tcnorris

New location for this blog

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:41:00 +0000

I have moved my blogging to a new Substack here: tcnorris Substack.

Ontario election 2022 might set a precedent

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 18:27:00 +0000

Polls over the past year seeking the views of the Ontario electorate have found a split that seemingly favours a re-election of the Ford government with a majority. Going back to last June, a year prior to the upcoming election date of June 2, the PCs have averaged about 35% support, five percentage points less than they obtained in 2018 while the average for the Liberals and NDP is 27% each. However, much of the analysis of this dead even split takes no account of a history of tactical voting in Ontario, both federal and provincial, dating back to 1999. I fully expect either the Liberals or the NDP to demonstrate during the election campaign that they are the more popular alternative to Ford - at this point I am not sure which it will be. The consequence of that will be late movement towards the party with the best chance of defeating the PCs, not necessarily dislodging the Ford PCs from first place, but likely sufficient to prevent a PC majority.

Even if the PCs win the most seats, the NDP and Liberal leaders have recently strongly suggested that they will not let Ford continue to govern. Fifteen years ago this would have been unheard of. The Canadian electorate accepted the legitimacy of the party finishing first simply carrying on with the business of government.

At a recent panel discussion NDP leader Andrea Horwath said, "I don’t see any scenario where I would support a Doug Ford government... If (Liberal leader) Steven Del Duca is prepared to support the kind of things that we want to see happen to fix what’s wrong in Ontario then I would welcome that and I would be prepared to have that conversation". For his part del Duca predicted "I don’t believe that I’ll be able to support Doug Ford... Doug Ford has demonstrated consistently ... he’s not the right person for the job. He doesn’t have what it takes — not the capacity, the curiosity, the interest or the skill set to get us through to the recovery and rebuild this province".

There was a time not long ago where the electorate accepted the first place finisher in our first-past-the-post electoral system as the legitimate winner. No longer. The idea of the acceptability of voting coalitions in legislatures has been growing. We saw this at work in BC following the 2017 provincial election when the NDP and Greens came to an agreement. If that type of accord could oust the Ford government following the 2022 election, I fully expect to see it happen. The PCs could be tossed from office even if they are, say, 10 seats and a couple of percentage points ahead.

Doug Ford with snow shovel

One of the conundrums of Ontario politics is that all three party leaders are seriously weak. Doug Ford is an incompetent clown whose first chief of staff, Dean French, had to be sacked due to a nepotism scandal, following a year where he engendered intense hostility throughout the halls of government, both bureaucratic and political. More recently, following a record snowfall Ford went out in his car to help other motorists who were stuck using a child's shovel (the link is to an amusing video), rather than working with provincial and municipal officials on managing the response to the storm. It was absurd.

However, both of the opposition leaders are weak. NDP leader Andrea Horwath has frequently demonstrated poor political judgement, while Liberal leader Stephen del Duca is an exceptionally inept political performer.

Nonetheless, one of these three must wind up as a winner. I increasingly like the odds of one of the opposition leaders becoming premier.

Election 2021 Observations

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:38:00 +0000

Overall the results of the 2021 election were unremarkable. The result was acutely disappointing for the Liberal government, but their expections for a majority may have been misplaced. What follows are some observations about 2021.

1963 & 1965

The 2019 and 2021 elections bear a striking resemblance to the 1963 and 1965 elections. Both 1963 and 1965 produced Liberal minorities that were disappointments for the Liberals as they had expected to win a majority in both cases. Clearly the 2021 election was called by Justin Trudeau because numerous polls prior to the call of the election suggested that a majority was within reach, quite similar to the calling of the 1965 election by Lester Pearson on the urging of Walter Gordon and Keith Davey.

Lester Pearson & Walter Gordon

Because the Liberals slumped initially before recovering, expectations rose among some observers of a possible Conservative win. These expections were unrealistic. Among other things it involved forgetting that the Conservatives had already won more votes in 2019 but ended up with far fewer seats. My seat estimate, applied to the point where they peaked in the polls in late August, would have had them somewhere close to a tie with the Liberals in seats or even slightly ahead, but a long way short of a majority. In other words the Conservatives were not close to winning even a significant plurality of the constituencies. Once the campaign became focused the dynamic changed. It became clear that the Conservatives were attempting to come down on both sides of issues ranging from abortion to vaccination. This was a clear indication that they had no confidence in key parts of their platform.

An important Liberal mistake was anticipating that gains in Quebec would carry them much of the way towards a majority. In part the Bloc got lucky gaining ground based on the aggressive behaviour of the host of the English TV debate, which overall she handled badly. However, it revealed how brittle Quebec nationalist sensibilities can be. The Bloc portrayed the host's question on Bill 21 as an attack on Quebec. The political dynamic in Quebec is at best elusive; a similar unexpectedly strong performance on the part of the Ralliement créditistes of Real Caouette in rural Quebec in 1965 contributed to the Liberal failure then. I remember a pollster on the 1965 CBC election night coverage excusing his results by saying they were off base mainly in rural Quebec.

Pork Barrel Politics

When there is an impending election the party in power tries to take advantage of it by funding local projects to pick up a marginal seat. I wrote about this last summer: "The Liberal government gives every signal that they intend to call an election in late summer or early autumn with the goal of converting their minority into a majority. One such sign was the announcement of federal money on July 9 for the extension of the Skytrain in BC in Surrey and Langley, which is aimed at shoring up existing Liberal ridings while targeting narrowly held Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) constituencies such as South Surrey-White Rock and Cloverdale-Langley City." So how did that turn out? The results were mixed: the Liberals did win Cloverdale-Langley City, a new seat for them, by three points, but lost the South Surrey-White Rock riding by a similar amount. The Liberals did keep their existing ridings in the region.

Chinese Ridings

The Liberals picked up three constituencies with large Chinese populations: Richmond Centre and Steveston-Richmond East in British Columbia, and Markham-Unionville in suburban Toronto. Given there was so little seat shifting the change is notable. Some argue that it was partly a product of a disinformation campaign by China, which was reacting to Conservative party policy proposals. However, it is conceivable the strong criticism of the Conservative party of Chinese human rights violations could have been interpreted by some members of the community as being anti-Chinese. Either way it did not affect the net outcome.

The Polls

On the whole, with a notable exception, the polls were accurate in 2021. I compared both the national and regional polls to the results. The most accurate polling firms were Leger, Ipsos and Research Co when you include all the regional numbers. The exception was the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) polls - ie being phoned by a computer. They significantly overestimated support for the PPC (People's Party of Canada).

The PPC and Greens

The PPC measurably increased its support in this election, from 3.3% in 2019 to 4.9% in 2021 (but won no seats) essentially campaigning as an anti-vaccine party (its strength was strongest in rural Manitoba). Following its disastrous leadership change, the Green Party dropped 4.1 percentage points between the two elections and ended up with one less seat.

Third Party Interventions

There are always interests and individuals seeking to affect elections. Former Liberal cabinet minister Jody Wilson Raybould, elected as an independent in 2019, wrote a critical memoir centred on the SNC Lavalin Affair and was, according to Jeffrey Simpson, "so determined ... to wound the prime minister and his party in the 2021 election that she apparently advanced the memoir’s publication date to maximize the hurt it might do to her former colleagues." As best I can tell it had no impact. Most intervenors in elections are similarly unsuccessful.

What should we expect in our political future

During the campaign, Earnscliffe Strategies sponsored weekly polls by Leger and provided discussion in the form of a webinar. One session focused particualarly on second choices. The election delivered a disappointing outcome for the NDP but the poll suggests the NDP may be well positioned going forward (see 8:20 onward). Nationally more voters indicated second choice support for the NDP than any other party

Earnscliffe Leger Poll 2021 Election

Earnscliffe's Allan Gregg, one of Canada's best pollsters, comments (at about the 10:04 mark): "Second choice support is a pretty good surrogate for potential growth.You can see how different it is for each of the three parties. You can see here the Conservatives only have six percent of the population versus fifteen percent for the Liberals and twenty-seven percent for the New Democrats. Historically you would never see anything like that. Secondly you look at Liberal voters, they have almost no propensity to vote Conservative whatsoever."

Gregg was referring in this instance to the short term of the election campaign but it might be appropriate to think about it in a longer run context.

As the Official Opposition, the Conservatives are generally thought of as the most likely alternative government, but if Gregg's comment is right, they will have a hard time getting there.

The NDP also benefits from Jagmeet Singh's popularity, although it is strongly correlated with age. Singh is quite popular with younger voters. There are a number of different questions used to measure personal popularity. One of the best measures is 'Who do you prefer as prime minister?'. This appears to be closest to actual vote choice. The Nanos poll asks more than one including preferred prime minister. Trudeau is almost always first around 30%. This week O'Toole was second and Singh third, near 20%. Last week it was the reverse. Singh has the most support when the question is about 'has the qualities of a good political leader' (note: not prime minister).

Will Trudeau Retire from Politics?

I like gossip as much as the next person but the Ottawa press corps is obsessed with gossip about Trudeau's departure so you see a great deal of coverage. When asked, Trudeau said clearly he is not leaving. If you want to figure out what will happen history strongly suggests that he is far more likely to hang on too long than leave early. Party leaders that have hung on too long in recent history include Brian Mulroney (leaving Kim Campbell not much time to get ready for the next election), Pierre Trudeau (remember the 'peace initiative'), Jean Chrétien (helping provoke the clash with Martin), and John Diefenbaker (he had to be ousted by Dalton Camp). There are several more. Ignore the gossip.

And the winner is....

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 22:02:00 +0000

This election campaign has left a sour taste in everyone's mouth. It was unnecessary and has let loose a wave of anti-social behaviour, particularly on the part of PPC adherents and anti-vaxxers. It appears the Liberals will win the most seats, likely somewhere in the 140-150 range with the Conservatives somewhere in the 120-130 range. Almost all seat projections would yield a Liberal plus NDP majority in the House of Commons. It is quite possible that vote shares for the two leading parties will wind up lower than their respective vote shares than in the 2019 election. For the Liberals a minority outcome would be a result comparable to the bitter fruit the party tasted at the time of the 1965 election.

It also appears the election has not been kind to the Conservatives; they have been forced on the defensive on issues including ranging from vaccinations to health care to abortion to gun control. Erin O'Toole has quite skilfully tried to come down on both sides of contentious issues without appearing opportunistic. To me he has simply appeared to be dishonest and untrustworthy - not just dishonest in the dissembling way one normally expects from political speech but beyond that.

One party that is clearly doing better this time is the NDP, benefiting in part from dissatisfaction with the two leading alternatives, particularly the Liberals. It is possible, if everything went the NDP's way, they would end up somewhere in the 40-50 seat range. More likely is something in the 30-40 seat range, still a large improvement on the 24 seats they captured in 2019. NDP support is disproportionately young, the demographic with the lowest turnout. In today's Nanos poll the NDP leads in the 18 to 34 age group with 34% of the vote to 22% for the Liberals and 20% for the Conservatives. Another factor is that some who prefer the NDP nonetheless vote Liberal to prevent the Conservatives from achieving success.

A key reason the Conservatives are having a tough time ousting the Liberals is that relatively few non-Conservatives cite them as a second choice.

A poll conducted by Leger for the Earnscliffe Strategy Group produced the following finding:

In January 2019, 22% of Liberal supporters named the CPC as their second choice, falling to 16% in October of that year. Now, just 2% would support the CPC, while over half (58%) give their second-choice support to the NDP.

If we go back over the decades it is the Liberal Party and Conservative Party (in its various iterations) that have provided alternative governments to Canadians. Is that era coming to an end? It is too soon to say, but this evolution in public opinion seems significant.

The other big problem for the Conservatives is that they are no longer the big tent party on the right. The gains of the PPC this time are almost certain to be modest, but most of their votes are coming from the Conservatives. Nick Kouvalis, a pollster and Conservative strategist - he worked for Rob Ford and is currently working for Doug - blames the PPC for the likely Liberal victory in the latest press release issued by his polling firm Campaign Research. It is reminiscent of the nineties and the split between the Reform Party and the former Progressive Conservative Party, albeit on a more limited scale. However, it would take just a few percentage points to deny Erin O'Toole's Conservative Party a good result.

Because there has been a great deal of voting this year by mail and special ballots, results which won't be known until Tuesday, we might not learn the final shape of the House of Commons until the next day. However, polling from Nanos suggests the gains post election day will not go to the Conservatives:

According to Nanos Research’s nightly tracking data conducted for CTV News and the Globe and Mail, which was released on Friday, those Canadians who plan to vote by mail-in ballot are four times more likely to vote for the Liberals than the Conservatives...

Of those who rated their likelihood to vote by mail as a nine or 10 on the scale:

47 per cent would vote Liberal;

26 per cent would vote NDP;

12 per cent would vote Conservative;

6 per cent would vote Bloc Quebecois;

6 per cent would vote Green Party; and

2 per cent would vote People’s Party of Canada

In 2019 the polls significantly underestimated the Conservatives; every major polling firm understated the Andrew Scheer Conservatives by an average of 2.6 percentage points nationally; in Alberta it was 11.1 percentage points. Will it happen again? Have the polling firms made adjustments to reflect 2019 experience? We don't know. One party that has a lot riding on this is the NDP. As things stand now, the party is poised to make significant seat gains in Saskatchewan and Alberta, but a repeat of the same polling phenomenon could negate those potential wins. The pandemic has not been kind to Jason Kenney or Scott Moe. That could be an offsetting factor as could the rise of the PPC.

The 2020 election in the United States produced significant polling error. A key explanation that emerged later was that there was increasing distrust on the part of the political right in institutions including polling. It could be repeated here.

The last week: where things stand

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 21:45:00 +0000

State of the Race

In the last few days the Liberals have begun inching upward in various polls, in particular in the Nanos daily tracking poll for the Globe and Mail and CTV, the Mainstreet poll for iPolitics (you can see all the polls on Wikipedia). Both Nanos and Mainstreet had quite accurate polls in 2019, so they deserve to be taken seriously. The growth for the Liberals may be connected to the debates, but it seems to have started earlier. These results point to a Liberal minority that would be stronger than their pre-election position but short of a majority. There has also been some upward movement for Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada (PPC) - scroll down the CBC's poll tracker page to see the graphic showing poll shifts over time to see this. While a little of their support comes from elsewhere, most is coming from the Conservatives. One province showing weakness in Conservative support is Alberta, weak enough that the NDP and Liberals could pick up seats. However, polling there in 2019 underestimated the actual Conservative vote by eleven points. In the United States in 2020 there is evidence that small 'c' conservatives did not respond to polls to the same extent as liberals. We should not be surprised to see something along these lines in Canada, although polling firms are now aware of the problem.

The Debate

The debate was atrocious. I did not think they could get any worse but this one did. The Globe's John Doyle nailed it in his TV column:

What happened across multiple Canadian TV channels was the worst of the worst, an example of utter failure in Canadian television, and a disgraceful insult to the intelligence of viewers and voters.

That was not a debate, it was a farce. The fact that the political leaders even agreed to participate in the format is an indictment of their collective intelligence....

Moderator Shachi Kurl took the view that her job was to stop the leaders from talking. This was a peculiar tack to take. You see, at its best, television coverage isolates and highlights the strengths and flaws of individuals. It goes to the core. It can push aside propaganda and posturing. Politicians and the public know this. It’s why the U.S. debates proceed with deep seriousness. Here, in election debate after election debate, the event has tended to descend into bickering and masquerade.

I agree with all of this. One reform I would like to see (among many) is that there be only one live mike at a time for the politicians. The cross talk and interruptions make the debate extremely confusing for viewers. If only one mike is on at a time, the speaker who has the floor will be heard easily above one who tries to interrupt. As it was in this debate the moderator frequently took the side of the interrupter and told the speaker to stop. It was the worst performance by a debate moderator ever.

The significance of Suburban Toronto

The region where the Conservatives are hoping to make significant gains in Ontario is known as the 905 after its area code and consists of suburbs west, east and north of Toronto. Half of these constituencies are in the west, a third in the north and a smaller number in the east.

The Conservatives swept this area in 2011, the Liberals in 2019. The top two tables below report the results for 2019 and 2015. The third table gives the comparison. Note that while the Liberals maintained their strength overall in 2019 they slipped a bit in the north and east but actually gained in the west. The suburbs to the west of Toronto include primarily Mississauga, Brampton, and Oakville. The population there is becoming more diverse, that is, more like Toronto, where Conservative support is weak.

I would look for Conservative gains (if they re-establish their earlier campaign strength) first in York Region, the suburbs north of Toronto. The Conservatives are targeting seats here and were successful in luring a Liberal elected in this region in 2019 to cross the floor, no doubt in part because she sensed Conservative strength here.

The NDP and Jagmeet Singh

To date the NDP is running ahead of its pace in 2019, and looks set to pick up seats. Leader Jagmeet Singh is polling particularly well in surveys that ask specifically about leadership. A recent Abacus poll found he had the strongest net positives among the leaders. The problem is that leaders are not on the ballot but parties are. Nonetheless, Singh is proving to be an adept campaigner and communicator.

However, the NDP vote is strongly correlated by age (in the most recent Mainstreet and Nanos they were either tied or ahead in the youngest age cohort) so turnout is exceptionally important. The NDP is quite a bit weaker among older voters who tend to turn out more strongly while younger voters have lower turnout (see this Statistics Canada survey). It bodes well for the NDP in the longer run. Because the Conservatives did well early on in the campaign they could also lose votes to tactical voters who may prefer the NDP but will nonetheless vote Liberal if they fear the Conservatives.

Normally, one should not expect much movement in the final week of a campaign but this one is close; there are recent shifts that may not be finished. There is higher than normal uncertainty.

Election Campaign 2021 and the polls

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:07:00 +0000

Election 2021 features quite a few polls including daily tracking polls from Nanos and Mainstreet, who were among the most accurate polling firms in 2019. The table below presents calculations of the difference between actual election results and the late campaign provincial & regional subsections of national polls in 2019. I converted the errors into absolute values, added them up and ranked the pollsters. The top three performers in 2019 (seen below with a white background) were Leger, Mainstreet and Nanos.

In my view the polling firms in the middle with the light gray background also did well - Abacus, Research Co and Campaign Research. The others in darker gray below were less accurate.

These pollster performances could look different in 2021. The pollster with the best record over time is Nanos, the firm doing daily tracking polls for the Globe and Mail/ CTV News. So far the polls suggest that the Liberals' hoped for majority is a chimera. I hate the term "polls show"; polls are not so unswervingly accurate, so they deserve less declarative language.

The results so far should be regarded as tentative and preliminary. The arrival of the autumn will bring TV debates in the week following Labour Day. They are likely to be highly influential on the final result.

Although parties devote much space to detailed policy proposals the public looks at the big picture: it is symbolic politics that are decisive.

The Liberals popularity declined almost as soon as the writ was dropped. It is likely the Trudeau government was unpopular before writ. Six years of accumulated grievances will do that. However, the Liberals' polling and other public opinion research such as focus groups should have been looking for that and they ought to have found it. Clearly they weren't looking.

The Dishonesty of Erin O'Toole

The Conservatives are running an extremely dishonest, but highly effective campaign, a much more effective campaign than Andrew Scheer mounted in 2019.

An Andrew Coyne column in the Globe and Mail helps illustrate the nature of the Conservative campaign.

"...So Conservatives must be thrilled to find Erin O’Toole showing promise of the requisite shamelessness. The Conservative leader has not just survived the inevitable Liberal attacks in the campaign’s first week, he has seemed almost to invite them, luring the Grits into wasting valuable rhetorical ammunition on a series of dummy controversies.

On vaccine mandates, on abortion, on health care, Mr. O’Toole has said things that at first sound difficult, controversial, or at least noteworthy, but which on closer examination turn out to mean nothing – nothing, that is, substantively different from Liberal policy, the status quo, or both. Liberal attempts to turn these into wedge issues have accordingly largely fizzled.

Some of this facility had been in evidence even before the Conservative platform was released. The Conservative promise to balance the budget “over the next decade” is a masterpiece of meaninglessness: the latest projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office show the budget will be all but balanced – a deficit of less than 1 per cent of GDP – inside of four years. It would require heroic acts of profligacy to prevent it from balancing in 10."

Coyne is right about this meaningless promise, but it lets the Conservatives appear to be fiscally prudent, when it is probably their intent to run large deficits in budgets, which include big tax cuts for their friends, financed by additional borrowing. It is the symbolism that counts. Quite brilliant, but entirely dishonest.

More Coyne:

".... On abortion, Mr. O’Toole’s vociferously pro-choice position seemed to deprive the Liberals of a target – until the release of the Conservative platform, with its vow to “protect the conscience rights of health-care professionals” who object to providing services such as abortion or assisted suicide. Again the Liberals pounced, only to find their wedge blunted once again: doctors are not required to provide those services now.

They are required to provide “effective referrals,” something Mr. O’Toole had promised to scrap during his leadership campaign. Would he still? Alas, no, as he later clarified: the promise now is merely to “protect” doctors’ existing conscience rights. The status quo, in other words."

Coyne should ask the rhetorical question if this is no change: why say anything? Because that rhetoric is a strong symbolic bow towards the anti-abortion crowd within Conservative ranks. He is saying "I am sympathetic to your feelings. I will try to do something for you." It may not amount to much - public opinion in Canada is strongly pro-choice. Stephen Harper did not try to introduce an abortion law. However, he firmly prohibited Canada's international aid money from being spent on family planning that included access to abortion. In other words he is saying he is with the anti-abortionists in spirit if not in practice. Again, brilliant but dishonest.

We go through the same thing again on health care. Coyne again:

"By the time the Liberals shifted their focus to health care, they were already looking punched out. Still, did they really think, in 2021, after so much talk of the perils of online misinformation, they could get away with posting a video of Mr. O’Toole saying he would allow provinces to contract with private, for-profit providers, while snipping out the bit about ensuring “universal access remains paramount”?

Again: private provision of services within a system of universal public insurance is common practice now – under the current, i.e. Liberal government. All the Liberal war room achieved by this ham-fisted gambit was to make themselves the issue, rather than their intended target.

Mr. O’Toole’s talent for double-talk may not make for much coherent policy. But as a survival tactic, its merits are undoubted. The point of a wedge issue is to force a party leader to choose between his base and the broader public. It takes some artful duplicity to wriggle out of this trap: to adopt a position of such bottomless vacuity, impenetrable yet suggestive, as to allow each group to take away from it what they prefer.

Again we have to ask why say this. Because O'Toole wants to appeal to the pro-privatization part of the Canadian electorate. This includes many affluent Canadians who want to buy their way to the front of the line, something that would seriously undermine Canada's health care system. However, his rhetorical frame lets him deny it. My impression is that it seems to have worked at the symbolic level, which is the point of the gambit. However, it is remarkably dishonest and suggests to me that O'Toole is further to the right than he is letting on. Coyne seems clueless about all this: symbolic politics have a reality underneath that should not be ignored.

So far I have neglected to mention the NDP. To date they are running a successful (for a third party) 'happy warrior' campaign, and Jagmeet Singh is achieving new heights of personal popularity. More on the NDP in a future post.

Is it time for a Liberal majority?

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 22:22:00 +0000

1965 Liberal Campaign Button

A federal election is coming and the widely mooted purpose for this campaign is a desire by the Trudeau government to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons. It brings immediately to mind a similar effort in 1965 when Walter Gordon and Keith Davey persuaded Lester Pearson to call an election for November 8, 1965.

That particular effort failed, humiliating its sponsors - one of the more notorious political failures in Canadian history, leaving behind a button to remind us of the hubris. A few years later in 1968 Pearson's successor, Pierre Trudeau, called a snap election after winning the Liberal leadership, winning a majority. He would repeat the success in 1974, an election engineered for the same purpose, following a near death performance in the 1972 election.

The record of minority governments seeking to become majorities is mixed. Probably the most spectacular success was that of John Diefenbaker in 1957 when he called the 1958 election and won one of Canada's largest majorities ever. A year later Manitoba PC Premier Duff Roblin engineered his defeat in the legislature, turning his minority government into a majority in the ensuing election. On the other hand, Stephen Harper was handed a setback when he called the 2008 election not long after legislating a fixed election date law that he promptly ignored. He saw an opportunity for a majority but it faded during the campaign; he wound up with a minority.

We have seen a pattern of success and failure among provincial governments as well. Bill Davis failed in Ontario in 1977 to attain a majority (seeking to reverse the minority outcome in 1975) , while Manitoba PC Premier Gary Filmon won a snap election in September 1990 following two yars in a minority. Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest won a majority the same way in 2008 following being reduced to a minority in 2007. Nova Scotia PC Premier Rodney Macdonald tried for a majority in 2006 but didn't get it, and lost outright to the NDP in 2009. The New Brunswick PC government of Blaine Higgs converted a minority into a majority this year, while John Horgan did the same thing for the NDP last year in BC. There have been others as well.

One conclusion I reach is that, despite current appearances, a Liberal majority is not a lock. I averaged a few recent polls and the seats projected; the estimate based on that average is a Liberal majority of 177 (101 C, 36 NDP, 24 Bloc and 1 Green) but the dynamics of an election campaign could easily change that. Indeed, 177 is a marginal majority and by no means certain. The number of previous attempts by others nonetheless suggest that the incentive to seek a majority is strong and elections called to win a majority in similar circumstances will continue in the future.

One final point: there is much discussion at the moment about whether there should be an election. Some argue that an unnecessary election (and I agree it is unnecessary) will hurt the Liberals. Some cite the example of David Peterson's early election call in 1990 leading to the victory of Bob Rae's NDP. I don't think it will be an issue, and it will be forgotten once the campaign is underway. There was a poll early on reporting the Ontario Liberals way ahead in 1990. But there was a great deal of public opiniton research that was not public at the time that suggested the Peterson government was quite unpopular (See the book Not Without Cause: David Peterson's Fall from Grace for details). I think an election will be called on Sunday, August 15 and whatever else may be said, the fact of calling the election will not be a significant election issue. But Justin Trudeau's majority project, which looks strong now, could fail.

Election fever

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 17:17:00 +0000

The Liberal government gives every signal that they intend to call an election in late summer or early autumn with the goal of converting their minority into a majority. One such sign was the announcement of federal money on July 9 for the extension of the Skytrain in BC in Surrey and Langley, which is aimed at shoring up existing Liberal ridings while targeting narrowly held Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) constituencies such as South Surrey-White Rock and Cloverdale-Langley City.

As soon as a party finds itself in a minority, it immediately begins scheming how to restore its majority. The Liberals appear quite confident that they will be succussful, so we should take the prospect of an early vote seriously. One reason for the early call is to avoid clashing with municipal elections in Quebec.

The published public opinion polls suggest a majority may well be in the offing. While the Liberals and other parties read these surveys with interest, what matters are the private polls that the governing party has no doubt been conducting in marginal constituencies and regions. The Liberals won 157 seats in 2019 and need just 13 more for a bare majority. There are twenty or so that the Liberals lost very narrowly last time, around a third of them in Quebec.

Polling has transformed in the past ten years from standard telephone surveys where when one answers the phone and speaks to a person, to a variety of methods, predominantly surveys conducted online among panels (people who have agreed to answer surveys by email, sometimes for a reward), but also surveys conducted by a computer where you hear a recorded voice and answer the questions by punching the numbers on a the telephone pad. While they work fairly well on the whole, there can be errors. For example, mostly online polling missed the outcome of the 2013 BC election.

In the 2019 election the regional results in Alberta of the national polls conducted immediately prior to election day generally underestimated the Conservative total in that province by about 10 points. As it turned out the Conservatives were so far ahead in Alberta that it did not matter in terms of seats. There is some evidence from south of the border that some on the political right are reluctant to answer polls and distrust them as a consequence of a more general distrust of institutions. A repeat this time of errors on the Alberta 2019 scale could make a difference. Alberta now has an unpopular conservative provincial government that was newly elected then. If current polling is truly accurate, the CPC stand to lose seats in Calgary and Edmonton to both the Liberals and the NDP. I suspect that polling does under-estimate support on the right in Canada for various reasons including those emerging in the United States. The Conservatives could well do better than polls suggest but they nonetheless have deep problems.

Liberals: On the Cusp of a Majority?

A recent Nanos poll (available by subscription only) implies (by my method of converting poll results into seats) that the Liberals would win over 200 constituencies, while the most recent Abacus poll would yield a similar, slightly lower, seat count. However, the most recent Leger poll (page 8 on the link) presents a significant contrast; it implies that the Liberals would win just 158 seats, almost the same result as 2019.

Erin O'Toole and the Structural Crisis of Conservatism

Erin O'Toole

The Conservatives have serious issues and are currently being hammered in the polls, but it is not, as is so often suggested, rooted in deficiencies of leader Erin O'Toole; rather it is ideological and structural. To gain more votes especially in large urban and suburban locations in Ontario and BC, they need to at least tiptoe towards the centre on issues like climate change and daycare. But the party represents the regions of the country in Alberta, Saskatchewan and parts of BC that depend on the production of fossil fuels - an apparently irreconcilable dilemma. Unpopular Conservative goverments in Manitoba and Alberts are adding to their woes.

Another serious barrier for the CPC is that a part of the political right has become batshit crazy - holding demonstrations against masking and indulging in bizarre conspiracy theories, not to mention supporting unpopular socially conservative ideas on abortion and sexuality, etc. There are now parties able to appeal to these kinds of people, such as the People's Party of Canada (PPC) of Maxime Bernier (he has attended anti-mask rallies), and in Alberta, western independence parties. Their support bleeds from the Conservative Party (we have seen this before with the Reform Party). Recent polling suggests that the CPC is indeed losing votes to the PPC. It will be O'Toole's first national election and while he may be capable of performing well in debates, it is likely not possible to overcome the fracturing and insanity going on among the political right. To take one example, Derek Sloan, the MP for Hastings-Lennox and Addington and a social conservative, was ejected from the Conservative caucus by Erin O'Toole. However, he says he will run again as an independent. In the last election, representing the CPC, he only defeated the Liberal candidate by four percentage points. If he really runs as an independent, he will easily hand the seat to the Liberals.

The political right increasingly also does not appeal to younger voters and women. It is becoming a haven for cranky old men.

The NDP: Prospects for Growth

Jagmeet Singh

If the Conservatives are doing worse in the polls, the NDP is doing much better. Jagmeet Singh has done quite well in the House of Commons, extracting concessions from the governing Liberals. The party has been quite open about supporting the Liberals on issues, pressuring them to support changes, and voting to avoid an election. It is in marked contrast to how the party handled itself in the 1972-74 House of Commons, the last time they enjoyed similar leverage. At that time they worried an early election would hand a majority to the Stanfield Progressive Conservatives and were reluctant to be seen as too close to the Liberals. By comparison, the current NDP has been much bolder and more self-confident.

The party currently has a comparative video ad on their Facebook page extolling their accomplishments. In the polls cited above, the NDP would win as many as 41 seats, up from their current 24. One factor that is likely helping them right now is a comparative advantage over the other parties on the issue of indigenous rights.

The Greens: Prospect of Decline

Annamie Paul

The Greens are having a leadership crisis immediately ahead of the election. Annamie Paul has an impressive resumé, but appears to have no leadership skills whatsoever. Whatever the eventual outcome, whether Anamie Paul keeps her post or is replaced by an interim leader (which would likely be a recycling of Elizabeth May who ought to have given up her seat to Paul in the first instance), the Green Party, already in a weak fourth place position in English Canada (fifth in Quebec), seems destined to decline in the near term. Their longer run potential, which is clearly linked to climate change, may be unaffected. The current crisis, which one suspects would be devastating for another party, has so far had only a limited impact on their position in the polls (their national support has declined from an average of 6.9% in April to 6.2% in June). Part of the Green base consists of ideologically committed environmentalists and they may vote Green come what may. Other Green voters are often lower information alienated voters for whom not being one of the established parties is largely what matters.

Quebec and the fate of the Trudeau Liberals

As noted above, the Trudeau Liberals lost several seats in Quebec in 2019 by narrow margins to the BQ often in the three and four way splits that characterized voting there. They will be looking to get some back. That helps to explain some of their reticence to criticize a popular Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government in Quebec City, which recently made extensive use of the nothwithstanding clause in new language legislation, anathema to the traditional federalist English community in Quebec, and abhorrent to Justin Trudeau's father. We tend to think of Quebec as the province swept by one party and then another. In 2019 four parties won seats and for the first time since 1962 the party that won more seats than any other, the Liberals, who won 35, captured less than a majority of all the constituencies. Quebec is split several ways and that makes it less predictable.

Of course, none of this is really necessary; Canada's fixed election date legislation specifies the date for the next election as October 16, 2023.

Trump voters - where will they go?

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 18:23:00 +0000

Donald Trump lost the November 3, 2020 U.S. election but he gained 11 million more votes over his 2016 total. Trump was the issue on the ballot, and more Americans despised him than liked him, so his Democratic opponent Joe Biden won 15 million more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump appealed to voters for a number of different reasons, but his economic populism and racism were of greatest importance. While it can't be specifically calculated from from the results, I hypothesize that he had a particularly strong appeal to an unknown number of voters, but numbering in the millions, who saw him as charismatic and who strongly identified with him and his views, however repugnant. This appeal did not necessarily extend to other voters who supported the Republican party or who neatly fit its ideological categories. I suspect that most are deeply racist. These Trump loyalists would have voted the straight Republican ticket, making a critical difference in down ballot races. These voters belonged to Trump and not other Republicans. If he is not on the ballot, a significant percentage are not likely to be interested in voting. Most are likely low information voters.

Jon Ossoff (left) and Raphael Warnock

Can we find any evidence of this? The only elections to have taken place since November 3rd were the two Georgia Senate run-off elections held January 5, 2021. Two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, were victorious in the special elections, giving the Democrats control of the Senate. For that reason alone understanding what happened in Georgia matters a great deal going forward. Of the two contests, the Ossoff race had the potential to be more revealing because the Warnock contest was a multi-candidate affair.

Here is a quick summary based on a Washington Post article on the January 5th result by Philip Bump:

Counties with larger Black populations shifted more heavily to Ossoff... comparing Ossoff’s percentage of the vote in November with what he earned in January shows how his support jumped more in counties with denser Black populations.
While those shifts in heavily Black counties were important, we should not undervalue the drop in support for (incumbent Senator David) Perdue in less heavily Black counties, too. Perdue’s vote total decreased the most relative to November in more heavily White counties.

Here is Bump's key conclusion:

In just counties that are about 30 percent Black or less, he (Perdue) saw a drop of 190,000 votes to Ossoff’s 70,000 votes — more than his margin in November. One likely reason: The lack of Trump on the ballot directly meant that fewer Republicans motivated by Trump came out to vote.

For Democrats increasing turnout in black counties mattered significantly, but so also did the drop in the white vote in less black counties. Political organizing by Democrats, led by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, made a big difference but loss of white Trump voters also mattered.

A poll conducted a few weeks later by the University of Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper confirmed the transformed political landscape in the formerly safe red state of Georgia. Among the findings:

57%, say that Trump is responsible for a “great deal” or a “good amount” of blame for stirring up the deadly mob on Jan. 6 that attempted to block certification of Biden’s election victory at the U.S. Capitol.
Fresh from their upset victories, the state’s two new Democratic U.S. senators are on solid footing. About 50% of Georgians have a favorable view of Ossoff, compared with 40% unfavorable. And Warnock, facing a reelection bid next year, has a 54% approval rating, with 37% disapproving of him.
Regarding Trump, a solid majority of Georgians disapprove of the former president in the weeks since he left office, with 57% giving him an unfavorable rating, compared with just 40% who approved of his performance in the White House.

The elections and the poll strongly suggest that this formerly red state, now purple, is heading in the direction of becoming blue.

A recent analysis by the same newspaper also found:

Control of the U.S. Senate was on the line, but many Georgia Republicans — at least some deterred by Donald Trump’s loss — stayed home rather than cast ballots in January’s runoffs.

Their absence at the polls helped swing Georgia and the Senate to the Democrats.

Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later, according to a new analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of recently released voting records.

More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates...

Meanwhile, 228,000 new voters cast ballots in the runoffs who hadn’t voted in the Nov. 3 election. They were more racially diverse and younger voters who tend to back Democrats.

As Georgia goes....

Critical to the success or failure of the Biden administration will be the outcome of the midterm elections to House of Representatives and the Senate in 2022. For Democrats, while the map for the Senate is relatively positive, it has generally been true that midterm elections don't produce positive results for incumbent parties.

However, when you look closely, one finds that there have been specific reasons for each midterm result. One must also remember that the current era is highly polarized. In earlier periods successful presidents often had long coatails that brought victory for numerous representatives and senators along with them in the presidential election. This is no longer the case. It was often the marginal victors in a presidential year who were most likely to lose a midterm contest. As political analyst Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report asks: Is the midterm a referendum on Biden or on Trump?

I am not sure she is right (Trump may actually focus more on making money and staying out of jail) but it is possible Trump will seek a significant political role going forward. Amy Walter clearly thinks so:

Unlike previous presidents — especially those who lost re-election, he isn't interested in retreating from public view. He — and those who support his brand of politics — are going to play a much more significant role than we've seen in modern times. Whether it is Trump stepping into competitive primaries to exact revenge on those who voted to impeach him, or a state party voting to censure one of its most promising Senate candidates — the infighting among the GOP will be a factor in determining the kinds of candidates who will be on the ballot in 2022.

It's also unclear at this point what role the attacks on the Capitol on January 6th will have on the opinions of Trump and GOP members of Congress.

As my colleague Charlie Cook has noted, "unreleased survey research—both quantitative polls and qualitative focus groups—since the January 6th attack on the Capitol suggests that between 25 and 30 percent of Trump voters now have very mixed feelings about having backed him. They are less likely to believe that the election was stolen, and they were alarmed by the attack in Washington. They care more about the coronavirus pandemic and the direction of the economy.

These voters aren't necessarily open to voting for Democrats, but they may be less willing to come out and vote for a GOP candidate who identifies him/herself so closely with Trump or the more Trumpian factions in Congress. Given that these Trump-conflicted voters are more likely to be living in a congressional district or county that is more purple than dark-red, their absence could be critical in determining control of the House and Senate.

The most likely factors to be decisive in 2022 are dealing with the pandemic, which the Biden administration seems likely to handle adroitly, and the economy, which will have to be recovering well. However, there are going to be voters who only wish to vote if Trump is actually on the ballot, as appears to have happened in the Georgia Senate elections. In addition, I suspect that January 6th is a point of departure for Trump and not in a good way.

The Hill an online newspaper covering Capitol Hill argued that the split in GOP ranks could portend disaster:

The Republican Party is riven by internal tensions, and moderate voices fear it is headed for disaster at the hands of the far right.

The centrists’ worry is that the party is branding itself as the party of insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists. This spells catastrophe for the GOP’s ability to appeal beyond a hardcore base, they say.

As an example, in Colorado in the six days following the January 6 insurrection, 4600 Republicans changed their party registration. There is a vast amount of video of the riot that will be shown repeatedly on air during the impeachment trial. Given what we know so far about the reaction, it is clear this will not be good for Trump's political future. A similar phenomenon happened in Arizona.

A Canadian Precedent

What can happen when a populist figure is no longer on the political scene has an antecedent in Canada. John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963. While not at all like Trump some of his appeal to voters was as a populist figure. He pulled voters to the polls in 1958 when he won a landslide for his Progressive Conservative Party. But they were gone by the time he sought re-election in 1962. Although his popularity declined in much of the country he did hang on to considerable support in his political home in Saskatchewan all the way through to his last campaign in 1965 when he won all the seats in the province that year. However, by the next campaign in 1968 when Pierre Trudeau was winning his first majority government, in Saskatchewan the disappearance of Diefenbaker led to the loss of 20 percent of the PC vote, which in turn led to a revival of NDP fortunes in the province. The NDP had won only one seat in 1958 and had been shut out ever since. Even Tommy Douglas lost his bid for a seat in 1962. In 1968 post-Diefenbaker the NDP won 6 seats.

A Republican Party without Trump is not the same party and would not have the same appeal.

The Polls, the Election Results and Trump

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:24:00 +0000

The most notable outcome of the 2020 U.S. election was that, as expected, Trump lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. However, the polls experienced significant errors, the nature of which is still being debated. Overall, it appears that polling understated support for Trump and the Republicans by about three or four points. It is also clear that there was a Republican anti-Trump vote (a group of Republican voters who were small 'c' conservatives that opposed Trump, but also supported Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives). There was also increased turnout from a pro-Trump constituency, many likely middle aged or older and voting for the first time. The results disappointed Democrats who expected more. However, the party seems to trail the Republicans when it comes to innovative campaign techniques and it made other mistakes in its congressional campaigning.

Polling Error

There appears to have been a general problem with the polling. As the highly respected Pew Research Center noted:

...the election was much closer than polls suggested in several battleground states (e.g., Wisconsin) and more decisive for Trump elsewhere (e.g., Ohio). ... it’s clear that national and many state estimates were not just off, but off in the same direction: They favored the Democratic candidate...Looking across the 12 battleground states from the upper Midwest (where many polls missed the mark) to the Sun Belt and Southwest (where many were stronger), polls overestimated the Democratic advantage by an average of about 4 percentage points. When looking at national polls, the Democratic overstatement will end up being similar, about 4 points...The fact that the polling errors were not random, and that they almost uniformly involved underestimates of Republican rather than Democratic performance, points to a systematic cause or set of causes.

Although Nate Silver of the blog FiveThirtyEight called the miss "pretty normal by historical standards", he links those words to a blog post from Vox whose sub-headline is "The kind of people who answer polls are really weird, and it’s ruining polling" - hardly illustrative of the point he was trying to make. The author of that post quotes a Democratic polling expert named David Shor who says of 2020, "the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way."

My view is that there was a systematic problem. It likely had more than one cause. One possibility might be that the pandemic had a unique impact. Pew says:

The once-in-a-generation coronavirus pandemic dramatically altered how people intended to vote, with Democrats disproportionately concerned about the virus and using early voting (either by mail or in person) and Republicans more likely to vote in person on Election Day itself. In such an unusual year – with so many people voting early for the first time and some states changing their procedures – it’s possible that some Democrats who thought they had, or would, cast a ballot did not successfully do so. A related point is that Trump and the Republican Party conducted a more traditional get-out-the-vote effort in the campaign’s final weeks, with large rallies and door-to-door canvassing. These may have further confounded likely voter models.

While this argument does have merit Pew also suggests another explanation that makes sense to me:

The overall share of Republicans in survey samples was roughly correct, but the samples underrepresented the most hard-core Trump supporters in the party. One possible corollary of this theory is that Republicans’ widespread lack of trust in institutions like the news media – which sponsors a great deal of polling – led some people to not want to participate in polls.

The pronounced alienation of some parts of the population from institutions may be a broader phenomenon than we have appreciated. I had noted to myself that in Canada the Conservatives were sometimes underestimated in Canadian polls, especially in Alberta. I double checked for this post, and confirmed that an average of the closing polls in Alberta in the 2019 federal election underestimated the party's actual vote share in the election by about ten points, well outside any margin of error. There have also been other collective poll misses, particularly in the BC election in 2013, where again it was the political right that was under-estimated. The Alberta miss was in the most small 'c' conservative province in Canada, one with a history of rural right of centre populism. It is possible that normal polling is undercounting rural conservatives.

Rural Resentment

American political scientist Kathy Cramer investigated rural resentment in Wisconsin before the Trump era, producing a book aimed at explaining support for a conservative Trump-like Republican Governor named Scott Walker. She did so by travelling all over the state joining coffee klatches, talking and listening to the participants, a different way of measuring public opinion. Her analysis is important to understanding attitudes to Trump and indirectly what happened in this year's election. Here is an edited version of what she found, as summarized by an observer to a lecture she gave:

Rural consciousness is identifying as a rural person... and a strong perception of distributive injustice that disfavors you and your identity. Cramer notes that this ... comprises resentment toward: cities and city people, elites (government, financial, cultural), people of color, and partisan polarization. "(This) ...makes rural consciousness a fertile ground for populism. Cramer defines populism here as essentially, “people are good and government is bad.”

Rural folks explain, “Our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are going to people who do not deserve them.” They thoroughly believe that others don’t work as hard as they do. And by hard work they mean, “when you have to shower after work, not before it.” And when Cramer followed up with the groups after the book came out, they agreed that they were resentful.

There is also a sense of loss. That these people’s communities and their standard of living have been taken away—that their status is threatened.

... (T)here is a belief that government is urban and distant. Even if workers are local, the decisions they follow are from the city to the rural area. They believe the government is not really working for them....

Cramer is still reflecting on how Donald Trump’s campaign activated rural consciousness. In contrast to Scott Walker’s assault on public employees, Donald Trump pointed to immigrants, Muslims, and women as undeserving groups. ...

Importantly, when she asks these rural folks what they hope will change with the new administration, they say they don’t expect anything to change. They set a very low bar. And it’s clear to her, that their criteria for Trump’s success is not anything like liberals criteria. They don’t believe he is going to solve their problems....

This latter point is important. It explains why, despite Trump's manifest incompetence and failure to improve the lives of his supporters, what ends up mattering to them are the symbolic steps he takes, as they don't actually believe he can accomplish anything meaningful for them.

Turnout

Democrats voted by mail in large numbers because of fear of the pandemic, but precisely because they feared the pandemic, I suspect it is likely a significant number of Democratic voters did not show up in person to vote on election day. Given that turnout was up significantly it is extremely difficult to calculate the exact dimensions of this, although we may see efforts to do so in the months ahead. I want to emphasize that there could both be a large increase in turnout overall of Democratic votes because of intense anti-Trump feelings, while simultaneously there could have been a lower than anticipated turnout of in person Democratic votes on election day, because of pandemic fears. Republicans did not share fear of the virus nearly as much as Democrats, because of the absurd, but widely believed propaganda, peddled by the right. For example, watch this CNN interview with a nurse from a small town in South Dakota who treated patients who clearly thought the virus was a hoax, and desperately wanted to believe their COVID-19 was some other illness.

There were some outcomes in particular areas that surprised the campaigns. For example, in Florida in Miami-Dade county the Democrats strongly underperformed among Hispanics, something that also showed up elsewhere such as Orange County in California. Trump made some small gains among blacks. There are likely some straightforward explanations for this. Trump campaigned on "reopening the economy" in the face of the growing coronavirus. Some of the working class, which is heavily black and Hispanic and suffering from unemployment because of the pandemic, may have been susceptible to such an appeal. In addition, the Republicans were willing to do door to door campaigning, which Democrats, worried about the virus, avoided. Republicans have also been adopting innovative digital campaign techniques unmatched by the Democrats.

Digital Campaigning

The Republicans effectively used targeted digital voting via social media, such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook to persuade certain voters to support them. It helps explain what happened in places such as Miami-Dade and Texas. Read the comments of political scientist Rachel Bitecofer delivered on a post-election panel discussion sponsored by Oxford University: (I have edited these remarks but you can hear the original on Youtube at about the 56:30 mark)

"I started talking about ... their micro-target efforts and like what they were doing with Latino voters way way way back in 2018 about how the um you know Republicans. It was going to be heavily reliant on digital targeting through Youtube, Facebook, targeting voters of color, young men Latino and black young men with these micro-targeted ads. It relies on the assumption that these people don't know anything about politics, they know nothing, they're a clean slate, and so therefore it doesn't matter in if in reality Donald Trump is a racist, the GOP platform is the most racially hostile it's been ever, these things don't matter if you have a voter that knows nothing and you come in and you start talking to them about the 1994 crime bill [Biden supported it and it has been deemed to have targeted blacks] and you make that the salient issue. You'll suddenly start hearing talking points coming out of the communities of color and that is that Democrats take black voters for granted.... You could hear this on MSNBC, they were interviewing some black voters in Atlanta, what is the main thing they are considering... 'I still haven't come in all the way in for Biden because I'm really upset about that crime bill'... She is thinking about the crime bill... They're not thinking about Donald Trump's contemporaneous record on race."

On the same panel. Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project commented (around 1;02:30): "We had guys trawling through the thousands and thousands of ad variants they ran on Facebook to pick out these different things and you could have seen people living next door to each other, and in one house they were getting the message that scary brown people are coming to kill you, and the house next door would be Joe Biden puts brown people in jail and that that, that, that ability of Facebook to profoundly manipulate voter behavior is the most unappreciated aspect of the last 10 years of our campaigns."

The Democrats appear to be no match for the Republicans when it comes to these internet based campaign techniques.

While it is clear from 2020 that the polls have serious problems, particularly from what is called partisan non-reponse (i.e. conservative Republicans aren't picking up the phone), but there are still some pollsters who did well in the 2020 election. Ann Selzer is an Iowa based pollster who has an established reputation for accuracy. Her poll of Iowa released just before the 2020 election was bang on accurate, despite drawing criticism from others who believed in a Democratic blue wave at the time.

I noted earlier the increased turnout of pro-Trump voters, many likely voting for the first time. It is hard to gauge the size of this group, but in aggregate Trump did win over eleven million more votes than in 2016. For them Trump is a visionary, charismatic (and deeply racist) leader. They would have mostly voted the straight Republican ticket meaning some of the Republican down ballot strength is attributable to this factor. We don't know if they will be there in future elections.

I suspect both the pandemic and the Trump factor may make 2020 unique. Vaccines are being produced and Trump, despite his current rhetoric, may not be a factor in future U.S. elections. For now, although Trump is gone, the Democrats have weak support in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the country remains polarized. This means the United States likely still faces a difficult future.

Ballot Measures

One final note: There were some progressive measures adopted in state referendums. In Florida, while supporting Trump, the state also voted for a $15 per hour minimum wage. In the ruby red state of Oklahoma, which just voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, a referendum held last summer, voted narrowly to approve an expansion of Medicaid, "a public health insurance program for the poor, with states splitting the cost with the federal government."

U.S. Election - TC's Final Call

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 01:34:00 +0000

Three Possible Outcomes

The U.S. election is imminent. This post represents my final assessment.

Recently anti-Trump Republican Bill Kristol laid out three election scenarios as alternate Wednesday, November 4th headlines:

1. “Trump loses presidency as Midwest flips; GOP holds Senate.”

2. “Trump defeated by big margin; election called early as Florida and North Carolina go to Biden; Democrats win Senate.”

3. “Biden wins by double digits in popular vote; rout extends to victory in Texas; Democrats control Senate easily.”

My own gut reaction is that the most likely scenario is number two with the distinct possibility the scenario will be number three. The first scenario seems the least likely as a Democratic takeover of the Senate seems highly likely; indeed a big blue wave could happen. Trump can only win by coming from behind in the polls in a large number of states where he now trails. The only scenario for a Trump victory appears to be that he holds most of the states he won last time. Among the three midwestern states that he won for the Republicans for the first time in many years in 2016, he can afford to lose Wisconsin and Michigan where he trails significantly, but not Pennsylvania, where he is behind but by a smaller margin.

However, the poll averages reported on the websites Fivethirtyeight and Real Clear Politics, as well as the New York Times, suggest that, in addition to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump is behind (sometimes narrowly) in the following jurisdictions he won in 2016: Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska 2nd Congressional District, and the Maine 2nd Congressional District. Overall, the polls would have to be more wrong than in 2016 for Trump to win. There is a narrow path where Trump overcomes his deficits in the southern states plus the one in Pennsylvania. On the other side of the ledger he holds only quite narrow leads in three states he won in 2016: Iowa, Ohio and Texas. He must win them all to have a chance.

Most analysts are skeptical of a 'shy' or 'hidden' Trump Voter effect. Here is political scientist Rachel Bitecofer;

"... I am skeptical of the “hidden Trump voter” thesis. Of course, one can find hidden Trump voters just as surely you can find secret Biden voters running around ruby red America. But as with “disaffected” Republicans defecting to vote for Biden, like the ones who have joined groups like Biden Republicans and who are donating money to The Lincoln Project, what we’re primarily concerned with is quantitative evidence of them at the mass level.

One way to test for hidden Trump voters is to compare Trump’s support between live interview polls and anonymous polls like those done by YouGov, which are anonymous and online - where no one can judge you. People have no need to hide from online or automated polls. But like in 2016, there is no difference in Trump’s level of support via these two data collection methods and often, Trump overperforms on live telephone interviews, which really undercuts the “hidden voter” hypothesis."

After the polling misses of 2016, primarily state polls as the national polls were close, pollsters examined what went wrong. Mainly, they concluded, they under-estimated non-college educated white voters, in part because they were either under-sampled or underweighted. They have made corrections to avoid that this time and are highly conscious of the earlier miss. However, perhaps they are now missing in the other direction, under-estimating the Biden vote.

After considering all the polling data plus my impressions this is the electoral map I expect (the grades of blue and red indicate how close the results should be):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

You can see other scenarios at the 270 to win website including which states are considered toss-ups. The consensus forecast, which includes a number of states considered toss-ups, has Biden winning at least 290 electoral votes, enough to win the election.

On election night if Biden wins Florida, which counts early, the prospects of a Biden victory become so high that the fact that some states won't be finished their count the same night will likely not prevent the networks from making a call, particularly if another state such as Arizona or North Carolina goes for Biden. The advance and mail-in vote may be counted slowly in a number of states including the crucial three in the midwest. Several of recent elections have not been called before midnight on election day but this one may.

A Tale of Two Provincial Elections: Saskatchewan and BC

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 15:33:00 +0000

Saskatchewan: A Long Term Shift to the Right?

There will be provincial elections held imminently in two western provinces, British Columbia on Saturday October 24, followed by Saskatchewan on Monday October 26. Historically, the two jurisdictions have been of great importance to the New Democratic Party. Saskatchewan was home to the breakthrough election of 1944 that brought Tommy Douglas to office and would eventually produce Canada's first public health care plans.

Map of 1944 Saskatchewan Election

The CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) and NDP have held office for 47 of the 76 years since that win in 1944, while three parties with different names but all representing the political right have held office for just 29 of those years. However, over the past several elections support for the NDP has been steadily declining while the conservative Saskatchewan party has won overwhelming majorities of the constituencies in the Saskatchwan legislature.

The polls in the current campaign so far suggest that while the NDP can expect some improvement in vote share, and could pick up some seats, the Saskatchewan Party remains headed for an a big victory. Originally the CCF represented agrarian socialism (as the map suggests) but the party soon shifted to the cities.

A new Saskatchewan Party win would mean that Saskatchewan would be headed for 17 consecutive years of small 'c' conservative governance, far exceeding the length of previous right-wing regimes. It has been a complicated multi factor process but in part it reflects the consolidation of the conservative support in almost all of rural agricultural Saskatchewan except the far north, and Saskatchewan's shift to becoming an oil province (probably a sunset industry later in this century) and conscious of its status as such - it is among the provinces vigourously challenging the federal carbon tax. Conservative parties also hold sway in rural parts of Canada elsewhere.

Results of federal elections in Saskatchewan have paralleled the provincial results, with the Conservatives under the prevous Saskatchewan-based leader Andrew Scheer winning a share of votes and seats similar to Alberta in last year's federal election.

The NDP may well turn a corner upward in this election but, given that all governments accumulate grievances, that is to be expected. However, the Saskatchewan of Dream No Little Dreams (a book I highly recommend) seems in the distant past. Indeed it seems more likely at the moment that we will see a new NDP government in Alberta before we see one in Saskatchewan.

British Columbia: Becoming a Canadian California?

About fifty years ago a book chapter on British Columbia was sub-titled The Politics of Class Conflict. BC's history is of an economy based on natural resources such as mining and fisheries that has been characterized by strong class-based conflicts between strong unions and antagonistic employers. The unions have supported political parties on the left expressing their interests.

The old CCF never won office in BC - it was not until 1972 that the NDP won office for a single term. However, the political right was sufficiently terrified of the electoral prospects of the left to have formed a coalition government of the Liberals and Conservatives in the 1940s to keep them from winning. The Social Credit governments that followed were that same coalition reconstituted along slightly different lines. The most recent expression of the same coalition can be found in the B.C. Liberal Party governments that followed the defeat of the first two term NDP government, albeit winning elections under two different leaders (Mike Harcourt in 1991 and Glen Clark in 1996). Notably, although Glen Clark lead the NDP to victory in 1996, the party actually won a smaller share of the popular vote than the BC Liberals.

While the NDP has had limited success in BC compared to Saskatchewan, the 21st century is providing brighter prospects for the party. In part the older class-based politics has given way to a politics that reflects the multiple and overlapping strains of modern political culture, marrying traditional concerns about social and economic inequality to emerging issues like climate change and the demands for recognition and respect for the range of peoples that compose our increasingly diverse society. While these social trends matter enormously, one can never underestimate the importance of leadership.

John Horgan

The NDP in BC is poised to win the election and form a second consecutive government under the same leader for the first time on Saturday night. A key reason for this is that the BC NDP has one of the most talented political leaders on this continent in the person of John Horgan. I am increasingly of view that when it comes to politics experience matters most when it comes to picking leaders (we have just had a demonstration in the New Brunswick election of what happens when a party chooses a politically inexperienced neophyte as leader). Horgan brought to the job not just years of direct political experience dating from his first election in 2005, but also deep experience working as both a political advisor and public servant in the BC NDP governments of the 1990s. The people I know in B.C. who have had dealings with him have the utmost respect for him.

The BC NDP continue to lead the opposition Liberals and the Green Party in opinion polls: based on the latest numbers I have them winning at least 52 seats in the 87 seat legislature. Beyond Saturday's result we can see that BC has a coastal politics similar to the US states of Washington, Oregon and California, a politics that trends to the left. I wrote about this in 2017 when I said:

The blue state-red state trend in the U.S. is of relatively recent vintage (until the mid-nineties Republicans were strong in California), but the trend to more left of centre views (and growing green consciousness) is clearly characteristic of the coasts in both places. Can it be too many more years before the trends evident south of the border become typical of B.C.?

In contrast, the politics of the plains province of Saskatchewan are beginng to appear similar to American states directly to its south. The last election in BC produced a close overall result between the BC Liberals and the NDP but the Greens produced a stronger showing than before. There was a dramatic increase in the combined NDP-Green vote from the prior election in 2013. The Green Party do have roots in both left wing and more conservative politics, but in BC overall they lean much more left. That jump in the combined vote from 2013 to 2017 and continuing in 2020 is something we should expect to be a theme of politics in the 21st century. As for Saskatchewan, while the analogy is far from perfect, their US neighbour North Dakota, now a highly conservative Trump voting state, was once ruled by the Non-Partisan League, a left of centre radical agrarian politcal formation that captured the state's Republican Party.

On this blog I normally write about politics but today is Canada Day

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 10:00:00 +0000

On July 1, 1945 - 75 years ago today - an event took place in Ottawa that was of critical importance to my family. Both my mother and father moved to Ottawa in the spring of 1945, unbeknownst to each other.

Clarence Barber

Barbara Patchet

That spring my mother graduated from the University of Toronto at a ceremony where, as she puts it, "At our June graduation George Drew, the Conservative premier of Ontario spoke and all our class booed. We felt so superior."

Almost right away she headed for Ottawa expecting a job to be waiting for her. Many of the details that follow come from the life writing stories my mother wrote in during her retirement. She completed some 250 of them between ages of 79 and 89. She was born in Toronto in 1923 and named Barbara Patchet at birth. She picks up the story:

"In June, l945 having just graduated in sociology from the University of Toronto I headed to Ottawa by train having been recommended by my professor for a job in the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (DBS). I traveled with a university acquaintance named Betty who was going to work in the new National Incomes Branch.

I headed down to DBS, found my prospective employer out of town, and ended up as a clerical assistant to a Civil Service Commissioner. While I cannot remember precisely what my duties were as assistant to the Civil Service Commissioner I do remember being very impressed with the curriculum vitae of the man who was to be my future husband. He had all A’s and such extravagant praise.

Canoeing 1946

Then I met him briefly in the hallway of DBS when I went to visit Betty. A few days later on July 1st, a national holiday, I went for lunch in a restaurant near my room (Bank and Fifth). It was quite empty but there in a corner I spotted Clarence and had no hesitation in saying, “ Do you mind if I eat with you? I hate to eat alone”

After lunch we decided to go canoeing out at Hog’s Back on the Ottawa River. He too lived in a room and we ended up eating our dinners together. At our wedding two years later he ended up in responding to the toast to the bride that he did not have to eat alone anymore.

Because Clarence and I both lived in rooms, we fell into the habit of eating dinner together. We went bicycling or walking and to celebrate in any way we went to a better restaurant, a movie or dancing at the Chateau grill. I loved Ottawa because it was small, picturesque and there was a French joie de vivre compared to Toronto. Moreover, I was in love.

Rideau Street Ottawa in the 40s

Our backgrounds were very different. My father was a business man, secretary treasurer of Saturday Night magazine. Clarence came from a Saskatchewan farm, growing up during the depression, worked on the farm following high school, while taking his first university year extramurally. After a B.A. from the University of Saskatchean, scholarships took him to American universities for his M.A. and PhD (in economics). In l943 he returned to Canada to join the RCAF." (I wrote a longer description of my father's biography in 2017 here: https://tcnorris.blogspot.com/2017/05/clarence-lyle-barber.html)

He received an early release from the military having been recruited to work for DBS as part of a team developing Canada's national income accounts. That was why he found himself in Ottawa that spring renting a room and eating many of his meals in simple cafeteria style restaurants, quite common in the era. While he was happy to work at DBS in postwar Ottawa, his career aspirations were to teach economics at a university.

My parents enjoyed their three years in Ottawa - taking time out to get married in Toronto in May 1947 - as the photos below illustrate, taking advantage of what it had to offer including the nearby lakes and hills of Quebec.

Babs & Clarence 1946

Babs at Lac Blue Sea, Quebec

Babs & Clarence Winter 1945-46

My mother picks up the story again:

When Clarence turned down an offer to teach at the University of Pittsburgh in 1946, I asked him what he wanted to do and his answer amazed me “I think I have an original contribution to make to Canadian economics” This confidence in self was staggering to me.

After a small wedding in Toronto we spent our savings on a honeymoon, a week in Boston, a week in Cape Cod, and ended up in Quebec City. There, we saw some of our colleagues who were attending the Learned Societies .

After a seemingly idyllic three years, they moved to Hamilton, shortly after my birth, where my father taught economics for a year. In 1949 they moved on to Winnipeg.

As Yogi said it ain't over 'til its over but...

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 18:45:00 +0000

For four years Donald Trump has maintained a level of support that, beyond being greater than someone so incompetent deserves, actually had left him competitive for re-election despite trailing. However, the last few months featuring COVID-19, the economic collapse and Black Lives Matter protests have now so reduced his support in both national and state polls such that his re-election prospects are, for the moment, dead.

He is not just behind, he is way behind. As recently as mid-May Trump was just over 4 points behind in the Real Clear Politics National Average. Now he is 8.5 points back. If I project the results of a four point victory compared to eight and a half points using the model that I normally only deploy to analyze Canadian politics, it is the difference between Biden winning with about 308 electoral votes including several close states (it takes 270 to win), and 356 electoral college votes, a landslide, where the swing states from 2016 vote decisively Democratic. This estimate is matched by the other key politics and polling website: the FiveThirtyEight blog of Nate Silver, which has Biden ahead of Trump by nine points and he says Biden is ahead in states worth 368 electoral college votes.

There is a weekly podcast featuring key Obama advisor David Axelrod and Republican consultant Mike Murphy (he ran Jeb Bush's campaign). In their podcast released on June 17 Murphy commented on the current polls (about the 23 minute mark):

Trump was in trouble in the swing states before coronavirus. I thought he was heading toward losing, but he was in the race. Then the wrong track when people say in polling 'things have gone to hell' has skyrocketed, and the economic argument has evaporated at least right now, so now he's in trouble in the states he ought to get pretty much for free like Iowa. Now my guess is that in the end he'll be able to crawl to a victory or two but it's (Iowa) in play no doubt about it. Over at campaign headquarters right now - memo to staff - 'we put this guy in ads with the current message and it gets worse'.... so this is the total nightmare.

Here is approximately what I think an 8.5 or 9 point Biden victory would look like:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Anyone know what this thing is?

In addition to the factors cited above Trump's own efforts have backfired. The Bible waving photo op that involved forcibly clearing out protestors has significantly harmed him. I thought it looked both foolish and seriously weird. It suggested just by the way he held the book up that he didn't take the Bible seriously at all. The public noticed. In Michigan it caused a "sharp dive in the polls". Trump went from a 12 point deficit to a 16 point deficit in a state that was crucial to his victory in 2016 precisely because of this authoritarian but ham-fisted manoeuvre.

To recover would require a combination of both strong economic growth plus a decreasing incidence of the coronavirus. Trump's reputation as a good economic manager, which he doesn't deserve, has held up relatively strongly. However, for the economy to recover the U.S. has to get the virus under control. If the economy doesn't recover strongly there will come a time when his reputation suffers. The situation is better than it was but as the New York Times puts it:

As states move to partly reopen their economies, thousands of new cases are still being identified each day and true normalcy remains a distant vision.

If true normalcy is a distant vision both economically and in terms of the nation's and the world's health, it is extremely difficult to see what might help Trump stage a comeback. The protests led by Black Lives Matter might have been thought to allow Trump to make a law and order appeal as Nixon did in 1968 but it hasn't worked out that way. As Robert Gibbs (at one time Obama's press secretary) put it on another podcast (12:32 mark), "I think its important for that 1968 analogy, he's (Trump) not playing the Nixon character in 1968, he is playing very clearly George Wallace and quite frankly Nixon had the ability to do what he needed to do in that election by playing off of both candidates - at this point David Axerod jumps in - Yeah he triangulated. Wallace did the heavy lifting and scare mongering and Nixon was able to present Wallace as another face of disorder."

This time the candidate who offers a vision of renewed stability, calm and order is Joe Biden. Yes, it is true that a week is a long time, perhaps an eternity, in politics. However, sometimes the outcome of an election becomes a certainty well ahead of the actual date. It certainly looks like that is the way we are headed now.

The 1950 Red River Flood: 70th Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Mon, 04 May 2020 20:14:00 +0000

Seventy years ago this week the Red River flood started. It had a huge impact on our family. Later my father was a part of the process that led to the building of the floodway

The 1950 Flood: My Family's Experience

My parents, Clarence Barber and wife Babs, moved into a new house in Wildwood Park in the fall of 1949. My father came to Winnipeg take up a teaching post in economics at the University of Manitoba (neither parent had ever lived in Winnipeg before moving) only to be flooded out in the spring of 1950. My mother had two small children including me, six weeks shy of being two and my brother Steve then a five-month old baby. For my mother, the experience of the flood (as for many others) was truly horrific.

In her eighties she took a life-writing class in Oak Bay B.C. eventually penning over 250 essays about her life. This (slightly edited) essay conveys how for many residents caught up in those events of 70 years ago, it was a dark and stressful time.

My father, around the time the family left Wildwood Park for a house on Kingsway in Crescentwood, was hired to conduct economic studies for the Manitoba Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit. This was the commission that recommended the construction of the Red River Floodway. The floodway is now hailed as an unmitigated success, the saviour of lives and property in Manitoba, an outstanding example of the importance of the right infrastructure investments. I will discuss this more below but first my family's personal story of the flood written by my mother who passed away three years ago in May 2017. She wrote it in 2011 when another flood threatened.

------------------------------------------------

I see on TV that once again the Red River threatens to overflow its banks and flood the land. Memories of May 1950, rush back to haunt me.

On May 5, 1950, the day before we evacuated our new home (in Wildwood Park) it was my husband’s 33rd birthday. I had made him a chocolate cake.

After a tense dinner Clarence went back to continue help filling sandbags and hauling them to the dike in a futile attempt to hold back the Red River. The remainder of the cake went out to feed the neighbours, all working on the dike.

With 2 babies in diapers I had been busy with the laundry since I had to dry them on a wooden rack in the basement. I was also busy with the myriad tasks of a housewife and mother. The last thing in the world I wanted was to leave my little house and money was scarce.

Seeing the large puddle on South Drive which bordered the river I commented on it to Clarence who told me it was not a puddle but the river. We even had close neighbours, both architects who were living nearby in one story houses of their own design.

The day of departure was an appalling nightmare. Leaden skies, rain pouring down, children confined to house and crying. What could we do?

One of Clarence’s colleagues who had agreed to shelter us in the event of a flood phoned the morning of May 6 to say the whole family had come down with the flu and it was no place to bring a baby. Another colleague phoned and offered us shelter.

A wailing siren warned us all to leave. An Ottawa friend phoned volunteering to come and drive us to the colleague’s house. She had heard about the evacuation. Anna had been a senior person in Health and Welfare where I had worked before marriage.

My first thought was what the children would need. Formula was made, food for Paul, diapers both dry and damp, clothes for the children and oh yes, a few clothes for me. I resembled a poor immigrant, scarf over hair, laden with bags and babies as I went out in the rain. But I did evacuate in style in a Cadillac.

Sirens wailing, headlights on at the shopping centre and trucks laden with sand roaring through the streets and a crying baby in my arms.

Anna quickly sized up my refuge and knew there was not enough room for us there. That night I cannot recall at all.

The next day Anna phoned and told me I was going to her sister’s house which had more room. I was very grateful but my heart sank when I saw the lovely carpet and elegant surroundings. Her sister had cooked us a wonderful roast beef dinner with a remarkably good apple pie. The baby still cried although he had been such a happy baby.

I called the doctor and realizing my state, she told me to turn the baby over to my husband and take a walk around the block. When I returned there was a sedative for me to take.

This I did, but I also phoned my parents in Toronto to ask for refuge. Instead my father offered us money not to come.

Because there were forecasts of more rain, which could put much of the city under water, residents were being asked to leave. I had to flee Winnipeg, leaving my husband behind to save our furniture. I flew home to Toronto on May 10th, my third wedding anniversary, wearing my “going away suit and coat”. I was accompanied by a 5-year old girl, daughter of the head of the economics department, my 5-month old baby and the 23-month-old son.

323 Wildwood Park during 1950 Flood
Photo taken by Clarence Barber

Trans Canada Airlines added an extra stewardess to take care of the baby (the plane was a North Star) and shortly after take-off she came to me because he was crying and she did not know what to do. Neither did I.

My mother’s first words were “Aren’t you glad it was not fire!” That thought had never occurred to me.

How happy I was to return 6 weeks later and live in 2 rooms upstairs while the house repairs went on for the next few months. Paul slept in the crib while the baby was in his carriage downstairs.

Before the house flooded Clarence and a neighbour had helped each other by building a ramp on the stairs and slid each other’s furniture up to the second floor. The fridge was on the landing, the bathroom was fortunately on the second floor and I cooked on a 2-burner stove in our bedroom.

The houses in our subdivision were repaired by the builder with several teams. The first came and cleaned out the mud followed by others who created new walls and floors. Shortly before Christmas we were back downstairs. A nightmare, never to be forgotten.

My husband, not knowing what repairs would cost had painstakingly taken up each of the oak floor boards. They eventually got moved to our second home – a big, old house in a higher part of the city. My architect son Steve, that crying 5 month old baby fashioned the boards into a dining room table which is still being used.

323 Wildwood Park in 2009

So, it seemed only just that in l956 Clarence was appointed to conduct economic research for a Provincial Royal Commission to investigate flood prevention on the Red River. The eventual result was the building of the Winnipeg Floodway. Clarence liked to boast later that it was the only commission on which he served that had every recommendation carried out.

------------------------------

THE RED RIVER FLOODWAY

The Commission's Innovative Work

As noted in my mother's essay my father was on the staff of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit. It was appointed in December 1956 following engineering studies that were clear that the only effective way in the long run was to build a floodway, a 26 mile (42 km) ditch around the east side of Winnipeg that then returned the diverted flood waters to the lower Red River near where it flows into Lake Winnipeg.

Appointed in December 1956 the commission was historically significant and was the subject of a published study by historian J.M. Bumsted who noted:

The Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit made recommendations that determined Manitoba’s basic policy on flood mitigation to the present day. In many respects, of course, Manitoba has gone farther in terms of structural protection against flooding than any other jurisdiction in the world. The commission’s report also represented, moreover, the first large-scale cost-benefit analysis ever done in Canada, and pioneered in introducing a new approach and methodology into planning and public policy.

He later notes that the key innovation in the study (that came from my father) was the concept of taking loss of income into account in assessing the benefits that would accrue from flood protection:

Two innovative aspects of the damages calculations were the categories of loss of income and extra costs.... they were typically neglected by many cost-benefit studies of the time. The Manitoba economists estimated the level of income produced and then evaluated the proportion of that lost at different stages of flooding.... As for extra costs, the commission estimated for four kinds of extra costs, ranging from evacuation expenses to extra food costs because of displacement to extra labor costs in flooded homes and additional transportation costs.... The commission's report argued that most of the cost estimates were on the conservative side, which was almost certainly correct.

Bumsted concludes:

Almost unique among royal commissions either federal or provincial, all of its major recommendations were eventually implemented in virtually the form in which it had presented them. Moreover, its analysis shaped the flood mitigation agenda of Manitoba for more than a generation; in 1997, the province still had not drawn free of the conclusions and opinions of this 1958 report. Perhaps equally important, the pioneering work of Clarence Barber represented a real breakthrough for Canadian social science in the 1950s... the 1958 Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit was a pioneering effort at applied cost benefit analysis, which had enormous impact upon the province of Manitoba.

Getting the Floodway Built

Although the technical studies were clear in terms of their conclusion that there ought to be a floodway (and some smaller flood control projects), because the proposed projects were so expensive it wasn't necessarily a given that the floodway would get built and when. The government of Douglas Campbell was extremely fiscally cautious and conservative and only appointed the commission under considerable pressure. In fact as Bumsted notes:

Some observers thought him the tightest penny-pincher in the history of a relatively poor province. ... His response to the Manitoba Flood of 1950 was cautious and heavily criticized at the time for its failure to act in advance of federal assistance and its unwillingness to insist on more support from Ottawa.

Duff Roblin

The commission was appointed in 1956 following upon a near flood that spring, plus sustained pressure from Winnipeg business and the daily newspapers. In early May says Bumsted, "the Winnipeg Tribune published a front-page editorial on flooding. The government had begun warning of flooding in late February, but it would have been better if “proper long term precautions” had been taken. The newspaper began leading a chorus of demands for a cost-benefit analysis of the flood protection measures...."

Campbell's slowness to act meant that the report would be delivered to a new government in 1958, the minority administration of Duff Roblin, a more progressive and activist administration that championed the floodway.

As a 2001 article on "Duff''s Ditch" put it:

The project was championed by Dufferin (Duff) Roblin, the Leader of the Opposition and head of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party, but it was vehemently denounced by opponents as a monumental, and potentially ruinous, waste of money. Indeed, the projected Red River Floodway was derisively referred to as “Duff”s Folly” and “Duff’s Ditch”, and decried as “approximating the building of the pyramids of Egypt in terms of usefulness.” The construction of the floodway and Assiniboine River works, would entail a capital cost of over $72 million, amortized over fifty years at 4% interest, at a time when the province had a population of only 900,000 and an annual net provincial revenue of about $74 million.

Roblin's vital role in getting the floodway built is a matter of record. What is not known is something my father related to me about the proceedings within the commission. There was one strong dissenter within the commission named Jack McDowell (who did file a formal dissent from the commission's conclusions). In the end although the other commissioners endorsed the report and its conclusions McDowell kept up a vociferous opposition to the floodway at all the meetings of the commission arguing absurdly that the floodway was unnecessary; all one had to do was clean up the river south of the city of junk that had been tossed in - I remember my father mentioning old rubber boots and junked cars. However, another commissioner, Culver Riley, a leading Winnipeg businessman, would then refocus the discussion on the basic facts, among them that the engineers had clearly recommended that only the floodway would provide reliable flood protection.

PM John Diefenbaker and Premier Duff Roblin

Even with Roblin's strong commitment to the floodway and getting it done as quickly as possible, Manitoba could not possibly finance such a large project on its own. Roblin launched negotiations with the then government of John Diefenbaker on a cost sharing agreement to finance the floodway construction. The negotiations were tough and protracted. I once had the opportunity to view some of the correspondence on the issue the Manitoba and federal governments exchanged during this period.

The federal government supported the floodway in principle, but wanted to go over the project budget in absolutely minute detail. The letters (and notes from phone calls) conveyed the flavour of one order of government pushing the other to assume as great a share of the costs as possible and vice versa. Worried about precedent, and knowing they were going to pay more than half, the federal government looked extremely carefully at every item, trying to minimize their exposure. They agreed, for example, they would pay 59.1% for item X but only 51.3% for item Y.

The federal government had everything to gain from a floodway as they were on the hook for a significant percentage of compensation to flood victims and for damaged infrastructure. The 1950 flood cost $22 million in aid to victims and another $126 million in physical damages. (Note: my parents did not know when they were carrying out repairs to their house whether there would be any compensation; that came later).

The federal government agreed in principle to pay for a significant percentage of the floodway costs but were slow to come to a final agreement (in the end they paid 58.5% of the cost). In 1962 the Roblin government felt it could wait no longer and brought in legislation so that construction could commence, which it did in October of that year. It was among the largest construction projects ever undertaken in Canada. For example, "At the time, excavation of the floodway channel was the second largest earth moving project in the world (second only to the Panama Canal and larger than the Suez Canal project). The floodway was completed in 1968 and went into operation.

Floodway where water is diverted from Red River

No sooner was the Red River Floodway completed than it proved of even greater benefit than anticipated. The decade after 1968 saw a trend toward an increased frequency and severity of flooding with the mean annual discharge of both the Red and Assiniboine rivers exceeding, by 80% and 60% respectively, that of the period between 1915 and 1968. In 1969, 1970, 1974, and 1979, substantial flooding was experienced in the upper Red River Valley south of Winnipeg, costing millions of dollars in damage; yet Winnipeg escaped virtually unscathed with the Red River Floodway in operation. ....in the spring of 1979, the Red River Floodway proved beyond dispute its critical value in protecting the city from potentially severe inundations. In both years (1974 &1979) the volume of floodwaters approximated the 1950 flood, and would have devastated Winnipeg if not diverted by the flood control systems... Moreover, as of 1987 it was reported that the floodway had been put in operation 14 times in the first 19 years of its existence to control threatening flood waters, and had saved a cumulative total of $1 billion in flood damage costs within Winnipeg.

In 1997 came the largest flood seen on the Red River since the 19th century. It taxed the capacity of the floodway almost to its limit. Subsequently, a new project was initiated to expand the original floodway to a handle a much larger inundation, defined as a "once in 700-year flood".

The Importance of Infrastructure

The immense costs avoided by building the floodway illustrate that having the right infrastructure is of immense value to a community and a regional economy. This is not true of every project; Montreal's Olympic Stadium is an example of extraordinarily wasteful spending on infrastructure and there are numerous others. However, for essential purposes such as flood control or public transportation the right infrastructure spending is essential. It can also provide needed stimulus to a sagging national economy. The deep downturn occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to address the looming climate crisis may once again highlight of the importance of capital expenditure on infrastructure.

Rachel the political forecasting revolutionary

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 01:55:00 +0000

A commonly held belief on ideology in politics is that it can be distinguished by its placement on a spectrum. This spectrum came originally from a seating arrangement in the French National Assembly at the time of the French Revolution when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. It evolved over time becoming firmly established as a convention by early in the 20th century, with multiple gradations from right to left.

Flowing from that, an often unstated assumption of much political analysis is that movement takes places in the centre of the spectrum. To achieve political gains it follows one must persuade centre-right or centre-left voters to move a little in the opposite direction in order to make gains. This view of politics is central to much analysis of American politics, especially inside the Washington D.C. beltway, but it is being contested by an outsider.

Rachel Bitecofer

Little known until recently, Rachel Bitecofer, a Virginia based political scientist, has challenged this perspective on how American politics works. As a profile of her in Politico put it: "Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place."

What made her reputation as a forecaster is that early on she accurately predicted the outcome of the 2018 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. As the Politico item put it:

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

Here is an example of conventional analysis from the period from the New York Times public opinion writer Nate Cohn about ten days before voting day:

Dozens of House races remain extremely close in the closing days of the midterms, according to New York Times Upshot/Siena College polls, making it easy to envision a Democratic blowout or a district-by-district battle for control that lasts for weeks of counting beyond the election.

The difference between the two outcomes will depend on whether enough Democratic candidates get over the top in the long list of Republican-leaning areas they’ve put into play. The Democratic gains in predominantly white, well-educated suburbs have stretched the Republican majority exceedingly thin. Fighting against this is partisan polarization, which could allow Republican incumbents to narrowly hold on to districts carried by the president.

The uncertainty isn’t just about hedging. It’s a reflection of the sheer number of highly competitive districts, and the limited data available about each one.

Cohn was uncertain and could not decide where things were headed months after she made her accurate prediction. Bitecofer argues that her success is rooted in an appropriate appreciation of the phenomenon of "negative partisanship". In an article for the for the New Republic she begins by first articulating the perspective of Nancy Pelosi on the 2018 success.

On election night 2018, newly re-gaveled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over a celebratory press conference after the Democratic Party’s recapture of a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the center of the party’s success, Pelosi explained, was its “For the People”agenda—and particularly the party’s laser-focus on health care access and the protection of preexisting conditions in Obamacare. Adding a new spin on Tip O’Neill’s timeworn political adage “all politics is local,” Pelosi triumphantly declared “all politics is personal.” This pragmatic emphasis on basic economic safeguards, Pelosi argued, had powered a historic blue wave. Ultimately, Democrats managed to flip 40 Republican-held House seats, ousting 31 Republican incumbents in the process.

By contrast argued Bitecofer:

...there was something very different about the 2018 cycle—and it’s something that the health care thesis fails to address. That something was voter turnout. After waning to historic lows in 2014, voter turnout in 2018 reached historic highs, smashing even the very high expectations set for the cycle in my own forecast. The 53.4 percent turnout in 2018 was closer to what we typically see in a presidential election than a midterm cycle. It dwarfed the 2014 cycle’s midterm turnout of 36.7 percent by nearly 17 points. And for all the talk of how central health care was that year, it was certainly not any more salient than it had been in the other elections since Obamacare was first enacted in 2010...

Indeed, if the health care policy debate should have been driving turnout in any major recent cycle, it was in the 2016 election, not 2018. The 2018 congressional battle over health care only came to pass, after all, because Trump ran hard on the pledge to “repeal and replace Obamacare,” and won....

So what, then, really drove the dramatic surge in voter turnout in 2018? It happened for one simple reason—or, rather, because of one simple man: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s surprise victory on election night 2016 set into motion conditions that all but guaranteed Democrats would take back control of the House of Representatives two years later, even as the GOP managed to hang on to a narrow majority in the Senate.

My forecasting model for the 2018 midterms predicted an enormous Democratic wave in the House, mostly by focusing on a dynamic known in political-science circles as negative partisanship. The idea behind negative partisanship is simple, harking back to Henry Adams’s definition of politics as the “organization of hatreds.” The determination to vote out the opposition—and the broader trend of acute polarization within the American political system—has altered virtually every facet of our political life. Negative partisanship is affecting the behavior of voters and reshaping the voting coalitions aligned behind each major party.

Negative partisanship is also the reason why the pending 2020 presidential and congressional cycle doesn’t call to mind charged modern ideological battles such as 1964 and 1972 so much as the fateful election of 1860, which ended up kicking off the Civil War....

The U.S. Civil War that followed on the 1860 election (the last time the U.S. was so divided) is echoed in the distribution of political support among states today. The Republicans own most of the states of the old confederacy because they made a deliberate turn to the racist right in 1968 in a deal cut between Richard Nixon and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. Trump explicitly caters to the extreme right and the racial divide is a key force underpinning the partisan gap. The hyperpartisanship also explains the tenacity of Trump's support. Bitecofer in New Republic again:

We see this play out daily in the static polling on Trump’s approval numbers. These figures are virtually unresponsive to events, even to dramatic shifts in the political landscape such as Trump’s impeachment. We can also see this bedrock level of partisan attachment in election outcomes such as the special Senate election in Alabama in late 2017. In that contest, Roy Moore, the Republican nominee, faced credible accusations of child sexual abuse but still managed to accrue 48.3 percent of the state’s vote share. That outcome furnished a prime case study in polarization, with fully 91 percent of the state’s Republican electorate voting for Moore.

Her overall approach makes sense to me and I think it has broad application. In the 2018 election there were two races that illustrate what happened. In the Tennessee Senate election that year the Democrats nominated a traditional southern 'moderate', Phil Bredesen, but in trying to straddle the middle of the road he did not win over Republicans and actually alienated some liberal voters. He ended up losing by eleven points. By contrast in Georgia the Democrats nominated Stacey Abrams for Governor, a black woman progressive, the first such candidate in the state's history. She lost by less than two points and likely would have won save for the cheating and vote suppression by the Republicans.

A mentor of Bitecofer, political scientist Alan Abramowits sees the current polarization like "a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump."

Essentially Bitecofer took this insight and using voter files, polling, other demographic data and most importantly, data on voter turnout, mapped it across the United States, arguing "there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties." It is who shows up on voting day that matters. Once you can figure that out, you can calculate the outcome.

Bitecofer does believe that the Democrats need strategies to drive turnout this year to assure success. One such is Biden's choice for Vice-President. Hilary Clinton chose Tim Kaine, a moderate designed to appeal to centrist Republicans, exactly the wrong choice. Bitecofer thinks Biden should choose a VP to drive turnout. He has already partly done that by saying he will select a woman. As the Politico article noted she believes:

For Democrats to win, they need to fire up Democratic-minded voters. The Blue Dogs (TC's note: moderate or right leaning Democrats) who tried to narrow the difference between themselves and Trump did worse, overall, than the Stacey Abramses and Beto O’Rourkes, whose progressive ideas and inspirational campaigns drove turnout in their own parties and brought them to the cusp of victory.

She also thinks having a VP candidate that can appeal to the progressive wing of the party matters because "strategy, candidate quality, and especially candidate demographics can still matter on the margins and Democrats will roll into the fall general election with one clearly exploitable weakness: disaffection within the progressive base. The GOP will seek to exploit that weakness and Democrats would be wise to shore up every weak spot..."

On this year's Presidential election Bitecofer is the only analyst who has offered a firm prediction that Trump will lose. Here is her forecast map of the election, which predicts a Democratic majority in the Electoral College (Note that brown is colour of toss-up states):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

But wait I hear you say, isn't Trump gaining ground with his daily press conferences on TV. Well, not so much anymore. Here are the results of a tracking poll asking respondents about his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The pandemic is hurting Trump not helping him. Thus we see desperation initiatives like suspending all immigration - although that might end up like other Trump moves as no more than a tweet.

I expect Trump to lose.

Polling Errors in the 2019 Canadian Election - Leger Marketing Achieved the Best Results

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 18:18:00 +0000

NATIONAL POLLS

Most analysts who made calculations on the accuracy of polling in the 2019 election published their data soon after the result was made known. All the tables I saw compared polling only to the national results. I made a similar calculation that can be seen in the first table below, but I went further comparing the regional/ provincial poll numbers to election results (in a table further down).

First the national polls and how they fared. The polls are ranked by total absolute error. The red numbers indicate polling that fell below the actual results while the numbers in black indicate polling above the actual results.

A couple of observations: every pollster underestimated Conservative support and over-estimated the NDP. It is likely that the latter is an indication of a significant degree of tactical voting for the Liberals on the part of NDP supporters who, despite how they actually voted, had no hesitation expressing their true feelings to pollsters. One region where Conservative strength was under-estimated was Alberta (see below). In most cases the polls over-estimated the People's Party of Canada (PPC), a party I suspect may now disappear. On the whole the national polls were were fairly accurate.

It is not indicated in the table, but the national polling in this election from companies that rely on online polling was more accurate than the telephone based pollsters, including those that used the computerized Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technique. However, some of the phone/IVR pollsters did better with their regional polling numbers.

REGIONAL POLLING

It is a given that the errors in regional polling are much higher as the sub-sample sizes in provinces and regions are smaller (in some cases quite small). Despite the errors and what look like high totals of absolute error I found the performance of the polls regionally was relatively good with the exception of the Conservatives (see the line at the bottom of the table labelled 'Average error all regions'). In the table below I grouped the polls using shading ranging from white to darker gray to distinguish three groupings: those that attained the best regional/provincial results, a middle group and those that were weaker. They are ranked by Total Error.

A few observations (partly based on data not shown here). It is notable that Leger (on online pollster) performed best in both national and regional polling accuracy.

One region where polling error was high was Alberta. The polls significantly underestimated Conservative popular support. However, the error was of no importance with respect to seats. The CPC won all but one seat and would have done just as well in seats with many fewer votes. The error appears to have been rooted in turnout, which increased in all the constituencies in Alberta outside Calgary and Edmonton (it dropped in some ridings in the two cities). The most conservative region of Canada where the net outcome in all ridings was all a foregone conclusion turned out in greater numbers than in 2015. This is the region of maximum anti-Trudeau feeling, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

I wrote previously of how different the outcome would have been if votes were distributed by proportional representation. Even with a pure PR system the Conservatives would still have won 25 of 34 Alberta constituencies rather than their actual 33 (the party won nearly sixty-nine percent of the province-wide vote). Rural Alberta Conservative support was a classic example of a wasted vote in a first-past-the-post system.

In praise of the Saskatchewan CCF... the roots of Medicare

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 19:42:00 +0000

On the March 21 edition of CBC radio's The House Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, "This is a moment when all Canadians should get down on their knees and thank the people who gave us our universal health care system...."

Tommy Douglas

Sixty years ago in the spring of 1960 Saskatchewan's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government led by Tommy Douglas was about to enter a successful re-election campaign promising "a province-wide medical care program". Today medicare is considered a given in Canada but that wasn’t always the case. A series of politically risky moves on the part of Douglas and his government made it happen. These events deserve to be remembered.

In the midst of a pandemic the importance of having a government-run health care system will instantly be recognized by most Canadians, who have come to depend on it for over fifty years. While the United States continues as the world's leading private sector based health care system (although it spends large amounts of public dollars through programs such as Medicaid), in the current situation the leading U.S. public voice, Dr Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged recently: "The system is not really geared to what we need right now... let's admit it..."

The failures of the U.S. health system go well beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. If we look back at some the historic developments that led to the establishment of Medicare by the Saskatchewan CCF, we can recognize there are elements of the story we would do well to remember at this precarious time. (For most of what follows I am drawing upon the account in the book Dream No Little Dreams: A Biography of the Douglas Government of Saskatchewan, 1944-1961, written by A.W. Johnson ; with the assistance of Rosemary Proctor.) Note that Johnson was a founding father of medicare.

Medicare was always among the plans of the CCF when they came to office in August 1944. Saskatchewan was emerging from a decade and a half of war and depression, a period of austerity and scarcity that meant it felt compelled to balance its budget (farmers post-depression in particular were allergic to debt). However, that did not stop it from the beginnings of medicare. In 1946 Saskatchewan legislated the Saskatchewan Hospital Services Plan to start on January 1, 1947, a plan to pay for hospitcal care that was universal, comprehensive and publicly administered. It was expensive but Saskatchewan did not hesitate to find the necessary funding. Financing came from general revenues and family premiums (taxes), which were set initially at $30 ($425 in current dollars) per year for a family of four (less for singles and couples).

Before taking office the CCF contemplated abolishing the sales tax, but opted instead once in office to make it more progressive by exempting 'necessities'. The tax was an important part of financing hospitalization. Indeed, the sales tax rate was raised from 2% to 3% in the 1950 budget in part to cope with cost pressures from hospitalization. Provincial Treasurer Clarence Fines commented in his budget speech:

... the tax has been criticized more than any other provincial tax but this criticism has usually been political, and not based on sound reasoning. As originally drafted with few exemptions the tax did have some vicious features. Any tax on food stuffs must be considered regressive. The same is true of tax on many other necessities for which the poorest person in the province must pay as much as the wealthiest. It has been my purpose to remove these regressive features.

The speech then proceeded to list many of these in detail, including, for example, foodstuffs, drugs and prescriptions, soaps and cleaners, weed control chemicals and animal feeds.

Fines concluded:

There is no doubt that certain persons would be prepared to sacrifice badly needed health and education services in order that they may gain whatever political advantage they can by their advocacy of removing a tax which they introduced many years ago. I am confident however, that most intelligent people realize that such a proposal can not be genuine, unless the welfare of the people of the province is to be sacrificed. (Saskatchewan Budget Speech, March 8, 1950)

The budget speech also attacked the federal government, making it clear that despite Saskatchewan's hospitalization initiative, the failure of the then St. Laurent Liberal government to act on proposals for a national program (made originally in 1945), and instead to take what Fines called "token action" served only to increase the "financial load" upon Saskatchewan. Bending to pressure the federal government acted in the late fifties. Once the federal legislation to create a national hospitalization program took effect on July 1, 1958 half the cost of Saskatchewan's now eleven year old program came from federal coffers. The extra dollars meant Douglas government could see it would have the financial capacity to enact medicare.

One can hear echoed in the budget speech the anti-tax attitudes the government faced, but it decided nonetheless to forge ahead. At the time the tax increase did not hurt the party politically. The CCF, which had seen its popular vote and seats decrease in the 1948 election, increased its majority in the legislature and popular vote when it next faced the electorate in 1952.

Less than a year after the start of national hospitalization, the Douglas government commenced planning for universal health care, announcing its intention to proceed at a public meeting (held as part of a byelection) in the village of Birch Hills on April 25, 1959. Plans for the program were drawn up by an interdepartmental planning committee that reported to cabinet in November 1959. The plan identified ten objectives that would become familiar elements of Medicare such as universality. In the context of the current crisis, I want to draw attention to objective number four. It argued that "in the design of the medical care program... the preventive objective should always be kept at the forefront...Medical practitioners... must be encouraged to participate in preventive programs and apply preventive measures to personal health care."

A pandemic makes clear the ongoing importance of preventive public health programs and spending. But conservatives both south of the border - Donald Trump - and north of the border - Doug Ford - have made recent cuts to the public health component of our health care services. Trump eliminated a pandemic preparedness unit in the White House.

For the Douglas government, enacting and implementing medicare would be a multi-year, highly contentious struggle that involved making a series of difficult decisions. The controversies, particularly the struggle with the doctors and the 1962 strike are the better known part of the story. This article written on the 50th anniversary of the implementation of Medicare in Saskatchewan for Canadian Dimension looks back on those events. It starts off saying:

Medicare was born in Saskatchewan on July 1, 1962. It would be the first government-controlled, universal, comprehensive single-payer medical insurance plan in North America. It was a difficult birth. The North American medical establishment and the entire insurance industry were determined to stop Medicare in its tracks. They feared it would become popular and spread, and they were right.

In order to finance the introduction of Medicare in 1962 the CCF government, now led by Woodrow Lloyd, raised the sales tax by two percentage points (1½% for health care). In addition they added one point each to personal income and corporate taxes. By today's political standards these represented enormous tax hikes. One should not understate the political risks assumed by the CCF. Although the CCF would be defeated in the next election after 20 years in office, Saskatchewan's Medicare would become permanent.

A few years later the precedent established by the CCF (along with other factors) would lead to implementation of a national cost-shared Medicare program on July 1, 1968. Among the other developments that were important was the report of the Hall Royal Commission on Health Services appointed in 1961 by the Diefenbaker governmennt. The author of the report, Emmet Hall, was a fellow Conservative and old seat-mate from law school of Diefenbaker. Opponents of medicare had pressured for the appointment of the commission. However, they were to be disappointed. The report delivered in 1964 to the Pearson government strongly supported the establishment of a national medicare program.

Two other important political developments of the early sixties mattered. T.C. Douglas became leader of the New Democratic Party, which was established in 1961, carrying the advocacy of medicare to the national stage. There was also internal debate in the Liberal Party. A key proponent of medicare inside the Liberal Party was policy guru Tom Kent. In his book A Public Purpose he describes some of the internal struggle as follows:

... there always were within the party people of conservative mind who did not want Canada to have, for example, medicare; their numbers increased... as former Liberals returned to activity. Throughout, however, the ideological conservatives were mostly people not actively engaged in politics; many were business "friends" of the party those whom I call "the men who come to lunch." They were a nuisance, because they worried Mike Pearson and wasted time for many of us, but there was never much danger they would succeed in staying to dinner, in getting measures such as medicare taken out of the program.

In the end the pro-medicare forces were successful, in part because the Liberals wanted to win votes from the NDP and knew support for medicare was an essential condition of doing so. However, the conservative Liberals were pleased by Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp's delay in the introduction of medicare by one year.

With advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, we should all be grateful that the struggles to achieve medicare, beginning in the 1940s, were successful. We would be much worse off without it. The efforts to establish it were extremely difficult both politcally and financially. We will forever be in debt to those like T.C. Douglas and A.W. Johnson who worked hard and took risks to make it happen.

Thoughts on Canadian politics post the 2019 election

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 17:47:00 +0000

National political context emerging from 2019 election

Polling during the 2019 election left many with the impression that the Liberal government was on the ropes. However, the distortions of the first past the post system disguised the fact the Liberals were actually comfortably ahead in most of the country. The Liberals trailed the Conservatives in the national popular vote:

However, the popular vote share disguised an important regional dimension. The strong Liberal national lead in MPs elected was an outcome based on the regional implications of first-past-the-post. An enormous Conservative lead in two provinces - Saskatchewan and Alberta - produced the following:

Many of these were 'wasted' votes. Elsewhere, the Liberals had a comfortable eight point popular vote lead when you look at the combined results in other provinces. That national popular vote looked close, but when it came to MPs elected, once we exclude the two most Conservative provinces, we find a majority of the seats going Liberal in the rest of Canada.

This illusion disappears if seats are distributed by proportional representation, but the current political reality is that what might look close in the national poll standings really isn't.

The Liberals

The Liberals emerged from the election in a minority, the first Liberal minority government since 1979. After the 1972 campaign the Liberals ran an adept and strategic minority that turned into a majority in 1974. In 1980, following numerous strategic and tactical errors on the part of the PC Joe Clark government (that governed as if it had a majority), the Pierre Trudeau Liberals were back for four years with a majority. Other than Carolyn Bennett the current group of Liberals have no prior experience governing as a minority. The Liberals were last in a minority in 2004 to 2006. It remains unclear to me if they will govern as the 1972-74 Liberals, or closer to the Joe Clark model. They had no logical partner in 2004-006 although they did get just enough to win one vote in 2005 with the help of the NDP.

At the moment, they have a get of jail free card until after the Conservative convention, and they are close enough to a majority that only a combined opposition can bring them down so there is some measure of safety. To get back to a majority, unlike in 1974 and 1980, they can't realistically base it on gains in Ontario. A small but achievable increase in popular support in Quebec appears to be the most realistic path to another Liberal majority but don't be surprised if a new election produces another minority.

Since the election Justin Trudeau has handled issues that have arisen reasonably well, particularly the aftermath of the Iran air crash, as well as the rail blockades (although some of the polling on this has been negative for them) and the result is that their position is still strong. Take this March 4th albeit opinionated assessment on the election forecasting blog leantossup.ca.

A lot of sound and fury has been raised over the allegedly broken nature of Canada recently, all of it stupid.... Finally, today, we got enough data to update the LeanTossup Canada Model, and contrary to so many assumptions about how the blockades and issues around resource extraction are hurting the Liberals, they’re actually up in seats.

I suspect a greater threat to the Liberals could come from the negative economic impact of COVID-19, an impact certain to extend to all incumbent governments.

The NDP

Historians will no doubt forever treat the NDP's decision to get rid of Thomas Mulcair as a strategic error. From 2015 to 2019 the party dropped from 44 to 24 seats won. Their losses were particularly dramatic in Quebec. Nationally their popular vote dropped by 3.9 percentage points. However, in Quebec it dropped 14.7 percentage points and they lost all but one of the 16 seats they had won in 2015. There is no doubt the NDP exercised collective bad judgment in getting rid of Mulcair, who likely would have been gone after 2019 in any case.

In the 2019 election tactical voting hurt the NDP. In closing polls the NDP nationally averaged 18.3 per cent but on voting day received only 15.8% of the Canada-wide vote, a gap of 2.5 percentage points. Poll error would be part of the explanation but I suspect tactical voting (for the Liberals as the preferred alternative to the Conservatives) accounts for a substantial portion of the difference.

However, seen in the context of the longer term, it suggests there is more underlying support for the NDP than the 2019 election result would suggest. As well, there is some poll evidence that after a poor start as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh's election performance has left a positive impression on the electorate. There are a number of different polling questions one can pose to evaluate support for a given leader. One that I like is asked weekly by Nanos Research on whether a specific individual has the qualities of a good leader. Although Singh badly trails Trudeau and Scheer if the question is about which leader is your preferred choice for PM, he does quite well when poll respondents are asked if he has the qualities of a good political leader. Recently, he has been scoring in the high forties on this one just behind Justin Trudeau and well ahead of Scheer (Mulcair also performed well on this question). This strongly suggests he has the potential to do well in the future overall. I think Singh is a net asset to the NDP and does not hold back its popularity. The party should not repeat the error of its past and seek to remove him from the post.

Conservative Leadership Race

There is a Conservative leadership race for a number of reasons: critiques of Scheer's performance in the election, the scandal about party finances that emerged and so on. However, I think the key consideration was a product of the results themselves. The Conservatives deceived themselves into thinking that their strength in national polls translated into enough support to win at least a plurality of the seats. Finishing 36 seats behind the despised Justin Trudeau was more than they could take. (Somewhat similar disappointment coming out of 2015 had an impact on the NDP.)

The race is now on for the Conservative leadership, and like the NDP race in 2017, some of the expected strong candidates - Rona Ambrose, Pierre Poilievre - did not enter. Of greater significance is that the global zeitgeist has moved against the political right. If we look back three decades some of the key issues of the time and the way they were framed in public debate - free trade, lowering taxes, deregulation - were matters on which the party appeared to have a comparative advantage. The Mulroney PCs negotiated NAFTA, the Liberals at the time were unwilling to change it, and today they completely embrace it.

Today's zeitgeist is quite different. For example, the Conservatives are particularly weak on issues such as climate change and inequality. They are on the defensive and historically on the wrong side of the argument on both matters. As well, social conservatism on issues such as abortion or LGBTQ rights have transformed it from being an asset for the Conservative Party to being such a handicap in polling that we now see leading party activists lobbying to suppress social conservativism in the current race. And they are being successful. The party recently prohibited social conservative Richard Decarie from being a candidate.

However, the party still tilts right on key issues where their positioning is clearly a long run liability. As the Globe and Mail reported in January:

The key contenders in the Conservative leadership race say they plan to keep fighting the federal carbon tax, if they win the party’s top job.

While Peter MacKay, Erin O’Toole and Marilyn Gladu have tried to distance themselves from other elements of outgoing leader Andrew Scheer’s election campaign, all confirmed to The Globe and Mail that on the carbon tax they agree with Mr. Scheer.

The Conservatives remain mired in climate change myopia; it will hurt them over time. Cutting taxes such as eliminating the carbon tax is all the Conservatives have to say on inequality. Yet this is an era where public opinion has been moving in the direction of higher taxes for the wealthy.

There is considerable evidence that politics in North America is steadily shifting leftward. You would have no inkling of that if you look the current Tory leadership race.

The current global health crisis also illustrates the weakness of conservatives as they flounder in response. Let's not forget that one of the decisions of the PC Ford government was to cut public health spending.

Some thoughts on the US Presidential Race

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 22:41:00 +0000

The first thing that needs to be said about the US system of choosing presidents is that it is absolutely insane. Apart from the unfairness of advantaging some states and not others in the sequential series of primaries and caucuses over time, from the perspective of the parties it makes no sense. To take the case of the Democrats, instead of initial contests in small unrepresentative states like Iowa and New Hampshire, it would make more sense to stage these races in consequential swing states such as Pennsylvania and Florida.

It also advantages candidates who are well known. One simple reason Bernie Sanders has had an advantage over Elizabeth Warren despite similar policy positioning is that he is better known having run before. Joe Biden did well in many early polls for no better reason than that as Obama's VP he was well known. Campaigning changes this as a candidate's weaknesses become known but it does matter.

Because there are no effective spending limits the American political system also advantages money as we are seeing now with two billionaires (Bloomberg and Steyer) achieving some polling success simply because they have spent so much on ads.

A curious aspect of this campaign partly produced by the features described above is that we have three candidates who are realistically too old for the office - Bernie Sanders (will turn 79 this year in September), Michael Bloomberg (just turned 78) and Joe Biden (recently turned 78).

State of the race

Previous Democratic presidential nominating contests have tended to be rapid winnowing processes, based previously on first past the post principles, but continuing even after more proportional rules for awarding delegates were adopted. However, the potential for a convention where no candidate captures a majority of delegates pre-convention is stronger this year than before. Currently the website Five Thirty Eight ranks Bernie Sanders with the best prospects of winning more than 50% of the delegates but has 'No One getting a majority' ranked second.

This is partly because the pre-race favourite of "centrist" Democrats, Joe Biden, performed poorly in the first two contests. He could well be displaced in his role by another very senior citizen, Michael Bloomberg, who has all the money in the world to finance his campaign. As well, Bernie Sanders who is leading did not perform particularly strongly in Iowa and New Hampshire so he is not dominating.

Media bias

Major institutions of the U.S. media have had in the past a highly influential, sometimes negative impact on U.S. politics. In 2016 the major U.S. media overall were less negative towards Donald Trump than they were towards Hillary Clinton. A major study of this by the Shorenstein Center said: "...over the full course of the election, it was Clinton, not Trump, who was more often the target of negative coverage... Overall, the coverage of her candidacy was 62 percent negative to 38 percent positive, while his coverage was 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive."

One disadvantage for current candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is that the major U.S. media institutions have tended to frame their proposals for comprehensive medicare known popularly as 'medicare for all' negatively. Here is an example from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. I said 'framing' and I meant it. His column of February 11 says of Sanders that he, "wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All program..." Notice the word 'gigantic'. Would it not be more appropriate to describe the American heavily private health care system relative to all others as 'gigantic'? In 2018 16.7 percent of the US GDP went to health care, the largest by several percentage points in the world. And untested? Other western countries including Canada and others have medicare-for-all type systems. Hardly untested. This is a very solipsistic world view.

What will determine the outcome?

In trying to determine the outcome various theories have been offered: the state of the economy, the dedication of Trump's base, the views of suburban Republican women who switched to the Democrats in 2018, etc. One new figure in this debate gaining attention is political scientist Rachel Bitcofer (see this profile in Politico and this statement of her views in the New York Times).

The reason her views matter is that they are at odds with traditional ways of looking at the race of how it all comes down to a few swing voters, ideologically situated between the two alternatives.

Here is a summary as she outlined them in the Times:

The high levels of hyperpartisanship and polarization in the electorate have profoundly affected the political behavior of Americans and, by extension, made the outcome of our elections highly predictable.

Always powerful, partisanship has become the be-all and end-all for American voters. ...

Yet a key aspect of polarization has been somewhat overlooked: negative partisanship. Voters with this attitude are mobilized not by love of their own party so much as by hatred of the opposition party. Negative partisanship especially benefits the party that doesn’t hold the presidency, because out-party voters find themselves living in a world where their political preferences are under constant assault, or at least appear to be so....

...I predicted — in July 2018 — that negative partisanship would allow Democrats to pick up 42 House seats and sweep “Reagan country” in Orange County, Calif. At first, my model was an outlier, but by Election Day, the FiveThirtyEight “classic” forecast, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report all agreed with my forecast. [My note: The Democrats actually gained 41 seats]

Motivated by the threat posed by the Trump administration, casual Democratic voters, especially college-educated women, have been activated since Mr. Trump’s election and will remain activated so long as the threat he presents to them remains. And the complacent Democratic electorate of the 2010 and 2014 congressional midterms as well as the 2016 presidential election is gone (for now). It has been replaced by a galvanized Democratic electorate that will produce the same structural advantage for Democrats that manifested in the 2018 midterms.

Her forecast for the 2020 race made last year can be found here.

Economics do matter to any political race and the advantage on this so far favours Trump. However, a new wild card in all of this is the coronovirus - Covid-19. Canada's Minister of Finance Bill Morneau has already suggested it will have a negative economic effect. It may only be mild as is apparently the case for many who have contracted the illness but conceivably it could be profoundly negative. For example, Nouriel Roubini comments:

The COVID-19 outbreak ...is likely to be more severe than currently expected, and the disruption to the Chinese economy will have spillover effects on global supply chains – including pharma inputs, of which China is a critical supplier – and business confidence, all of which will likely be more severe than financial markets’ current complacency suggests.

TC's Choice

If I had a vote it would go to Elizabeth Warren who is the best qualified of the candidates by far to be the next president. Whether she will be seems unlikely at the moment but a week in politics is still a long time. I would argue that a must read on this is the item by Ezra Klein on Warren in Vox. He summarizes his argument thus:

The case for Warren over her competitors is threefold. She understands America’s problems better than anyone else in the field, in part because it’s her research and analysis that now forms the base for much of the policy debate. She understands how to focus and wield the powers of the regulatory state better than anyone else, because she’s actually done it, and because it’s core to her political project. And she is, far and away, the candidate with the clearest plan for making ambitious governance possible again.

Apart from the summary, I was struck by this section about her experience running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Obama:

I reported on Warren’s construction of the bureau, and what impressed me most in those years was something that is rarely discussed in politics but is of deep importance to the presidency: her skills as an organizational leader.

I have never covered an agency where the morale was as high, the sense of mission as clear, and the collection of talent as impressive, as the CFPB under Warren. During those years, I spoke with CFPB employees ranging from senior leadership to midlevel lawyers to junior communications staffers, and you couldn’t make it three minutes into those conversations without getting some aphorism from Warren, or anecdote about Warren, quoted back to you. Her ability to inspire not just loyalty but a sense of mission in her staff was unique....

Warren’s work on the CFPB gave her something rare among political candidates. One is interest in, and experience with, the federal bureaucracy itself. She understands the regulatory process, how it works, who has access to it. She knows which meetings matter, where power sits, which explanations for why something isn’t possible or isn’t happening are merely stalling tactics. She has seen, firsthand, the entry points that lobbyists and special interests use to hijack the process, the difficulties of collaboration among agencies.

This tells you Warren knows government better than any of the others. She ought to be the Democratic candidate. Whether she will be is another matter.

UPDATES: Warren performed well during last night's TV Debate in Nevada, which had a large audience of 19.7 million, a new record high for a Democratic debate. Warren's fundraising jumped during the debate.

What would the October election have looked like if based on PR

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 17:25:00 +0000

After I published my previous blogpost on December 9 I received a comment on Facebook asking what the results would have looked like using proportional representation. Good question. I have now done just such a calculation, the results of which can be found below.

In the post I emphasized that the federal Liberals were effective in appealing to Ontario voters to "vote for a progressive government, not a progressive opposition". The key role of strategic/tactical voting in the election makes it clear that had proportional representation been in place, the voting shares would inevitably have differed from what actually took place. Knowledge on the part of voters of the existence of PR would on its own certainly have produced a number of differences in the pattern of voting.

With those provisos, here are the seat results that would be produced by simply distributing seats based on a proportional voting system applied to the October 21 results.

As noted in the table I used a St. Lague PR voting calculation to calculate seat distribution using the vote shares produced in the October 21 election except in the northern territories. I used vote shares in each province and applied a 5% threshold rule - a party must have won at least 5% of the vote to be eligible to win seats (this excludes the PPC and independents such as Jody Wilson-Raybould).

This is the same method used in Germany and New Zealand in their national elections for their list seats. However, they both use a mixed member system where half the seats are chosen in constituencies. To simplify the calculus I assumed an all list system. My guess is that if Canada were ever to adopt PR it would be based on a mixed member system. However, assuming a proportional system were to emerge from the inevitably complicated and controversial reform process, the shares of seats we see in the table above would remain the about same.

The seat distribution seen here closely reflects the vote shares in the 2019 election at the national level.

Some observations about these results:

1. The largest single gain in seats would go to the NDP, the largest proportionate gain to the Greens.
2. The Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc all lose seats and seat shares. The Liberals lose the most.
3. The logical coalition that would emerge here would be Liberal-NDP - the two parties would have 173 seats combined.

This is all of course completely hypothetical. A PR system would likely produce more parties and multi-party coalitions.

Doug Ford and the federal election

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 04:00:00 +0000

I previously posted a revised version of an article published in Inroads last spring on the forthcoming federal election, part of a series of regional analyses. It concluded provincial politics were likely to play a role in the fall federal election. A few days after the October 21, 2019 event I submitted the article below, which appears in the new issue of Inroads. After the article there is an update and additional analysis.

------------
In the Summer/Fall issue of Inroads, I noted at the end of my election preview article that while Ontario’s provincial politics played no role in the federal elections of the seventies, by all appearances that was not going to be true in the upcoming election. Last December and January, prior to most of the major political developments of 2019, the federal Conservatives were averaging about 40 per cent in the Ontario section of the national polls. On October 21, Andrew Scheer’s Tories picked up just 33 per cent of the vote in Ontario, down slightly from the last election, while the Liberals, despite slipping a few points, won 79 seats, just one fewer than in 2015.

The difference can be chalked up to Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Sworn into office June 29, 2018, Ford had become such an unpopular political figure that Justin Trudeau made the Ontario Premier a staple of his political messaging. Trudeau warned that, should Andrew Scheer become prime minister, he would copy Ford’s spending cuts, such as those to education and other services. In the two weeks leading up to the election, Trudeau campaigned hard in the hopes that NDP and Green supporters would vote Liberal, arguing that they should vote for “a progressive government, not a progressive opposition.” The appeal to such voters to accept the necessity of casting a ballot for their second choice to avoid a Conservative government was particularly effective in Ontario.

To help out his federal counterpart, Ford suspended the provincial legislature until after the federal election and kept a generally low profile as Premier over the course of the campaign. However, he could not avoid governing, or the daily reporting that comes with it. As students returned to schools, universities and community colleges, tales of consequences of education cuts reinforced the impression of the unpopular austerity that dominated the first year of the Ford government. The promise of tax cuts had little impact on the negative feelings evoked by Ford’s regime.

There is a constituency for this kind of governance, but it achieves political success in Canada in our first-past-the-post political system only in particular circumstances. A deeply unpopular Kathleen Wynne regime coming at the end of 15 years of Liberal rule in Ontario produced the Ford victory in 2018, a situation without parallel in the 2019 federal election.

As the federal Liberals did not win a majority, they may not control the timing of the date of next federal election. The two most recent federal minority governments, both Conservative Harper regimes, each lasted about two and a half years (from January 2006 to October 2008 and from October 2008 to May 2011). If the same were to be true of the incoming federal Liberal minority government, there would be a federal campaign in the spring of 2022. The next Ontario election is currently scheduled for June 2, 2022. The last overlap of federal and provincial election campaigns in Ontario happened in 1945. If this occurs in 2022, we could see a repeat of this year’s federal-provincial dynamic.

Update and further analysis:

Since the election additional polling from Leger has made it clear just how unpopular Doug Ford continues to be, with 73% of those Ontarians with an opinion, expressing a negative view of him. Now that the federal Liberals find themselves in a minority situation they will be thinking how they might turn their current position into a majority in the next election. Ideally, they would like to have Doug Ford there to run against, but Ontario is not where the Liberals can find additional seats.

In the rest of Canada the October 21 election looked in some ways like a reversion to the long term average for the Liberals. In Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and BC, the CPC and NDP picked up some long held seats lost to the Liberals in 2015 wave election. The place with the greatest potential next time for Liberal gains is Quebec. There the Bloc Québecois won 22 more seats while the Liberals had net loss of five. Many of the Bloc seats could be picked up by the Liberals next time with just a small increment in the popular vote. While they need to pay some attention to the unhappiness in Alberta and Saskatchewan, there is little political benefit to the Liberals in making strenuous efforts there. It is Quebec that matters.

However, making gains in Quebec will be thorny. A key factor in the Bloc gains was a xenophobic nationalism protective of the provincial government's Bill 21, the legislation that bans the wearing of religious symbols. How that may evolve over time is unclear. The federal Liberals (like their provincial counterparts) have so far been deferential to the legislation. They need an electoral competition in Quebec next time with a different focus.

The Liberals have won support for the throne speech from the Bloc, but there is a danger for them in relying for support on what remains, at least nominally, a party that supports Quebec independence. They need to find support from the NDP for at least some of their measures. In the elections following 1972 and 1974 winning back disaffected voters in Ontario brought the Liberals additional majorities. However, four of the last six elections (2004, 2006, 2008 and 2019) have produced minorities and the path to another Liberal majority is much less clear.

Election 2019: Where are we headed?

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:20:00 +0000

Polls and Seats: Divergent messages

The polls in this campaign appear on the surface to be telling a similar story: a close election, outcome uncertain. However, different surveys, examined closely, reveal dramatic contrasts.

Here are two examples covering the same October 8 to 10 period (the day after the English debate to the day of the second French debate), one survey from Nanos Research, the other from Angus Reid. I provide a seat projection below based on the provincial/regional numbers from the two polls. What matters, however, is the dramatic difference between the two: one a Liberal plurality of seats won, the other Conservative.

There is also higher uncertainty because the polls are more variable at the level of regional details. So which survey should one trust? Even past performance is not an absolutely reliable guide since a given polling firm can have a bad result. That said, the best performing firm in elections since 2006 has overwhelmingly been Nanos. With the exception of 2008 when they had a bad result, Nanos has either been the most accurate pollster, or just a whisker away from being the most accurate. The table below tells us what happened in 2015. It compares the national numbers in the polls for each party compared to the election result. Overall the polls performed well. The firms are ranked by total absolute error. The red numbers indicate numbers that fell below actual vote shares, the black are above. The polling was fairly accurate, mostly within the margin of error.

I have been tracking polls compared to election results for some time. Generally polls conducted by phone either with a live interviewer or electronically by a method called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) have been the most accurate as in the table above. However, on occasion, an online survey outperformed the others.

I still regard online polls as experimental partly because there is no standard commonly accepted methodology. For example, some of the internet panels (meant to stand in for the Canadian or provincial population as a whole) are randomly recruited on the phone while others are self-selected or put together using other methods.

I would like to see full transparency in this area, which does not happen now: the size of the panel (including the size of provincial and regional sections), how it is selected, the number of surveys distributed and response rate. Online polls are attractive to polling firms because they are cost-efficient so they are probably here to stay. Online polls do generally report a margin of error. However, it should be remembered that the margin of error is simply a function of sample size. Online poll samples are drawn from the limited population of the internet panel, whereas phone or IVR polls sample all of the population with access to a phone (land line or cell). This difference is something that appears to be widely misunderstood. When you see margin of error in an online poll the population that it applies to is the population of the panel not the population of Canada. Sometimes a poll such as the Reid poll above will describe the margin of error using fudge language such as: "For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20." In fact the margin of error does apply to a sample of the size noted but the population it applies to is that of the internet panel.

Election trends: growth in support for the NDP and the Bloc

It is clear by now that the NDP has dramatically improved its prospects in the last couple of weeks, in part because of Jagmeet Singh's performance in the debates and his deft response to the Trudeau blackface controversy and other issues. The Bloc has been growing too, in part because the new leader, Yves-François Blanchet, is an effective communicator, but also because of the appeal in Quebec of the province's xenophobic Bill 21 (it imposes restrictions on the headgear of religious minorities) especially to older, more rural residents (see the demographic numbers on page 5 of this Leger survey). However, Chantal Hebert also makes a convincing case that other factors are at play.

I don't think the NDP is doing better because of Singh's debate performances per se. Instead, it has rejigged the campaign because his performance has drawn voters to take a new look at the positions he has emphasized. Voters don't look at elections as beauty contests (I get the impression some reporters do), but rather as a way to solve problems they face, so the NDP's promises in areas like dental care or housing and other issues are ultimately what is delivering the support to the NDP not the qualities of his debate performance.

In a way this should not be a surprise. All governments disappoint and it has been clear for some time that some of the electorate has been casting about for an alternative. The NDP does appear in current circumstances to be drawing at least some support from both the Liberals and the Conservatives reflecting the new dynamic.

Historically, the NDP has done well in elections following Liberal majorities. This happened in the elections following Liberal wins in 1968, 1974, 1993 and 2000. It is not a new phenomenon. At the moment the NDP would not match its 2015 seat total of 44 but there are several days to go. Intuitively, I have wondered if this election might produce a scenario like that in 1972 when the Liberals of Trudeau the elder finished a single seat ahead of the Stanfield PCs. The next two years brought a Liberal government dependent on support from the NDP. However, increasing Bloc strength suggests it may be a House of Commons where neither major party can govern with the support of just one opposition party. This suggests a period of parliamentary instability to follow.

It will be remembered by some that there was considerable speculation about how well the Green Party would do following their by-election win in May. The situation is actually the same now as then. The Greens have improved in the polls since the last election but they only have real strength on Vancouver Island. Their leader Elizabeth May has stumbled during the campaign in part because of her dishonesty. For example, she claimed a new Quebec recruit from the ranks of the NDP was a sovereignist not a separatist, although the two words have the same practical meaning (the new recruit used 'separate' in French himself). She has gotten away with a great deal of this kind of use of political weasel words for a long time, but the real problem for the Greens is that they just don't have much organizational muscle off the island.

The Conservatives could have improved their prospects if they weren't so determined to be a party well to the right. Andrew Scheer doubled down on this approach in the English debate - it seems he is somehow trying to thread the needle - but this behaviour overall is self-marginalizing in the context of the reality of Canadians' political views. It also inspires some fear among progressives leading many of them to look to cast a tactical ballot, even though that is a practical alternative in only a small number of circumstances.

High turnout at advance polls mean some of the result is already baked in, i.e. developments in the last week cannot change votes already cast (two million ballots were cast in the first two days of advance voting). That suggests the current numbers already guarantee no party will control a majority in the House of Commons come October 21.

Manitoba Election - Closer than it appears?

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:45:00 +0000

The Manitoba election is on September 10 and while most polling suggests an easy PC win, it may be closer than it appears. The most recent poll from Mainstreet Research has an overall margin of nine points - 43% to the NDP's 34% with the Liberals trailing at 15% and the Greens at 6%. The Free Press headlined it Poll Predicts Tory Majority.

However, this same poll actually gives the NDP a six point lead in the City of Winnipeg (an earlier poll suggested the parties were tied in the city) while the PCs have a thirty point margin in the rest of the province. This is significant. The PCs win by enormous margins in rural Manitoba, sometimes by greater than sixty percentage points - a vast number of 'wasted' votes.

When I apply my seat calculation forecast using the regional numbers from the survey I get a PC majority but a tight one. Of the 57 constituencies the PCs would win 30, the NDP 24 and the Liberals 3. There is nothing certain about these numbers. One should expect both polling error and errors from the seat forecasting methodology. However, if the poll is right about a real NDP lead in the city then this election may be closer than has generally been thought. At the individual riding level I see quite a few close margins with tight PC leads (and a few NDP). Several are suburban Winnipeg seats formerly held by the NDP under Gary Doer and Greg Selinger.

The PCs have not run this campaign as if they were coasting to a comfortable victory. They know that polling suggests that PC Premier Brian Pallister is personally unpopular. In addition the NDP with some effect has been campaigning strongly against cuts to health care.

The PCs have used attack ads including some that I think qualify as dirty politics. For example, the PCs have been running an ad attacking NDP leader Wab Kinew. For the moment you can see it here on Youtube. Kinew engaged in serious misbehaviour in his youth, which he described in a memoir, The Reason You Walk. He has acknowledged his misdeeds but is a different person, in particular because he has overcome his alcohol addiction.

The image in the ad, which appears for 4½ seconds, is not long enough to read but long enough to get the impression of someone really terrible. You will note the "charged with" outnumbers the "convicted" but that is the idea, to conflate the two and leave an impression of someone unfit to be premier. The political goal of this ad, which clearly says that Kinew's background makes him unqualified to lead, is to sow doubts about him in precisely those previously NDP suburban Winnipeg constituencies where the PCs do not have safe leads.

Something that has had next to no discussion in this campaign is anti-indigenous racism in Manitoba. Clearly it exists and will have at least some negative impact on the NDP among the non-indigenous population. How large an impact it might have is a subject for conjecture, but it will no doubt matter to some extent.

I don't really see how the PCs can lose at this point but if the NDP keeps the outcome close, it can matter in Manitoba's political future. The Pawley NDP government was re-elected in 1986 with just 30 seats. I think a government needs 31 to be assured a full term of four years. Two years after the 1986 election at a point where their popularity had plummeted, the NDP lost a budget vote. In the subsequent election they ended up in third place.

Reflections on the 1969 NDP Election Win in Manitoba

noreply@blogger.com (tcnorris) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 20:10:00 +0000

In June I attended a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the election of Ed Schreyer's NDP government in Manitoba in 1969. Fifty years ago I had just turned 21 and cast my first vote that day for the NDP, having worked during the campaign for Cy Gonick, the NDP candidate in Crescentwood. His victory was one of a number of outcomes in close contests critical to the NDP's success. Most of the speeches at the dinner were devoted to the (highly successful) record of the government, which I will touch on, but I want to reflect here on how it happened.

Back in 1970 I was generously given co-authorship by Tom Peterson, a member of the University of Manitoba Political Science Department, for an article published in the Lakehead University Review titled "Some Factors in the 1969 NDP Victory in Manitoba". This analysis reflects arguments made there but adds to them.

The Diagonal Line

Fundamental to the NDP victory was that politics in the province divided along a northwest to southeast diagonal line, poorer and more ethnically diverse to the north, more prosperous and more British to the south. Here is the line as it appeared in the 1970 article:

The pattern is clearly visible in coloured maps of the 1969 results below:

The line would become deeply entrenched over time. Several factors converged in 1969 to produce the NDP victory:

1. Redistribution and the end of rural preference. For decades Manitoba had legislated rural over-representation. However, the provincial government had also implemented a non-partisan system for redrawing constituency boundaries in 1955. Further reform meant a 1968 redistribution permitted no more than a 25 percent allowance on riding size. This increased representation in Winnipeg where the NDP's victory was centred - the party captured 17 of 27 constituencies with 45.4% of the vote (compared to 38.3% province-wide).

2. The Liberal party had not been small 'l' liberal for a long time. There was a reform Liberal government in Manitoba from 1915 to 1922 but it lost to the United Farmers (later the Progressives) in the 1922 election, and thereafter was a small urban party. The Liberals entered into coalition with the Progressives in 1932 and became part of a small 'c' conservative regime that lasted until 1958. I described the consequences in a paper in 2008: "By joining a farmers’ movement with its emphasis on fiscal frugality the Manitoba Liberals put themselves on a course that would leave them vulnerable in a modern urban world that wanted a more activist state than their inherited beliefs would permit."

Under leader Gil Molgat the Liberals did project a moderate image in the sixties. After by-election defeats in February 1969 Molgat resigned and was replaced by Robert Bend, a man who hailed from the coalition days, and who described himself as 'a little more right of centre'.

Although the provincial party leaned right there were many small 'l' liberals in the province (many had voted for Pierre Trudeau the year before). For them Ed Schreyer was an attractive commodity. The Liberal convention that chose Bend preceded the NDP convention by a few weeks. However, the name of everyone's lips at that convention was not Bend or his opponents. It was Ed Schreyer.

3. The PCs also shifted to the right. When they selected Walter Weir to replace the urban and reform minded Duff Roblin it represented a significant ideological shift within the PC universe. More progressive candidates were defeated at the leadership convention that chose Weir.

With an echo of today's Ford-Trudeau relationship, media accounts at the time suggested Weir had successfully confronted ideological adversary Pierre Trudeau in February at a federal-provincial conference. Shortly thereafter his party won three of four by-elections. He also made it clear that French language rights would be a low priority for him. The PCs subsequently tested the waters with a private poll, the only political poll of any kind taken in 1969 in Manitoba. Thinking they would catch their leaderless opponents off guard, they called an early election.

4. Luck mattered. Something that should never be underestimated in politics. While three of the four February by-elections were won by the Weir PCs, the fourth in Churchill was won by the NDP's Joe Borowski. Key to the June 25 victory were the three wins in the northern seats of The Pas, Flin Flon and Thompson (a new constituency in 1969 won by Borowski). I think the by-election win had a demonstration effect that encouraged voters in the other two northern ridings to view the prospects of the NDP as a realistic alternative in electoral contests at a point where they were ready to vote for change.

The leadership contest the NDP were forced to call in the middle of the campaign received extensive television coverage, granting free media to a party that could not afford to buy time on TV. The northern seats have been dominated by the NDP ever since.

5. Ethnic diversity in Manitoba in 1969 was quite different from diversity and politics as it is thought of today in much of Canada. Ethnic political strategy in the current environment is conceived of as appealing for votes among relatively recent immigrants. In 1969 the NDP made significant gains among Manitobans of Indigenous and Francophone descent, although the latter continued to exhibit residual loyalty to the Liberals. Other minorities from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds were composed mostly of a population that had immigrated to Manitoba prior to World War I more than fifty years in the past in 1969. Initially Liberal and Conservative politicians were highly successful in recruiting leaders in ethnic communities and, by granting recognition and status to them, they were able to secure electoral support. However, by the sixties as Thomas Peterson noted the "second and third generations of non-British immigrants became less susceptible to ethnic appeals. Among this younger group, in contrast to the 'hesitant conservatism' of their elders, there was a greater drive toward improvement of their material circumstances as well as a skepticism that this could be achieved within the existing system." [This is drawn from an article by Thomas Peterson titled Ethnic and Class Politics in Manitoba]. CCF-NDP leaders had always been from British backgrounds. The selection of Schreyer as a leader signalled that the NDP was a party that could be trusted by minorities whose class status inclined them to support social democratic reforms. Increasingly, they were less interested in questions of ethnic status.

6. Mistakes by the governing PCs mattered. An increase in health care premiums just prior to the campaign became a major election issue. Manitoba joined the national medicare program on April 1, 1969, nine months after the federal implementation date of July 1, 1968. Prior to that Manitobans paid health care premiums to help finance the already existing hospitalization program, introduced in the late fifties. As a political gambit, the Weir government created a premium 'holiday' for the period leading up to medicare implementation. However, when premiums returned with the introduction of medicare they were dramatically increased. The unpopularity of this move made slashing premiums a key election plank for the NDP.

Following the election, the NDP secured a governing majority when re-elected Liberal, Laurent Desjardins, supported the NDP. Weir's hostility to French language rights compared to Schreyer's support for bilingualism made the difference.

The new government called an early session and adopted the outgoing government's budget with two key changes, the premiums were cut, and personal income tax rates were increased to pay for the change. It was the first of a series of fiscal changes that led to a more progressive tax structure in Manitoba by the time the NDP left office in 1977.

----------------

The election represented a fundamental departure in the province's history, what political scientists would call a re-aligning election. Its consequences for Manitoba's politics are still clearly discernible today.