Seats For The Asking

On Projections And Predictions

On Saturday night, I released a first run at seat projections for the new boundary lines we’re overwhelmingly likely to use at the next election. As currently planned, any election after April 1^st, 2024 would be on the new lines (as I understand Election Canada’s patently unclear website), and given that I have routinely mocked the idea of an election this year, it’s not happening. The lines aren’t officially final, but given these are likely the final lines, it made sense to do the work.

https://twitter.com/EScrimshaw/status/1647389417286381571

The results aren’t wildly different from what PJ Fournier is projecting for the old lines – the LPC/NDP/GPC a few seats short of a majority, any Conservative government would rely on the Bloc, and this is all based on a snapshot of polls now, not a projection of where we’ll be in 2024 or 2025, whenever the next election is. And that fact is what makes this a worthwhile column to write.

The most notable reaction I got from the release of the projections was various people pushing back on the idea that the Liberals would get a status quo result in Atlantic Canada, and the thing is, they’re 1000% correct. I do not for a single second think that the swing we saw in rural and regional Atlantic Canada in 2021 won’t continue – the swings that saw Scott Simms and Bernadette Jordan lose their seats and saw Gudie Hutchins get run into a close race aren’t going to stop. It’s the logical extension of the Global Fucking Realignment – if, for a given national vote share, the Liberals are going to do better than they did last time in suburban, educated seats, they have to, definitionally, do worse in places with lower educational attainment and in rural and regional areas – also known as, in part, Atlantic Canada.

So, if I know that Hutchins will lose in 2025 if she runs again and that Churence Rogers on the other side of Simms’ old seat is also in danger and you have a risk on Labrador – let alone the Cape Breton risks for the Liberals – why do I have them suffering no losses yet? Because right now, the polls in the Atlantic are good for the government, and if I’m going to override the (noisy, small sample, unreliable) Atlantic samples to confirm a prior, I’d also have to not have the NDP “surge” in Ontario cost the Liberals four seats directly to them and cost them another 4 or 5 seats that the CPC wins because of a vote split, because we all know the NDP aren’t gonna be polling at 24% in Leger when the writ actually drops. But, for now, just let it go.

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The problem with forecasting elections between campaigns is that things we know, or things we think we know, don’t really have a great place in the debate. We know, from history not just in this country but in others, that small parties poll better outside the writ period and then collapse down the stretch. We see it constantly with the Lib Dems in the UK, the various iterations of Clive Palmer’s parties since 2016 in Australia, and even the US Libertarians in 2016, and we see it with the NDP here – or, in places where the Liberals are 3^rd, the Liberals.

In 2019 Manitoba, the Liberals polled at 17, 16, 15, and 18 in the final polls of the four pollsters who polled that race. They got 14.5%. Go back to the middle of the 2016-2019 Legislature, and they broke 20% 7 times. There was never a chance that was real. In the same way, In Ontario 2014, a majority of the polls in the latter half of 2013 – aka, after the Wynne honeymoon – had the NDP north of 26%. Ipsos Reid’s final poll had the NDP at 30%! They ended up just short of 24%. And yet, to point any of this out is usually followed by a surge of angry NDPers trying to convince me that actually this time is different, an argument I bought into for a hot second in 2021 and which utterly failed to be accurate.

So, what does it all mean? Yeah, there probably are four or five Liberal losses coming out of Atlantic Canada, but a lot of the Tory advantage in Ontario right now is probably overstated by an NDP vote that will come home to their natural allies. It’s not a particularly controversial opinion that between Pierre Poilievre’s combination of tinhatted rhetoric, his inability to commit a government he leads to Liberal investments in Child Care, Dental Care, and likely Pharma Care, then soft Dippers will come home. It also shouldn’t be a controversial opinion that a government currently saddled with a bad economy will have a better one when the next election, and that given they are the masters of election timing (with the NDP, sure, but still), they will wait for the green shoots of a growing economy and low inflation to pull the trigger.

None of this is guaranteed, but it’s my belief. If the best the Conservatives can do is a rough tie in seats with the Liberals and a 1979 redux where the government maybe has a majority on matters of not making Trudeau PM anymore but has no majority for any part of the legislative agenda now, then why do we think in better economic times, when the campaign kicks in, and Poilievre is subject to the elevated scrutiny that brought down Tim Hudak twice and John Tory and Adrian Dix and Danielle Smith and Michael Ignatieff, they’ll do better?

Maybe they will, but the difference between a seat projection of now and a prediction for the future is that politics isn’t just a science. It’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet. It’s a soft art, and while the math matters, there have to be moments when what we know in our guts come through. If the Liberals are still projecting out to 24 seats in Atlantic Canada the night before the election, I’ll override it, but I doubt I’ll have to. Similarly, I’m quite sure I won’t have the NDP winning 4 seats in Ontario when the time comes. But, right now, this is what the polls suggest.

Do the polls right now mean much? I have no idea. I have my doubts about parts of them, and I know that whatever they say in Quebec right now nobody should panic or triumph on their basis (as the late Bloc surge in 2021 showed), but I have my guesses where they’ll be by the time an election is. Those aren’t the same as my projections if the election was today. Both are valuable, but just don’t confuse them.