Toronto Danforth. again

Looking at the final results of yesterday's by-election:

• Party   Candidate             vote   %     change from 2011
• NDP     Craig Scott          19,210 59.44% -10.025  -1.36 
• Liberal Grant Gordon          9,215 28.51%    +743 +10.89 
• Cons    Andrew Keyes          1,736  5.37%  -5,149  -8.95 
• Green   Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu 1,517  4.69%  -1,590  -1.77
• 6 other candidates              640  1.98%    +253  +1.18

Average vote for 2004 - 2011 elections

• NDP     24042  50.14%
• Liberal 14717  30.69%
• Cons     5035  10.50%
• Green    3815   7.96%
• Others    339   0.71%

As you can see from the four elections that Jack Layton won, these also being the four since the creation of the Conservative party, the only party that did better in the by-election than their average, that being the NDP.

The election was also not a good from the Conservatives.   The 5.37% of the vote puts the party into fringe party status in this riding.    I think that a lot of Conservatives simply stayed home because of the robocall stuff.

The Greens also had a bad election.   They had the only repeat candidate from the 2011 election and their percentage of the vote went down again.  In 2008 the party managed to get a high enough vote here to get their expenses rebated.   The bad result for the Greens is an ongoing example of how weak the party structure is.  It has declined a long way from the hard work done by Jim Harris in 2004 and 2006 to build a party on the ground.

For the Liberals this by-election has to be a concern.   The party did better than in 2011, but not nearly enough to make this riding a competitive race in the next election.   Given that this was the riding Jack Layton ran in and his personal popularity, I did not expect the NDP vote to hold as a percentage anywhere close to the 2011 results.   This area of Toronto was also represented by Bob Rae federally when he was an NDP MP.

With a new leader in Ottawa, the NDP will have a lot more visibility and media coverage on the issues of the day.  I have no sense if there is anyone there that is seriously considering running for the Liberal leadership, the one name I hear is Bob Rae, but he agreed that by becoming interim leader he would not run.