when Crombie made her Leader’s Dinner speech and encampments were going to be a key theme of the campaign? The best we’ve gotten from that is that she won’t use the Notwithstanding Clause and that municipalities need a new deal for supportive housing. That’s it? Nothing inspiring, no big announcement, that’s it? That’s what we get?

The NDP are beyond hope - leading the campaign with the 407 was a white flag if I’ve ever seen one and they deserve essentially permanent diminishment for it. And everybody knows it. The reason nobody can get any excitement or juice or energy behind this campaign is because the progressive parties are comically bad at this. The best campaign in the province is probably Tyler Watt’s in Nepean, mostly because he’s running a modern campaign that uses social media well and is sticking to a better, more coherent message than anybody else. It can be done.

The real problem for Ontario progressives isn’t how the opposition splits their votes, it’s the fact that 45% of Ontario is about to vote for Ford, and any person or any organization focused on anything other than driving that down isn’t helping.