Ontario Reset: Model Wars

Not Actually A War

So, in the world’s biggest surprise (he said sarcastically), we are at “Scrimshaw’s Model Is Wrong Because Him And Fournier Disagree” time of this election season in my mentions, because of course we are. In fairness, it’s not just Fournier – I am outlier to market consensus on the current state of the Ontario seat projectors, and people are either dooming in my mentions or more often trying to dunk on me. So let’s just go through this.

The other models have the Liberals making a limited number of gains in the western bits of Greater Toronto – Brampton, Mississauga, and Halton – plus less (or no) gains in Etobicoke and Scarborough. It’s really the story of the election – plus whether and how much the Tories can actually push into old-NDP areas in the north and dotted along the 401 and 403 – and it’s unsurprisingly why we disagree. I think the Liberals, for the same imputed vote shares, will do better, and the Tories worse, than the consensus thinks.

Anyone who has read this site since its start, or my previous place of employment, will be unsurprised to find out that I am trusting the trends in all these seats – the left-trending, suburban seats that make up the Toronto suburbs and the cities that would cringe at that title – but I am. And the logical consequence is that the Liberals vote efficiency means they can win enough seats to deprive the PCs majority government from a smaller share of the vote than others project.

In the 2019 campaign, I wrote a piece about how it was the polling averages, not the models, that really ended up mattering, and at the end of the day, that was mostly true. Where we went right and others went wrong that campaign was that the polls that year had a huge gulf in their Ontario crosstab between the online pollsters (mostly low single digit Liberal leads) and the IVR pollsters (who were mostly in the high single digits and occasionally low double digits for the LPC). We trusted the IVR pollsters over the panels and that call was correct.

In 2021, the polls in Ontario weren’t really the key thing – the Liberals did much better in the province than a straight uniform swing model would suggest, because their vote held up. Across the five seats in Brampton, the Liberal vote went up by 2.6% - off of 2019 results where the Liberal vote stayed still province wide and the Liberal margins in all those seats spiked – on the same day their province wide vote fell 2.3%. Across the whole of Brampton, Mississauga, Halton, and Hamilton – their vote went down 0.6%. Hell, they won Kitchener-Conestoga again, a seat they won in 2019 by 365 votes. In Scarborough, 5 of 6 Liberals got rises in their votes, and the one who didn’t saw his vote decline by (I am not joking) 0.02%.

You know where the Liberal vote fell more? London, where the average decline in their vote was 4.7%, Windsor, where it dropped by 5% on average, and the Lambton to Parry Sound corridor, where the Liberals saw repeated bad drops in their vote. This is what this sort of realignment looks like – the Liberals have less and less chance to win (or even gain respectable performances) in rural and regional Ontario, and have much better prospects at winning the suburbs.

You bored reading all of this? Good, I’m bored writing this, and I find model talk to be a boring waste of time, but let’s do this: Fournier, Bryan, and the Mainstreet projection have the Tories doing much better than I do in the West GTA, Etobicoke, and Scarborough. Maybe that is pure, uncut hope masquerading as fact on my part, but it’s worth noting that history – and the fact that Grenier and Fournier both have form on underselling Liberal performance in the west GTA.

Am I right? Obviously I think so, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, but this is my basic bet. Think about the realignment, and you’ll see why it’s the bet I’m making. Why is the provincial NDP stuck? Because their old base wants them to come out against vaccine mandates for teachers, doctors, and nurses on the basis that health choices are theirs to make (and plenty of those people are themselves unvaxxed) and their new base of young, urban progressives hate the unvaccinated more than Lewis Hamilton’s fanbase hate Max Verstappen. (I promise I’ll cool it with the F1 references soon, but I’m addicted.) You see the dilemma? The strategy that keeps you Danforth and Davenport loses you Essex and Timmons, and the NDP are therefore choosing … well, neither, but that’s a broader discussion about Horwath.

The thing about the realignment theory is that it makes complete sense when you frame it not as some wild abstraction, but in specific terms, because it explains why places and people are the way that they are. The Tory voter base is increasingly more and more people who are uncomfortable with actual expressions of homosexual affection (which helps in Essex, Northern Ontario, etc) and less and less rich, wealthy social liberals who want tax cuts (the west GTA). Condensed down to that basic premise, it’s inarguably true – especially given the global results – but when we talk in roundabouts about seats and regions, it gets lost.

If Doug Ford wins a majority next month, it will be because the populist Premier wins seats full of people who wouldn’t think twice when they see me and a partner kiss in a restaurant. It could happen, but the thing is, the right has been steadfastly losing ground with these voters across the English speaking world for the last nearly decade. If Ford fucks up that very basic bet of mine, I will doff my cap. But I don’t see it.

This is the conversation. This is the difference. This is what I’m calling my shot on that the others aren’t. “[Insert centre-left party here] Beats Expectations In The Cities and Suburbs” has been one consistent trend of the last 10 years of politics, and the two times it wasn’t true – Australia 2016 and US 2020 – are the exceptions that prove the rule. Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberals in that campaign were social liberally minded, because Turnbull was pro-gay marriage and pro-climate action, and in the US, Biden beat expectations once we knew it was a 4.5% popular vote win, and the reason his suburban advance seems less impressive is simply expectations of bad polls and worse takes (mostly from yours truly).

There are three ways the next nearly three weeks play out in terms of my forecast:

1.       The polls move towards the PCPO and the model moves, showing a clear Tory majority and then none of this matters

2.       The polls move towards the Liberals and the other models move closer to my current view, in which case a hung parliament with Conservative majority upside if the polls miss is the consensus view by June 1st

3.       The polls stay in this limbo and we’re stuck, where someone is definitionally going to be wrong.

If it’s 1, then I misread the mood of the electorate and the way they’d respond to this campaign.

If it’s 2, then I correctly read the mood of the electorate and the way they’d respond to this campaign.

If it’s 3, I’m gonna sleep like shit the night of June 1st.

Either way, I’m content with the model I’ve built. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. But right now, I believe it in my core. Doug Ford might win, but this ain’t a landslide right now, and the Tories aren’t looking at seat gains right now, no way.