2 days to go! Only 2 days to go in this Ontario election. Yesterday we got a bunch of new polls from Forum, Mainstreet and Pollara. Mainstreet is the only one still showing a decent lead for the PC (more than 3 points) while the others have a super close race. We also got the stats about advance voting and turnout. More on this after the projections.

It's nice to have a lot of recent polls with decent sample sizes. Also, the new update from Forum, showing a much tighter race, kind of broke with the trend that IVR polls were showing a decent PC lead while online (as well as live callers) polls were showing a tied race.

Anyway, here are the most up to date projections.

Voting intentions; Seat projections with confidence intervals; Chances of winning the most seats

As for the possible outcomes:



As usual, riding by riding projections are available at the bottom.

I won't go into much detail here mostly because the projections haven't changed much. We are still in a situation where the Tories are favourite but it isn't hard to imagine a path to 63 seats for the NDP. We have something more interesting to talk about this morning: advance turnout!


Advance turnout

According to Election Ontario, about 768,895 citizens have already voted. This is more than the 647,261 of 2014. That year was marked by a fairly weak turnout overall at 51% (still better than the 48.2% of 2011). So, does it mean we can expect a higher turnout this time around? Not necessarily. Last year in BC, advance turnout was on fire but the overall turnout barely increased. There is simply a trend where people take more and more advantage of the possibility to vote early. So hard to tell if overall voter participation will be up. If it is however, I wouldn't expect a giant jump like what we saw for the 2015 federal election. Which is good news for polls watchers as they tend to be more accurate when turnout is similar.

Maybe more interesting for someone like me trying to predict the results at the riding level is to look at the advance stats per electoral district.

Here below you have the top 10 ridings with the more advance voters. 

1.Kingston and the Islands
2. Simcoe-Grey
3. Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke
4. Orléan
5. Guelph
6. Simcoe North
7. Northumberland-Peterborough South
8. Ottawa Centre
9. Toronto-Danforth
10. Burlington

Out of these ten, 6 are projected to go PC, 2 NDP, 1 OLP and 1 Green,

But total number of voters isn't that interesting. Not only are some ridings bigger, turnout can also tend to simply be higher in some of them years after years.

Instead let's look at the top 10 ridings where the advance turnout increased the most. When this happens, this is usually a sign of changes. In BC last year for instance, we could clearly see many ridings in the Lowe Mainland -in particular Surrey- where the NDP ultimately made many gains.

Top 10 ridings with biggest increase in advance turnout

1. Kitchener South-Hespeler
2. Brampton West
3. Markham-Unionville
4. Brampton South
5. Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill
6. Markham Stouffville
7. University-Rosedale
8. Davenport
9. Etobicoke North
10. Toronto-Danforth

The list continues with other 416 and 905 ridings mostly. Note that this is the top 10 if measure in percentage change. If I had used the increase in the number of voters, the list would include most of the same ridings but Kingston and the Islands would be there.

We see a clear pattern here: increased turnout in Toronto or in the Toronto suburbs. Out of the 10, 5 are projected blue and 5 orange. It shows that close races will most likely attract higher turnout.

So, can we infer anything else? Both in 2015 and 2017 (BC), the increased turnout was clearly helping the one party increasing (LPC in 2015, BC NDP 2017). This time around is more difficult since we have two parties clearly rising compared to 2014.

What this list shows me for sure is that the Liberals won't win these seats. Increased turnout isn't a good news for a collapsing governing party. If they were hoping to salvage some seats in downtown Toronto, they are most likely mistaken (well, unless the concession of Wynne somehow works). After, we can possibly interpret this list as the PC and NDP mobilizing their voters. Riding polls have shown the PC upsetting the NDP in the Brampton ridings (2 wins and 2 super close losses) while my projections are showing the NDP well ahead except in Brampton-South. At the end of the day, it might come down to which party gets its vote out the most.

I can also see this list as showing that the scenario where the NDP would sweep the very urban riding (core Toronto) while the Tories would win in the suburbs can happen. If that's the case, the electoral night could be long. The increases turnout in Davenport, Toronto-Danforth or University-Rosedale shows me the NDP is surging there while the Markham and Etobicoke ridings are pointing to the PC finally breaking into the GTA.

What says you? Do you have a better reading of the situation?



The 2018 Ontario provincial election is coming to an end this Thursday. We are starting to get the final polls from many firms and it seems we are observing another case of methods disagreeing with each other. Namely, phone polls IVR, automatic phone calls) do not show the same thing as online ones.

Before looking into this though, here are, as usual, the latest projections. I have added the polls published yesterday into the mix. As you can see, for the first time in a long time, the Conservatives are ahead in the popular vote.



Trend just isn't good for the NDP. On top of that, the trend by region is also negative (NDP decreasing in the Southwest for instance). Riding by riding projections are available at the end of this article.

Online versus IVR polls

The latest Abacus, research Co. and H+K Strategies polls, all done online, show the NDP either slightly ahead or tied with the PC. On the other hand, the recent Ekos, Mainstreet (tracker) and Forum, all IVR, have the Tories between 3 and 5 points. Pollara, using a mix of online and live callers, is more similar to the online polls. Let's leave it aside for now but we'll get back to it.

The graph below shows you the polls during the campaign. For the Mainstreet tracker, I only included the data once every 3 days (since the tracker is a 3-days rolling average). I separated the polls by method. It's a messy graph but I don't believe I can do better. Also, I had to put one of the NDP in green because orange and yellow are too similar. Click on it for a bigger size.



Couple of observations:

1) Online and IVR polls have had a systematic difference during the entire campaign. IVR having the PC higher and the NDP and OLP lower than online polls. The gap has remained constant for the PC and NDP.

2) Both methods give us the same trend and dynamics. At least!

3) Because of 1), we see that online poll had the NDP and PC tied around May 19th while IVR poll only reached the same level almost a week later (and at that point, online polls naturally had the NDP ahead). The Mainstreet tracker was especially slow to pick up.

4) Right now, we can see that the online polls have a tied race while IVR polls have the PC ahead. But again, same late campaign dynamic, just different levels.

5) At least there is convergence for the OLP

6) The IVR graph is heavily influenced by Mainstreet which published way more polls. So keep that in mind.


So, who is right and who is wrong? In order to answer the question, I went back to my data set of polls I used to estimate the average accuracy. I compared IVR versus online polls. The answer? The average absolute deviation of both methods (with respect to the actual outcome) is almost identical. So IVR and online polls have performed similarly over the last few years. IVR polls did better in 2015 but this is mostly because they were the last ones to poll and there was a late campaign shift in favour of the Liberals.

So I see no reason to believe one more than the other. If we limit ourselves to the last Ontario election (using the numbers among all voters and not the crappy "likely voters" pollsters were trying at the time and that proved very wrong), the best two polls were online (Angus-Reid and Abacus).

Maybe we have other polls to help us determine which one is right? The latest Pollara was a mix of online+live callers (most of the sample being live callers) and the results are in line with the online polls. Live calls polls have the best accuracy in recent years, although a lot of it is due to Nanos being right on the spot during the federal election. Still, between 2014 (online better in Ontario) and Pollara, that's two arguments in favour of online polls.

We also got the latest Ipsos poll that was 2/3 online and 1/3 by phone (live caller). This poll was more in line with the IVR ones! Thus not providing any tie breaker (actually making things more complicated).

Finally, Innovative actually did two polls, one online and one by phone (live callers) with very similar results. This would confirm the online+live call group.

So at the end of the day, I'll simply do an average. But I'll be careful in case the latest polls (like published on Wednesday) are all of one type. Aggregators that tend to give a much higher weight to the very last poll may introduce a bias whereas, instead of measuring a late campaign swing, they are merely capturing the effect of the method.

One thing to keep in mind is that it might not matter as much this time around. Because not matter if you use online or IVR polls, you get a Tory majority as most likely outcome. Of course online polls would give more chances to the NDP but the PC is favourite in both cases.


Extra: riding by riding projections.

Polls are currently showing a Conservative majority with probabilities around 70%. This means a NDP victory next Thursday is possible but would require some surprises. In this blog post, I will go through one scenario that ends with Andrea Horwath as Premier. It isn't a purely fantasy scenario where the NDP gets 50% of the vote or anything. No, I'll use the current projections and make some minor changes.

But first, here are the most up to date projections. I just added the Mainstreet tracker of yesterday (showing the PC back on top) as well as accounting for the riding poll in Guelph showing the Green leader first. At the bottom of this article you can find the riding by riding projections that will serve as our baseline case.

Voting intentions; Seat projections with confidence intervals; Chances of winning the most seats

Alright, the NDP needs 13 more seats compared to the projections. Let's see the ridings that could be changed. The theme for this scenario will be the NDP surging in very urban areas. We'll leave most of the 905 to the Tories. We'll also not go with the scenario where the NDP is severly underestimated in the polls (although this is a possibility). We'll simply flip some ridings here and there.

Ok, here we go.

1. Guelph. Mainstreet published a second riding poll yesterday and it confirmed that Mike Schreiner was ahead, so I updated the model (even though I continue my decision not to use most of the riding polls as I believe they don't match up with the province wide ones. In this case however, we got two polls that showed the same results. Also, I can absolutely imagine the Green benefiting from the collapse of the OLP there). But the lead of the Green leader (3.9%) is small and smaller than the margins of error of the poll. Also, the riding polls of Mainstreet have been underestimating the NDP consistently. So let's assume that the NDP manages to grab this riding. It could be helped by some undecided ultimately going for the best option to defeat Rob Doug Ford.

2. Two of the three Don Valley (East, West and North). Current projections give the NDP some low chances there. Don Valley East is by far the easiest pick but those are urban ridings. The NDP mostly needs half of the Liberal voters to rally around them. Maybe Kathleen Wynne admitting she knows she won't win would be enough to move these voters.

3. Eglington-Lawrence. Projections aren't super favourable but that's one of the riding polls where the NDP was higher than in my model. Keeping with the surge in urban environment, this could make sense.

4. Scarborough-Guildwood. Currently one of the two Scarborough riding not going NDP, the NDP just needs a little bit of a push to win there.

5. Toronto Centre and St. Paul's. The former is almost a perfect toss up in the projections but riding polls were putting the NDP easily ahead. Similar story for St. Paul's. These are two ridings that could go NDP with the collapse of the Liberals.

Ok we are halfway there!

6. Willowdale and York-Centre. We are getting a little bit far from the city core though. But that's still the 416 and it still fits our scenario.

Not gains but for this scenario to work, I'm assuming all of Brampton goes orange.

7. One extra riding in Mississauga or Etobicoke-Lakeshore. There as well riding polls aren't very good but let's assume one surprise victory. The model seems to indicate that it should be possible in Mississauga.

8. Three Ottawa ridings; Vanier, West-Nepean and South. Both the model and riding polls are showing close races. Let's factor the usual collapse of the Liberal vote and a rally to the NDP and these can flip.

Here we are, the NDP is now at 63 seats and forming government. What did it take? A relatively basic scenario where the NDP is surging on Toronto proper and Ottawa, as well as getting lucky in one or two ridings in the suburbs. In most of the ridings here, the NDP's chances are already projected around 30%, so it's not like winning would be a monumental surprise. I did include some ridings with fairly low chances though (around 5%). So let's see if we can have a little bit of a buffer.

Let's add Sault St. Marie to the list. We can also put Kitchener South-Hespeler. They can replace two of the ridings above.

Look, of course I'm looking at a very optimistic scenario for the NDP. But my point is to show that it's not that hard to picture a path to 63 seats for this party. It doesn't require to flip seats where the NDP is 30 points behind.

Let's put it this way: remember last US election when so many pundits where saying there was no path to 270 for Trump? And then, 3 hours into the night, we started realizing that Trump actually had more path than Hillary simply because he flipped a couple of states in the midwest? I'm not comparing the NDP to Trump, I'm simply saying that we often think there is no way and then be surprised. My scenario here above would allow the PC to win most of the suburb and win almost everything in the rural part of the province (except the North). That's not a stretch. The fact the current chances of winning are almost exactly the same as for Hilary Clinton and Trump is just an amusing coincidence.

Look, whenever a party increases significantly between two elections, there are always ridings that flip that we never thought would. If the NDP really wins the popular vote by jumping to 37, 38 or 39%, I'm convinced such surprises will happen. They always do.

My model isn't even smart enough to actually include correlations across ridings that are similar (outside of being in the same region; But no socio-demographic variables unfortunately) and yet it gives the NDP around 30% chances of winning! So when I see the CBC poll tracker giving the NDP only 9.1% chances, I find it ridiculous.

Finally, uncertainty works both ways. I could easily do the same exercise for the Conservatives and have a scenario where Ford wins a super majority of 80 seats. Do not interpret this post as me saying that this is what will happen. I simply wanted to illustrate how possible a NDP majority was. In other words: do not assume that this election is over.

Interesting strategy from the Ontarian Premier Kathleen Wynne to admit she won't win next week. Not very common. What do you think of it?

What do you think of Kathleen Wynne's strategy to admit she won't win?
I love it, this is genius
I like it but it won't work
Meh
It's stupid, her party will now drop in the polls
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There was a time during this campaign, about the end of last week, were people genuinely wondered if we were witnessing an orange wave in Ontario. This reached a peak when Pollara published a poll putting the party of Andrea Horwath at 43%, 11 points ahead of the Conservatives of Doug Ford. At that time, my projections were literally showing a 50-50 race.

Since then, however, things have changed slightly against the NDP. The NDP didn't really drop in the average, but it stopped increasing and seems to have got stuck around 36-37%. The PC on the other hand enjoyed a small rebound. A rebound somewhat confirmed by looking at the recent trend in the Mainstreet tracker or the most recent polls from Ekos and Forum. At the very least you can say the PC managed to stop its fall.

If the election were tomorrow, that would be the best projections I'd have:

Voting intentions; Seat projections with 95% confidence intervals; Chances of winning the most seats

[Small update] Mainstreet released the new riding poll in Guelph and it confirmed Mike Schreiner ahead. So my next projections will have the Green leader as favourite there, although it remains a close race. Here below the updated projections. It is still a mix of projections and the numbers from the poll.




A couple of remarks about my model and my poll aggregation. I don't waste my time trying to weigh polls based on whether they were done 24 hours earlier or if they have an extra 200 respondents. I mostly use the polls over the last week and give everyone the same weight. You can think I'm lazy but my polling average has been better than the CBC one for multiple elections. I have published research showing that these factors don't matter significantly regarding polling accuracy.

What I do differently is regarding undecided. Pollsters usually allocate them proportionally. So if one party is at 40% among decided voters, they assume this party would get 40% of the undecided. This means they are making a very implicit assumption: undecided will ultimately break out the same way as decided voters. My point is: then why were they undecided in the first place? Alternatively, the proportional method is equivalent to dropping all the undecided and assuming none of them will vote.

I dislike both assumptions and find them unrealistic. Instead I allocate the undecided non-proportionally among the top parties (Liberals, PC and NDP). The small parties don't get undecided. This allows me to take care of the usual overestimation of small parties. Additionally, I allocate proportionally more undecided to the incumbent. Why? Well because a careful look at polls over the last years showed that the incumbent was systematically underestimated. Also, I can justify this by saying that undecided voters will be more likely to go with the safe option, the one they already know.

In the case of the Ontario election, I started the election by giving 40% of the undecided to the Liberals (instead of the 25-30% they would get with the proportional method), 40% to the PC and 20% to the NDP. But since the NDP has now taken the lead, I changed to 1/3 for everyone. It boosts the OLP a little bit and decrease the Green. It mostly leaves the NDP and PC where they'd be. Yes my 1/3 rule is arbitrary but you have to make an assumption at some point. I find mine no more stupid than going with a proportional allocation.

On top of this, as I was explaining the other day, the riding polls from Mainstreet simply do not line up with the province wide ones. And the difference is still present in the last few days. So after spending way too much time looking into them, I dropped the adjustments made based on the riding polls. I believe the riding polls are biased towards the PC and against the NDP (compared to the province wide polls that I trust more) and using their information is therefore introducing this bias into my projections. It's possible these polls are right but if they are, then the provincial average will be way, way off.

I kept 4 riding polls. Three in the North (Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Kenora-Rainy River), a region traditionally very volatile (and in the case of Sault Ste. Marie, the poll confirmed that the by-election results should most likely be used as baseline). I also kept the one in Guelph because it was the only way to measure the Mike Schreiner effect. Mainstreet will re-poll there and publish tomorrow, so we'll see if the Green really have a shot. All the other ridings polls have been discarded.


The state of this race



Let's focus on the chances of winning instead than on the seat total. We basically have a 70-30 race. Anecdotally, this is similar to the state of the race at the end of the 2016 US election. Don't interpret this as me saying you should expect a surprise NDP victory! With that said, there are similarities in the sense that it looks like there are very few paths for the NDP to win. The NDP vote being less efficient (in being converted in seats) than the PC vote, mostly because of the 905, it means the NDP either needs to hope for a severe underestimation in the polls (could be caused by a good turnout of the NDP voters) or a massive change to the electoral map. One path that would allow Horwath to become Premier would be a NDP surge in the core urban ridings of Toronto and Ottawa. This could be accomplish by a massive transfer of OLP voters to the NDP (strategic voting anyone?).

If nothing changes in the last few days, we'll have an election night where Doug Ford will be favourite but a NDP win shouldn't be considered as super unlikely or shocking. Well, that's assuming you believe my probabilities and not the CBC's ones since the CBC is currently only giving the NDP 9.1% chances of winning. I already explained why I think this is plain wrong. This is either seriously underestimating how wrong polls have been in the past or overestimating how good the model is.

Many think that for Ford, it's majority or burst. They might have a point. First of all, winning only a minority for the PC would be barely above blowing a 4-1 lead. After all, let's remember that the PC started this campaign with a very comfortable lead. I'm sure many would criticize Ford for dropping the majority. Also, if Ford fails to get a majority, we can't exclude the NDP and Liberals making some sort of deal. Anyway, if you are in the camp that thinks it's majority or burst, then you should know that the chances for such a majority are only 52.9%. So a toss-up basically.

Speaking of majority, the collapse of the Liberals means a minority is not the most likely outcome. It's simply arithmetic really. For a minority to happen, you need a third party winning enough seats. That's not currently the case for the Liberals, although the confidence intervals shows that if the Liberal vote was to hold better than expected, then this party could win significantly more than 5 seats.

What are the best and absolute worst case scenarios for each party?

For the PC: 22 seats is the worst, 93 is the absolute best (think of this scenario as the one where the Tories were underestimated by the polls and its vote was incredibly efficient).

OLP: 0-36 (note: around 2% chance of 0 seat)

NDP: 27-99.

Green: 0-1 (Note on Mike Schreiner: it's always hard to measure a local effect such as what might be happening in Guelph. The conditions look good for the Green leader -no incumbent, a split vote meaning the threshold to win the seat is low, etc- but I can't just go ahead and boost Schreiner. If the Mainstreet poll today confirms he's ahead (like in the first poll), then I'll make adjustments. For now, my take is that this is a 4-way race and he has some good chances.

Maybe the best way to see this uncertainty is with the distributions for each party:


As you can see, the only certainty seems to be that the Liberals will finish 3rd.

Notice that the projections above don't fall exactly in the middle of each distribution. The PC is currently projected slightly on the higher end of its interval while the OLP is in the low tail. This mostly comes down to close races and the PC is currently winning a majority of those. Still, if you instead prefer the average scenario as projections, then it's OLP 7, PC 63 and NDP 52. That should convince you that a majority for Ford is far from guaranteed at this point.

In conclusion, this will probably remain a close race until the end. I'm starting to be of the opinion that the real uncertainty will be whether Ford gets a majority though (because of how difficult the 905 is for the NDP; Elections in this country have often been won in the suburbs in recent years and I feel the suburbs have decided to change Wynne for Ford). I know that many things can happen during the last few days, but I feel that if there was supposed to be an orange wave, it would have happened by now. There is something preventing the NDP from reaching the 40% mark, or at the very least from taking a commanding lead over the PC. I'm not sure what it is exactly (fear of the  Rae days? etc) but I don't expect a late surge for this party. That's just my reading of the race and I'm usually wrong, so take it with a big grain of salt.

Finally, the riding by riding projections. Remember that you can make your own using the simulator.



The NDP surge in the polls seems to have come to an end. At the very least the the NDP-PC gap has been shrinking over the last few days. At this point, unless there is a very late surge, I think it's fair to say a clear NDP win in the popular vote is unlikely (but not impossible). By clear win, I mean going over 40% and beating the PC by 5 points or more.

This means that projections models like mine are showing the Tories ahead and favourite since the popular vote is almost tied. Vote efficiency has always assumed to be helping the PC. What I'm a little bit surprised by is the magnitude of the inefficiency of the NDP vote. Earlier this campaign I had found that the NDP probably needed to win by 2 points in order to win the most seat. But as the Liberals have slowly but surely fallen to 20% and below, the same analysis now shows the NDP would need to win by almost 5 points! That's what my model shows and I obviously trust it. But I can't help but feel I'm doing something wrong.


1. The inefficiency of the NDP vote

So, why would the NDP vote be so inefficient? Let's look at the projections by regions.

Two regions offset each other: Central and Northern Ontario. The latter is going PC and all 11 ridings are projected to elect a PC MPP. On the other hand the North is currently projected to go all NDP. So that's 11 vs 11 (my "North" is slightly smaller than the definition of others, not going to change it now). With that said, the PC has a chance in some northern ridings such as Sault Ste. Marie or Kenora-Rainy River. In Central Ontario the NDP would really only have a shot in York-Simcoe.

The Southwest and Midwestern Ontario (Kitchener, etc) are two fairly competitive regions. The NDP is projected to win 7 out of 11 in the SW (London and Windsor help a lot). In the other region, the PC is winning 7 out of 11 (and it's not sure the NDP can really prevent the Green from taking Guelph). So again, it mostly cancels out.

In the Hamilton-Niagara region, the NDP is edging the PC 7 to 2, nothing surprising.

Alright, so far the NDP is actually ahead. It leaves us Toronto, the GTA and the East.

In the East, the PC wins 6 out of 7 (only Kingston and the Islands is going NDP). In most cases the margins of victory is comfortable (10 points and more). Even if all the OLP votes were to go NDP, the PC would still win those seats! So let's say the East compensates for the Hamilton-Niagara region.

In the Ottawa region, it's currently 7 PC, 1 OLP and 1 NDP with a couple of clsoe races in Ottawa itself.

Next Toronto. It's interesting that for once we have an election where the core urban center of the province is competitive, including for the right-wing party. Urban centers have become electorally boring in the 21st century with the Conservative party being unable to even compete (remember how hard Harper had to fight to finally win seats in Toronto and one in Vancouver proper in 2011?).

Polls show the NDP well ahead in Toronto, at the expense of the Liberals. if there is one place where strategic voting to avoid Ford has happened, this is it. Right now the projections have 1 seat going Liberals, 11 going PC and 13 going NDP. This is by far the most competitive region with multiple 3-way races. The 3 Don Valley ridings are pretty much toss-ups at this point (projections have the PC winning all 3 but by very small margins. Riding polls were even less favourable to the NDP's chances there, but I already talked about how riding polls seemed to underestimate the New Democrats). All the Etobicoke ridings are leaning PC but it's close in at least 2 of them. Scarborough is a giant mess currently leaning NDP. Only the core downtown is probably less uncertain (and even there, it depends if the Liberals hold better than expected).

The city of Toronto is clearly the one region where anything can happen. I expect the projections to potentially be right overall (total number of seats) but having a lot of cancelling mistakes.

Alright, so we are left to the culprit of the inefficiency of the NDP vote: the 905. I'm talking of York-Durham and Peel Halton. So ridings like Ajax, Markham etc in the east and Mississauga and Brampton  in the west. The PC of Doug Ford is currently projected to win 22 seats there versus only 7 for the NDP! This, right there, is why the NDP isn't favourite.

Could my model be wrong? Well my model is already nicer to the NDP there than the riding polls. These show the PC crushing it in Mississauga for instance and even winning two of the Brampton ridings (and the other two are won by razor thin margins by the NDP!).

Polls and projections agree: the PC isn't crushing the 905 in terms of voting percentages. The Tories are winning by around 5-7 points. But it's winning most of the seats by far.

Can this be changed? Even if I somehow boost the NDP and decrease the Tories by a few points, I still have the PC winning 21 seats! This is because out of the 22 projected wins, the PC has 12 by a margin of 15 points and more (over the NDP, I'm leaving the Liberals behind here). On the other hand the NDP has 4 close wins out of the 7 it wins!

In other words: the GTA isn't about to break NDP anytime soon, at least not based on what we know. And this is giving the PC an advantage that is almost insurmountable. At this point the only way I could see the NDP having a path to victory is if they breakout in the city of Toronto (helped by a collapse of the Liberal vote).



2. The impact of the Liberal collapse.

When the OLP dropped from 25% to 20% (in average), it helped the PC a lot more than the NDP. This is particularly true in urban ridings like the ones in Toronto and Ottawa. Basically it just created more vote splitting between the OLP and the NDP. If the Liberals want to help the NDP (obviously the party itself doesn't...), then one of two things need to happen. Either the Liberals voters need to move away from the OLP and massively go to the NDP. Or they actually need to show up and vote for the OLP. From the point of the view of the NDP, every seat taken away from Ford is good news, even if it means the OLP getting more than 3 seats. Either it causes the PC to finish second overall or it at least forces a minority.



3. How can the NDP win?

There are mostly two paths to victory.

1) "Brute force" scenario where the NDP just wins the popular vote by 5+ points. It doesn't flip most of the 905 but it's enough to pick up seats elsewhere.

2) The surge in core urban areas scenario. In this one, the NDP needs to change the electoral map significantly. It would need to crush it in Toronto, possibly helped by a collapse of the Liberal vote. Out of 11 seats projected to go PC, 5 are by less than a 5 points margin and another 3 is by less than 10 points. Then you need the same in Ottawa. In this scenario, the NDP could go and grab an extra 5-10 seats from the PC. That brings the total to 60-60 pretty much. In this scenario, the NDP also needs luck in the sense that it better wins all the close ridings in the North, Guelph, etc.

So, that's pretty much it. As it stands there is no question the Progressive Conservatives of Ford are favourite. Scenario 1 here above is becoming less and less likely and would require a pretty important polling error. How likely is scenario 2? I can't really tell, or at least I can't quantify it.
Note: no new projections this morning as we didn't really get any new poll yesterday except the Mainstreet tracker (where the NDP is back in second place). Not enough change to justify redoing everything. Just refer to yesterday's projections.

Transposing polls into seats is nice and it works quite well if you have the correct voting percentages. That's a big if. We all remember the Alberta election of 2012 of the BC one of 2013 where polls were way off. This is why representing the uncertainty that exists is so important to me.

Think of the 2016 US election. Using a poll average, Hilary Clinton was clearly favourite. It is simply a fact that based on the information available before the election, she was the most likely to win the presidency. And whether you were reading 538 or another site, they all mostly agreed on the average expected outcome (Hilary Clinton winning with around 300-320 electoral vote). Where sites didn't agree was on the level of certainty they had of this outcome. 538 was the least bullish with Trump being given 28.6% chances of winning. This is way more than most other website or aggregators, some of which literally had Clinton's chances at over 99.9%!

Why am I talking US election? Because I believe we currently have a situation where some aggregators aren't representing uncertainty correctly. I'm talking here in particular of the well knwon CBC poll tracker (from Eric Grenier, previously at 308). As I'm writing this article, the CBC is saying the NDP has a 12% chance of winning the most seats (8.4% for a majority, 3.6% for a minority). My model on the other hand is currently giving the NDP around 24% chances (and that's a sharp drop compared to the >40% of a few days ago, before polls started showing a slight PC rebound).

Part of the difference come from a slight difference in our polling aggregation. The CBC has the NDP ahead by 0.7pt (37.3% versus 36.6% for the Tories) while I have the NDP ahead by around 1.5pt. This is because the CBC gives a lot more weight to very recent polls when I go with a more simple approach of giving equal weight to any poll conducted during the last week. Also, the CBC is currently giving the highest weight to the latest Forum poll... I don't think I need to add much more here.

But that's only part of the story. The CBC model has had the NDP with lower chances than me since the beginning. As a matter of fact the maximum was at 17.4% chances! I find it absolutely insane. And I truly believe this is incorrect.

Now, here comes the hard part: it literally is impossible to prove who is right here. The only way would be to have this election repeated a 100 times in 100 universes and see how many times the NDP wins. That is obviously not an option. So on election night, even after knowing the actual outcome, it wouldn't prove one model right or wrong (unless the outcome was one given 0% chances by us). In other words, even if the NDP wins, we wouldn't know how big of a surprise it was.

So I won't really try to convince you of who is right and who is wrong. Instead, I want to show how I come up with the chances of winning.

First of all, a probabilistic model must be properly calibrated with respect of the average polling accuracy. I have already written about this topic here. The summary is that polls in Canada have been decent but not perfect in the last few years. In average they are 1.92 points off (1.25% if we exclude the big two mistakes of Alberta and BC but then it becomes cherry picking). Beyond the average, the actual margins of error of the polling average have been 5.68%! Or 3.19% if we remove the two outliers. In other words: polls aren't bad but even after averaging them, there is still considerable uncertainty.

So right there we see that based on the average accuracy, we can have the following outcomes (NDP first, PC second): 37-37, 39-34, 35-38, etc. And based on the margins of error, we can't exclude a scenario where, for instance, the NDP is at 42% and the PC at 32%. It's not likely but absolutely possible (2-3% chances of this happening).

Let's focus on the NDP 39% (so underestimated by 1.5 points roughly in the polls) and PC at 34% (so overestimated by 1.8 pts). This scenario wouldn't even count as a surprise on election night. Or it shouldn't if you know anything about polls. At around a 5 points lead, I think it might be enough for the NDP to win (the current simulator shows a close race with these numbers however. I would call it a too close to call situation). With the collapse of the Liberals, my estimations show that the necessary lead for the NDP to win is increasing. Also, let's realize that when a party moves from 23.75% in 2014 to 39% in 2018, projection models like mine aren't the most accurate. This is a massive shift of the electoral map. So it is absolutely possible that the model is underestimating the vote efficiency of the NDP.

So, given the polling average, what are the odds of the NDP winning the popular vote by 3, 4 or 5 points? Using simulations calibrated to the average polling accuracy, we can easily answer this question. The table below shows these odds based on my polling average:

Probabilities that the NDP will win the popular vote by
3 points 36%
4 points 28%
5 points 21%


The graph below shows the possible outcomes for the popular vote. Specifically, it shows the difference between the % for the NDP and the % for the PC. and yes I'm aware it isn't a very pretty graph but you get the meaning.


So now the question really becomes: how inefficient is the NDP vote? Can the NDP really win by 4 points and still lose? The answer appears to be yes, as crazy as it sounds. The collapse of the Liberals has opened so many seats to the PC in the 905 and increased the vote efficiency of the Tories.

Right now, my most recent estimations show that the NDP probably needs 4-4.5 points lead in order to win the most seats. This is pretty crazy. It used to be 2 points but that was when the Liberals weren't as low as 20%. At the same time my simulations show that it is possible for the NDP to win if this party is only winning the popular vote by 1 points. It's unlikely but possible. If the NDP is ahead by 3 points, the chances of a NDP government are roughly 12%.

If we take into account the possibility that the polls will be off and the fact that the distribution of the vote will have a big influence (and could be mostly unknown after such a massive change in the Ontarian political landscape), I think it is fair to say the NDP has some chances. This party is clearly not favourite at this point but a NDP victory shouldn't be seen as a crazy unlikely event. In particular are these chances as low as 12%? I don't believe so. I already think that the 24% chances my model is giving the NDP are too low.

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