New MLAs

No matter what happened, there would be have to be six new MLAs after this election because of the new seats. In total we have 23 new MLAs elected in this election, 27% of the total of the legislature. There is a small potential in the recounts for this to rise to 25.

The Liberals have 17 new MLAs out of 49 elected, a bit more than one third of the total of the caucus. Six of the new MLAs are women. Being able to renew this many seats after two terms is an amazing accomplishment for the government. The government will look and feel different that it did in the last term. It also insulates the Liberals from too big a turn over in MLAs in 2013 if there has been a leadership change.

The NDP have a total of seven new MLAs out of a caucus of 36, about one fifth of the total. Given how many NDP MLAs were elected for the first time in 2005, it is not surprise that there were as many returning NDP MLAs. To see how the NDP affirmative action worked, one only need to note that five of the seven new NDP MLAs are women this time around.

Interestingly, the total of returning MLAs for the Liberals and the NDP is roughly the same, 32 Liberals and 29 New Democrats.

Liberals

• John Slater – Boundary Similkameen
• Don McRae – Liberal – Comox Valley
• Douglas Horne – Coquitlam Burke Mountain
• Terry Lake – Kamloops North Thompson
• Norm Letnick – Kelowna Lake Country
• Steve Thomson – Kelowna Mission
• Marc Dalton – Maple Ridge Mission
• Naomi Yamamoto – North Vancouver Lonsdale
• Jane Ann Thornthwaite – North Vancouver Seymour
• Pat Pimm – Peace River North
• Rob Howard – Richmond Centre
• Stephanie Cadieux – Surrey Panorama
• Margaret MacDiarmid – Vancouer Fairview
• Mary McNeil - Vancouver False Creek
• Kash Heed – Vancouver Fraserview
• Moira Stillwell – Vancouver Langara
• Ben Stewart – Westside Kelowna

NDP

• Kathy Corrigan - Burnaby Deer Lake
• Bill Routley - Cowichan Valley
• Michelle Mungall – Nelson Creston
• Dawn Black – New Westminster
• Lana Popham – Saanich South
• Doug Donaldson – Stikine
• Mable Elmore – Vancouver Kensington

50% did not vote

The people that did not vote are giving their tacit support for the current government. Not expressing an opinion means you are comfortable with the status quo.

By this reckoning, about 73% of eligible voters in BC are happy to have Campbell as premier.

How could the election have looked if we had BC STV?

This is only a guess, people are realistically going to have voted differently if we had STV.

Burnaby New Westminster - Liberal 2 NDP 3
Capital Region - Liberal 2, NDP 4 Greens 1
Cariboo Thompson - Liberal 3 NDP 2
Columbia Kootenay Liberal 2 NDP 2
Fraser Valley East Liberal 3 NDP 1 Conservative 1
Fraser Valley West Liberal 2 NDP 2
Mid Island - Liberal 2 NDP 2
North Central - Liberal 2 NDP 1
North Island South Coast - Liberal 2 NDP 2
North Shore Sea to Sky - Liberal 3 NDP 1
Northeast Liberal 1 Ind 1
Northwest Liberal 1 NDP 2
Okanagan Boundary Liberal 2 Conservative 1
Okanagan Shuswap Liberal 2 NDP 1 Green 1
Richmond Delta Liberal 3 NDP 1 Ind 1
Surrey North Liberal 1 NDP 3
Surrey South Liberal 2 NDP 2
Tri-Cities Liberal 2 NDP 2
Vancouver East Liberal 2 NDP 3
Vancouver West Liberal 3 NDP 2 Green 1

Totals

• Liberals 42
• NDP 36
• Greens 3
• Conservative 2
• Ind 2

Women Elected on May 12th

A total of 22 women were elected on Tuesday, just short of 26% of the legislature. In 2005 that was 17 women out of 79 MLAs - 21.5%. 2001 saw 19 women elected, 17 Liberals and 2 New Democrats, 24% of the total.

The NDP was pilloried for their affirmative action process for women getting nominations, but the party had to do something after only electing seven women in 2005, 21% of the caucus. This time they elected 11 women as part of a 36 member caucus, or close to 31% of the total.

In 2005 the Liberals elected 10 women as MLAs, about 22% of the 2005 caucus. The Liberals elected 11 women out of 49 MLAs elected in this election - 22% of the caucus.

The two recounts, Delta South and Carbiboo Chilcotin, will change the gender balance in the legislature if the results change.

What will the missing voters do in future elections?

There should have been about 1 850 000 votes cast in the BC election, instead it was only 1 542 000, that is more than 300 000 fewer people that there should have been voting.

The Liberals are short about 140 000 supporters and the NDP is short about 120 000. Will these people come back in 2013?

The impact of these 260 000 people that have supported the NDP or Liberals and chose not to vote in this election are a huge number. This is more than 3000 votes per riding.

I am trying to figure out how to account for these people in any calculation of an election result for 2013, do I assign more of the support of the parties to the ridings they lost this time? Will these people vote next time?

My current take on things is that the Liberals had a large number of soft supporters stay home because the Liberals under Campbell have moved much too far too the left. If I were to estimate what would happen with that 140 000 people, I can see half of them voting Conservative next time.

My estimate is that the NDP lost a lot of green supporters in this election, people that stayed home and did not vote because the NDP had a very weak and unclear approach to environmental issues. What will these people do in 2013? Will they vote NDP? Not vote again? I have trouble assessing what might happen.

The effect of these 120 000 NDP supporters that did not vote is a bigger impact on the NDP than any vote drain to the Greens - after four elections of the Greens running full slates, the NDP should accept the fact there is a core of people in BC that will not vote NDP but Green. The 120 000 non-voting New Democrats are the single most important group for the party to find and bring back in.

In 2001 the NDP lost more people to not voting that people crossing to the Liberals. The Liberals gained the most in that election from non-voters. In 2005 the NDP did the best in gaining back non-voters from 2001, this had twice the effect than people who voted Liberal in 2001 voting NDP in 2005. Werner Antweiler at the UBC Sauder School of Business has done some interesting work on this.

Looking at the low turn out, it is I think a coincidence that the Liberals and NDP had almost the same levels of bleed of supporters this time. If 1/3 of the Liberals had chosen to vote instead of staying home, the popular vote would have been 47.7% Liberal and 40.9% NDP.

In my assumptions on the election I assumed that turn out would close to 60%. I had built in some assumptions on the level of the NDP support in the election and the raw numbers were close to where they ended, I simply missed the fact that as many people would be staying home on the Liberal side.

So where did the Green voters go? I had expected about 180 000 people to have voted Green, not 124 798 as did. There are some 55 000 Green voters missing. I have no idea what happened to them or where they went. I really have no idea what happened to them. Do you know where the lost 55 000 Green voters are? If they all went to the NDP, then the NDP has a very serious problem because that would indicate their core vote is more like 39% and not 42%.

The best thing any party can do between now and 2013 is to engage the public and get them back to the polls. Time to have fun, do things between elections that are not just politics, time to try something different.

I think a strong positive approach to party building for the next three years could reap huge benefits to anyone that embarked on it. Build a strong grassroots postive time now, not in three and half years.

The Socreds were good at this, the Liberals have been weak with this. The Greens really need to build a big membership, much, much bigger than it has had up until now. The NDP has to make themselves fun and cool, they have to show hope and a clear vision.

Parties also need to focus on building their youth element, get someone in their teens and they will tend to stay with you for decades. Make it fun and they and their friends will come out and get involved.

Engage the public in a positive manner and I believe they will come back to vote in the future.

Boundary Similkameen - the only three way race since 1996, is it the future?

In this election Boundary Similkameen was the closest thing to a three way race in this election. Even then the Conservative was a distant third.

• John Slater Liberal - 6439 - 37.58%
• Lakhvinder Jhaj MDP - 5626 - 32.84%
• Joe Cardoso Conservative - 3456 - 20.17%
• Bob Grieve Green - 1612 - 9.41%

In 1991 and 1996 there were numerous three way races for ridings.

There were also numerous ones in 1972. There is a pattern here, tight three way races help the NDP win seats.

NDP popular vote 1969 to 2009 with majorities in bold

• 1969 - 33.92%
• 1972 - 39.59%
• 1975 - 39.16%
• 1979 - 45.99%
• 1983 - 44.94%
• 1986 - 42.60%
• 1991 - 40.71%
• 1996 - 39.45%
• 2001 - 21.56%
• 2005 - 41.52%
• 2009 - 42.03%

Carole James managed to do better in percentage of the vote than the NDP did in 1972, 1991 and 1996 when they won government.

If there is a very serious Conservative party in 2013 that can take 15% to 20% of the vote province wide, the NDP is likely to win a majority government.

Yes, I was wrong on the election - I can admit it

All I can say is that working from the data I had is why ended up where I did. ARS seemed to get the mood right and that this mood was in place from before the election started.

The low voter turn out really caught me off guard, it is where most of the error seems to come into it. As I pointed out several times, I had some major issues with the turn out numbers the pollsters were suggesting. In averaging them all and using the weighting I did, I ended up too high for the Liberals, way too low for the NDP and too high for the Greens. I was close on the Others.

I did make a prediction based on the ARS numbers and came up with 46 Liberal, 38 NDP and 1 Ind. So when I have the right data, I can come close, not that I was trusting their numbers.

In the last two days before the election I was doing some modeling that boosted incumbency and it gave me ranges of results that seemed 'odd' given the data from the polling companies. I ultimately did not give this as much weight as I should have when I look at the election results. Incumbency was a very strong factor in this election.

All I can do now is fondly think about my glory days from predicting the 2001 election in April 1999 to within two seats. Ok on a riding by riding basis I was wrong on four in total, but not bad looking two years forward. Think of this para as a me dealing with my wounded ego.

You can get a lot of votes and still lose.

They way our electoral boundaries are set up leads to some odd results. In this election 39 candidates managed to get more than 10 000 votes, four of them lost. Those four people that lost were more popular that 50 of the people headed to Victoria as MLAs. For the record these popular losers were:

• Gary Holman - NDP Saanich North and the Islands - 12118
• Leslie MacNabb - NDP Comox Valley - 11593
• Jessica Van der Veen - NDP Oak Bay Gordon Head - 10736
• Robin Adair - Liberal Saanich South - 10728

Notice that they were all on Vancouver Island and three of them in the Victoria area. In fact 13 of the 14 island New Democrats broke 10 000 votes, province wide they only managed that 22 times. They also broke 10 000 votes in Powell River Sunshine Coast. The only riding they did not get 10 000 votes on the island was Parksville Qaulicum where they missed by less than 200 votes.

The Liberals also had five candidates with more than 10 000 votes on the island. They had 12 in the rest of province.

There were five ridings in BC were the total vote did not break 10 000 voters:

• Peace River South - 7138
• Stikine - 7961
• Nechako Lakes - 8381
• Peace River North - 8440
• North Coast - 8579

Three candidates managed to get over 14000 votes:

• Colin Hansen Liberal - 14920
• Rich Coleman Liberal - 14576
• Gordon Hogg - 14213

These candidates got close to twice the total vote in the lowest voting ridings in the province.

The top five ridings for total vote

• Saanich North and the Islands - 27647
• Comox Valley - 27307
• Parksville Qaulicum - 25771
• Oak Bay Gordon Head - 24154
• Cowichan Valley 24116

Several more Vancouver Island ridings are in the top ten. The vote in these ridings is much as three of the lowest vote ridings. This means a vote in Stikine is worth three times a vote is in Oak Bay Gordon Head.

Vancouver Island has too few MLAs for the number of people that are living here.

This concentration on the island is bad for the NDP, one quarter of their vote province wide was on the Island. The island only represents 16.5% of the seats. On the island the NDP averaged 11541 votes per riding, in the rest of the province it was 6830 votes per riding.

The Liberals got 16.2% of their vote on the Island and averaged 8180 per riding on the island. In the rest of BC the Liberals averaged 8358 votes per riding.

On the Island the NDP has an average 3200 vote advantage over the Liberals, in the rest of the province the Liberals are ahead by 1500 votes.

May 13th, more reviews of what happened

The Vote is Getting Entrenched:

In general, ridings became more strongly for one party or the other. There are fewer ridings where the two major parties are less than ten percentage points apart. Going into the election, 35 of the new seats were nominally won by less than 10%. This has been reduced to only 21 seats after the election with a margin of less than 10%

Going into the election, the Liberals held four seats with more than 60% and the NDP three. None were over 70%. After the election the Liberals won 9 with more than 60%, one over 70% and the NDP won 6 with over 60% and one over 70%. This is a shift from seven super safe seats to 16.

At the bottom end, things are also more extreme, in 2009 the NDP failed to reach 30% in 14 ridings and failed to reach 20% in three, the notional numbers going in were eight and one. The Liberals failed to reach 30% in seven, previously this was four. This is rise from 12 seats were one of the two major parties was a fringe element to 21 seats.

Think about, in almost one quarter of the ridings in BC there is no danger of a race in any normal situation.

Safe Seats

• Liberals - 37
• NDP - 27

Decline of Other Parties:

The 2005 results in the 2009 boundaries had the Greens with more than 10% in 21 ridings along with 4 other candidates. In this election only 12 Greens broke 10%. The Conservatives had six of their candidates break 10%, that is 1/4 of their total slate. Beyond Vicki Huntingdon in Delta South that came two votes short of winning, there was Arthur Hadland in Peace River North that took 32% of the vote.

If one were to factor in Vicki Huntingdon and Arthur Hadland into the Conservative vote, both of them are clearly to the right of the Liberals, this would boost the Conservatives to 44 753 or 2.91% of the vote province wide, which if there was a full slate would be close to 10% of the vote.

Dramatic drop in Voter Turnout:

For the first time in BC history, the total number of voters dropped from the last election. In 2005 1,762,450 people voted, this time the final total will around 1,550 000. This is a drop of over 200 000 voters. All the parties had trouble getting their vote out, I should rephrase that, all the parties failed horribly in getting their vote out.

The election was a boring one and there was much to turn voters off in the election. Given the increase in party strength in the ridings they won, the parties may simply been good at getting the vote out where they already looked like they could win and the other party supporters simply stayed home.

Close to 300 000 people voted in the advance polls, leaving only 1 250 000 people voting on election day.

Outlook to 2013:

If the Conservatives were to field a full slate, they should be able to take around 8-10% of the vote in 2013. Will this have an impact on the election? In my opinion less so than many other factors. I suspect that the Conservatives will not take that many votes from the Liberals, but will bring more people out to vote. As an example from this election, Boundary Similkameen had a strong Conservative candidate but also had a turnout of close to 60%. In Kootenay East Bill Bennett managed to retain his vote total in the election and Wilf Hanni took 10% of the total vote.

The Conservatives are not BC Reform in 1996, they have no seats they are holding at the moment that they will be defending in the next election

I suspect that we will not see a James v Campbell race again. I expect both leaders to step down.

Of the 20 ridings that will be considered "in play" after this election, 11 are held by the Liberals and 9 by the NDP. I am taking Delta South out of this mix because the NDP is not a factor there.

Baring things we can not know, the NDP is starting the 2013 election with 27 seats won and the Liberals with 37 seats won. The Liberals only need to win seven of the 21 closest ridings to win a working fourth majority government. You need to win the election 44 to 41 to have a working majority in the legislature, a 43 to 42 win means once the speaker is chosen the parties are tied. Conversely, the NDP has to win 17 of the 20 'in play' ridings. Keep in mind Delta South is 'in play' for the Liberals and not for the NDP.

Where this puts us is that the NDP could win the popular vote in 2013 and lose the election. My estimate is that the NDP would have to be ahead of the BC Liberals by about 3 percentage points to be in the range of winning a working majority.

BC Election - the Biggest Stories

1) Electoral Reform was resoundingly defeated and is now likely to be off of the political agenda for the next generation.

2) Voter turn out was REALLY low. Looks there will be fewer than 1.5 million voters this time, that means turn out of less than 50%

3) Angus Reid Strategies was right and all the other pollsters were wrong.

4) About 88% of the public voted for the top two parties, the highest seen since the 1986 election

5) The Greens did badly, dropping to just over 8%, clearly the environment was not an issue.

It looks like Angus Reid Strategies were right

I would love to see some analysis of why the other companies all differed from ARS so much, that they over estimated the Liberals and under estimated the NDP.

Impressions of the BC Election Returns at 9:20pm

Liberal Majority, though how many seats is not clear, looks like something close to 50 35.

STV is losing very badly at the moment.

Federal and Provincial Parties

I think it is a huge mistake for a party to fully and formally linked provincially and federally. Check out the problems the NDP are having as noted in Mike Smyth's column.

The interests of a federal party and provincial party are never going to be the same. The provincial wing of any party is never going to agree to the surrender of more provincial powers to the blackhole of Ottawa and federal parties seem incapable of scaling back the size of waste and overlap federally.

Charlie Demers on BC STV

Over 10% of registered voters voted in the advance poll

The total advance poll was 297 201 people out of 2 948 175 registered voters. Htat works out to 10.1% of the voters. This is a significant increase from the past, but there has been a lot more encouragement of people to advance vote, really it is almost like five days of voting now.

I have no idea if this is going to have any significant impact on the turn out on voting day. I suspect it is going to have limited or no impact.


Some observations:

Saanich South, this is supposed to be a tight race, but fewer people than average went to the advance poll here. Only 9% advance voted.

In Saanich North and the Islands the advance vote was 15.3% and this is in a riding that is not in play in this election. This was the second best turn out in the province, assuming I made no math errors. The top was Boundary Similkameen at 15.4%.

Turnout in the Burnaby and Tri-City ridings is all below average. I thought it would be higher in that area as this is the battleground. I can not be certain, but low advance in a tight race says to me that government will do better.

Some quit random notes on the election

In the Student Vote at Shoreline Middle School Maurine Karagianis of the NDP won with Jane Sterk of the Greens a close second. Liberal Carl Ratsoy can a distant third with only 17 votes - my son says the Liberals were hurt because no one from the party was there to answer questions. In the end he was one of the 17 Liberal voters because he could not vote for the NDP if they were going to so negative. They were his first choice. BC STV comfortably passed.

I will have a report from Esquimalt Secondary later today.

As to my prediction, I am changing it slightly, I am going with 55 Liberal and 30 NDP has a final number. I have about ten ridings that are really too close to call and I have bumped the incumbent holds.

I have made no prediction on the BC STV referendum because I do not want to think that it might lose. It would be a shame of we miss our chance to show all of Canada that there is a fairer and better way to elect our MLAs.

Another Prediction - Liberals 57 seats, NDP 28

This is not my prediction, but one by Eric Lanoix. Eric is much better with the math and the layout than I am.

His popular vote prediction:

• Liberals - 46.1%
• NDP - 38.8%
• Greens - 10.8%
• Others - 4.3%