Ontario Reset: Key Seats, Tactical Voting, And Toronto Seats

A Deep Dive On June 2nd

With just under two months to the Ontario election, this calls for an Ontario Reset, so let’s dive deep on the race for the Province that I was born and raised in (much to the chagrin of the Montreal lover in me).

Tactical Voting

Here is the official list of places where you should tactical vote for the NDP:

·         Kitcheners South-Hespeler and Conestoga

·         Niagara Centre and Niagara Falls

·         Sault Ste. Marie

·         Oshawa

·         Essex

·         Brantford-Brant

·         Flamborough—Glanbrook

·         Brampton Centre

·         Scarborough Southwest

Here is the official list of places where you should tactically vote for the Liberals:

·         Mississauga

·         (The rest of) Brampton

·         (The rest of) Scarborough

·         Ottawa West-Nepean, Carleton, and Kanata-Carleton

·         The Don Valleys

·         Etobicoke

·         Vaughan

·         York

·         Markham

·         Oakville

·         Burlington

·         Milton

If you want to scream about tactical voting, realize that there are limitations to the effectiveness of these sorts of efforts. Realize that the bigger risk is that the Tory vote is too high in places, not that the left is splitting their vote. But if you must scream about tactical voting, here’s the guide.

If you are a Liberal, you’ll realize your coalition is broader, and in most places, you are the correct tactical vote. If you’re not sure, if I left your region off the list, assume it’s a Liberal tactical vote unless it’s on the NDP list.

The NDP’s problem is their upside in most of suburbia just isn’t as good as the Liberals, so in most places the PCs can win with a lower raw share of the vote if the NDP is strong than if the Liberals are the challengers. This isn’t a function of any bias of mine, having voted NDP in 2018 and having voted for their federal cousins in 2021 – it’s just the map.

For the Liberals, I know it’s not your style to run dead, but please God, run dead in Oshawa, Essex, Niagara Centre, Niagara Falls, and the Soo. There is literally no upside for the Liberals in any of these areas, you will just be playing spoiler – and sending Del Duca to do events in Windsor or Oshawa or the Soo would be needlessly provocative and make local cooperation in your targets harder.

On the other hand, NDP, do not dare fucking send Horwath to Mississauga. Getting swept there in 2018 was bad enough, but the Liberals have a bunch of good targets in the city, and they could genuinely sweep it. Any effort by the NDP there is an in-kind donation to Ford’s re-election efforts. Don’t you fucking dare.

If you want to claim that beating Doug Ford is the highest priority, then you have to understand that these sorts of tactical voting decisions cut both ways, and there’s no silver bullet. If you only advocate for voting for “your” party, you’re not about beating Ford, you’re about promotion of party over province, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Now, please God, stop screaming at me about vote splits and tactical voting. Please, I beg.

Toronto

One of the things that’s been weird is I’ve had the NDP on 28 seats for, well, a very long time now, and the reason is simple – they have a pretty high floor. At least, they do if there’s anything resembling a uniform swing.

For my modelling, I don’t assume a uniform swing, I use a trends-adjusted swing, so suburban areas trend more left and smaller cities and regional towns trend more left, for every point of provincial swing. This is a function of my belief in the Global Fucking Realignment, which if you’ve somehow missed the memo, wow you must be new here.

This sort of swing model did very well federally, predicting more seats correct for me than PJ Fournier’s fancy model did with the institutional backing of Macleans, and had me never buying any of the Conservative hype in the 905, where the Liberals did exceptionally well for the 3rd time in a row. It is the basis of my belief that the Tories can’t win the next federal election, because they cannot win, at a federal level, educated, well off, financially secure social liberals. This is why the Liberals have a genuine shot at a Mississauga sweep. It’s how things work these days.

The thing is, that 28 is softer than I have been projecting it to be, because I have no idea whether the NDP is holding their vote in the kinds of seats where they did exceptionally well last time – downtown, old city Toronto.

There are 8 ridings which make up my definition of downtown Toronto – Davenport, Parkdale, St. Pauls, Centre, Danforth, University-Rosedale, Spadina-Fort York, and Beaches-East York. Beaches is a controversial inclusion on this list, as (amongst others) TVO’s John Michael McGrath have told me it doesn’t count as a downtown seat, but it’s my rules, dammit, so let’s go.

All 8 of those seats are federally red – or, 7 of them are, and the 8th (Spadina) is held by Canada’s Pauline Hanson himself, the disgraced ex-Liberal whose name isn’t worth printing – and all 8 are held by the provincial NDP. No, “won by Party X at Y level” doesn’t always work, but these were Liberal areas provincially as well until 2018, with the area covered by 6 of the 8 current seats being red at the 2014 election. And now, they’re all NDP.

I won’t lie, I’m generally not very good at projecting these kinds of races, because they’re generally hard to model. The voters in urban downtowns tend to work in “information” jobs – what I often snarkily refer to as the “professions” – like writing, law, medicine, accounting, banking, government, lobbying. Shit where you’re not lifting much and not working too hard with your hands. These kinds of jobs are also the kind of jobs where the people who work there are more likely to pay attention to the news, to know their local candidate … all the things that make projection from provincial polling hard to do. And the problem for the NDP is, they only have downside from here.

I have the Liberals winning 1 of the 8 seats listed. Throw in Ottawa Centre, the other seat most like the downtown Toronto seats, the Liberals are winning 2 of the 9. I have real doubts the NDP are winning 7 of 8 in Toronto and 7 of 9 including Ottawa Centre, but that’s what the math says, right now. But it’s all downside from here for them. If the math is wrong, it’s much more likely to be wrong because I’m underestimating the Liberals’ surge potential in some or all of the Toronto seats, and the Leger Toronto crosstab, for what it’s worth, has the NDP in 3rd in the 416, a far cry from them winning it in 2018.

Whether or not that swing against the NDP is in the old city or the rest of it, I can’t pretend to know that yet. But what I do know is that the most interesting question in terms of the battle for second is the old city of Toronto, because if the NDP don’t hold those 7 seats, they’re in 3rd no matter what else happens. And if the Liberals can get some of them, then they will be firmly cemented into second, and the NDP’s golden chance to take over and establish the Prairie Consensus – conservative versus NDP, with the Liberals a minor party – onto Ontario. And I have absolutely no idea right now whether it will work or not.

Brampton

Another thing I have no idea about is whether there’s gonna be a different swing in Brampton because of the influence of ethnic media – in the last two federal campaigns, I’ve misread heavily Chinese areas in BC and Markham because I haven’t been aware of what’s being said in non-English local media, and here, I’m curious about it.

Most of the reason I’m curious about it is that Brampton is a tire fire, with three parties all winning seats, the Tories winning 3 seats, winning a seat off the NDP and holding their two while the Liberals win one off the NDP, and it’s the area where it’s all three way marginals. I’ve often lumped Mississauga and Brampton together as ethnically diverse, socially liberal areas trending left at a federal level, but provincially the distinction between the two cities matters much more. Mississauga is straightforward – the Liberals can win it, the NDP can’t. Here? Who the fuck knows.

The NDP are the right tactical vote in Brampton Centre, and they’re gonna hold Brampton East easily, but in the other three? Who the hell knows what’s going to happen. The Liberals are winning in Brampton North, but right now, all three parties are within 2%, so that’s way too close to be confident in. Brampton West is another three way contest where the Liberals and NDP both trail and the gap between 1st and 3rd is 4%, and the Liberals are better placed in Brampton South, but there the NDP vote is too high, without being competitive to win, so who knows.

Coordinating the local campaigns to try and tactically vote there would be a mess, and there’s nothing to suggest that there will be additionally clarity any time soon, but if you’re trying to figure out where the Tories could gain or lose seats against my projection based on local factors, look at how the non-English media treats Ford in Brampton – it could be the difference in 4 seats.

Ottawa

You didn’t think you’d get through a whole Ontario column without me bringing up my hometown, did you? The thing is, this isn’t just hometown homerism, it’s genuinely a battleground.

The Liberals will win Ottawa West-Nepean off the PCs, and hold Ottawa Vanier, Orleans, and Ottawa South. The PCs are probably safe to win Carleton. That is the full list of things we know, or feel confident in, around Ottawa.

I tentatively have the Liberals winning Ottawa Centre off Joel Harden and the NDP, but as I just wrote about in the Toronto section, that kind of seat can be quirky and personal votes and local campaigns matter. Also, it’s an underratedly French seat, and I have no idea how Harden’s French is, nor how good the French of the Liberal who is replacing Naqvi on the Liberal ticket is. (Think it doesn’t matter? Paul Dewar would have beaten Catherine McKenna in 2015 if he could have spoken the language, and that race was a huge shocker.) And now, we get to the hard ones.

Kanata-Carleton and Nepean are best described as Tory crisis seats – as in, if they’re in trouble there, they’re in a crisis province wide. Winning those two seats is not a guarantee that the Tories will win a majority, but failure to win them is a sign of failure for the PCs. If they can’t win those two seats, then there’s no hope for the party at large.

Will they win them? I think they win Kanata, and while my projection has them winning Nepean, I think the Liberals snag it by election day and take out Lisa MacLoed. (Also, memo to the Liberal candidate in Nepean, if you’re reading: be less pious about masking and COVID on the doorstep than you are on Twitter. You need the votes of “vaxxed but fuck masks” votes to win. Trust me on this.)

Prediction

Doug Ford will win the most seats on election day.

Doug Ford will not win a majority of seats on election day.

Doug Ford’s government will fall on the floor of the Ontario Legislature.

And Steven Del Duca will become Premier of Ontario – but it might take a few weeks for all the machinations to happen.

I stand by the idea that Steven Del Duca will be the next Premier of Ontario, and that Doug Ford will not win a majority government. When that changes, I’ll tell you. It hasn’t.

Should Liberals And Dippers Calm Down?

As I said on the podcast today, Calm. The. Fuck. Down.