Ontario race tightens in new projection

With the release of a new poll by Forum Research, the Ontario projection has been updated. Though there has been very little change, the race has narrowed in many ridings and a worst case scenario for the Tories could see them win one less seat than the Liberals.

The Progressive Conservatives are projected to win 40.5% of the vote and 60 seats, while the Liberals win 30.6% of the vote and 29 seats.

That is a drop of 0.8 points for the Tories and 0.6 points for the Liberals since the last projection. It is a gain of one seat for the Liberals and a loss of one for the Tories.

The New Democrats are up 1.1 points to 21.0%, but remain at 18 seats, while the Greens are up 0.3 points to 6.6%.

As only one seat has changed, there has been no shift in the regional breakdowns except in the Greater Toronto area.
There, the Tories are now projected to win 12 seats, down from 13, while the Liberals are up one to six.

Aside from that, the PCs are projected to win the most seats in every part of the province except Toronto (Liberals) and the North (NDP).

But it is in the marginal seats that the election will be decided, and the number of these seats has risen.
The PCs are leading by 5% or less in 16 seats and are trailing by that amount in nine seats.

The Liberals are leading by 5% or less in 10 seats and trailing by 5% or less in 16 seats in the projection, while the NDP is trailing by 5% or less in two seats.

This puts the Progressive Conservative range at between 44 and 69 seats, down from the range of 48 to 70 seats in the previous projection. It still means that 62% of the range puts the Tories in a majority situation, but a minority is still a possibility, at 38% of the range. Worse still is that with the Liberal range standing at 19 to 45 seats (an increase from 18 to 41), there is a small chance that the Liberals could win one more seat than the Tories.

The breadth of the NDP range, at 18 to 20 seats, is unchanged. But there is now less overlap with the Liberals than there was in the past projection, lowering the chances of the NDP forming the Official Opposition. Though the NDP has gained ground on both the Liberals and Tories in the popular vote in this projection, the reduction of PC support has benefited the Liberals more, as they are in more one-on-one races with the Tories.

In Manitoba race, odds could tip in Greg Selinger’s favour

On October 4, Greg Selinger will be asking Manitobans to hand his New Democratic government its fourth mandate in his first election campaign as leader. Until recently, it appeared that the days of Mr. Selinger’s tenure as premier were numbered, but newfound popularity could extend the life of Manitoba’s longest running government since the 1950s.

You can read the rest of the article on The Globe and Mail website.

Manitoba will be an interesting race, and at the moment it is the election whose result is most difficult to predict. The latest polls put the New Democrats and Tories in a tie, and the two parties have been running neck-and-neck almost since the 2007 election.

But the odds seem to be stacked in the NDP's favour. My projection model gives them a good shot at winning a majority of seats even with a larger gap between the PCs and the NDP than currently exists in the vote projection.

The NDP wins a lot of close races in Winnipeg, while the Tories pile up huge majorities outside of the city. This is the key reason for the inability for the Progressive Conservatives to win without a large lead in the popular vote.

This has actually been the case for a little while now. Using the UBC's uniform swing model for the 2007 election, the New Democrats would have still won a majority of the seats with 41.1% of the vote to the Tories' 44.6%. The re-districting does not seem to have reversed the situation. Indeed, it seems to have entrenched the NDP even more reliably. We shall see how it plays out.