Ontario Recap: Holy Shit The Liberals Suck

Thoughts On The Election Result

Well that was a clusterfuck for the Liberals, eh?

I’m not going to bother doing a post-mortem until we get full counts – I’ve got about 10 confirmed wrong ridings, probably a handful more wrong if current results hold, so a hit rate in the high 80s in terms of %. How much of that is model error versus pollster error (as of this writing, the Liberals are overstated in the polls, PCs understated) is unclear – I’ll run my model with the proper results in a couple days and figure that out.

What’s clear so far is two things – one, Ford and the PCs are advancing all throughout the regional towns and cities, and two that they’re holding up in the suburbs. Whether some of these suburban seats will flip with mail and early votes, who knows, but what’s much more interesting is the PCs winning not just Essex, but Windsor Tecumseh and Timmins, and leading in a few other formerly Liberal or NDP seats in the north and Hamilton. The Tories didn’t get their surge into London, but as I wrote before the campaign, the Tories getting some of these working class areas was not my model’s call but also decidedly not out of the question, and I’m unsurprised to see it.

I don’t want to get into the Liberal suburban failures quite yet, just because I need to see full results to assess what happened – the story of blue Mississauga and blue Brampton depends on lot on the Tories eventual share of the vote, because if they won because of inefficient left votes, that’s a different story than the Tories actually making ground up, and to do a proper autopsy is important for my ability to project future elections, and also in determining whether Ford was truly able to avoid the suburban struggles of the Global Realignment (while very much enjoying the fruits of it in the North, Windsor, and Hamilton).

The NDP have actually done alright – holding Ottawa Centre against the Liberals, keeping all three Londons, currently leading in Oshawa and Niagara Centre – but on the whole, playing better defence than I expected only has so much value. It’s still a bad night where they’ll lose 10-15 seats, and it’s a night that won’t inspire the kind of reflection they need. Horwath should still go, with a vote share massively down and a seat count close to it, but hey, they are winning some seats I wouldn’t have expected, so kudos.

On the PCs – I mean, this was always on the cards if Leger and Abacus were correct, as they appear to have been. If the PCs broke 40% this time, they were breaking 80 seats. My average had them on 39%, so I had them just under the 80 seat mark. It’s an impressive performance, and I guess hats off to Nick Kouvalis, who saw this coming the whole time.

But let’s just be very clear about something – Steven Del Duca’s leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party has been, on these results, a catastrophic failure. He has lost his seat (which I’ve been saying for months he would). Del Duca was elected to save the party, and he has consigned it to the dustbin of third place once again. A failed leader and a failed leadership has seen its time, and if he doesn’t resign tonight, it will be a disgrace to the party he supposedly loves.

I’ll have more detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but this is a Conservative landslide like we all expected, and a Liberal result worse than almost everyone expected. And now, I’m gonna drink some more.