Pundits' Guide

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Friday's ruling by Justice Thomas Lederer of the Ontario Superior Court declaring the May 2, 2011 results in Etobicoke Centre, ON null and void of course puts the riding into play, thereby presenting the different political parties with a very different set of risks. [first link opens PDF]

The one-time seat of such influential cabinet ministers as Progressive Conservative Finance Minister Michael Wilson and Liberal Justice and Health Minister Allan Rock, could now become the focus of a by-election, assuming first-time M.P. Ted Opitz and the Conservative Party decide to appeal defeated Liberal M.P. Borys Wrzesnewskyj's victory in getting the results of the third closest contest of last May's election overturned, as now seems likely.

Judge Lederer found that more ballots were called into question as the result of unsigned registration certificates from voters not already on the list of electors, and from undocumented vouching, than the 26 vote margin which resulted from last year's judicial recount in the seat; and on that basis he asserted that Canadians could not have confidence in the outcome of the election, in spite of the fact that all election officials and party representatives appeared to have conducted themselves with the best of intentions.

Riding History

Historically, the riding has never been anything but a two-way Liberal-Conservative race federally, the two traditional parties or their offshoots accounting for between 82.5% and 96% of the ballots cast in every election since at least 1988. The NDP has always run name-on-ballot candidates, rarely spending more than 5% of the limit, while the Greens have done the same since 2004; and a similar pattern is found provincially as well since at least 1999.

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More recently, while Etobicoke Centre was not ground zero for the so-called "Ford Nation" (Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's own ward as a city councillor was Ward 2 in Etobicoke North), its Wards 3 and 4 certainly formed part of the heartland of his support in the stunning Toronto mayoralty results of 2010.

UPDATE 1: See the excellent clarification on this point from the first reader comment below.

Given this pattern of voting behaviour, one might be tempted to view the seat as one of the few potentially viable targets for a Nathan Cullen-style "cooperation plan" between the so-called "progressive parties" should a by-election indeed be required. But before latching on to such an electoral shortcut too hastily, a quick review of the last overturned election result reminds us how quickly things can change.

Sidebar on York North

In the 1988 "Free Trade" election, first-time Conservative candidate Michael O'Brien was declared the winner on election night in the then-open seat of York North, but an initial recount reversed the result in first-time Liberal candidate Maurizio Bevilacqua's favour, after which a judicial recount re-installed Michael O'Brien with a margin of 99 votes. Even though O'Brien was subsequently sworn in as a Member of Parliament, Bevilacqua appealed the recount and was therefore declared the winner by 77 votes. Finally O'Brien filed an "election petition", after which the number of irregularities was found to have exceeded the 77 vote margin and a new election was ordered. (See note 185 in Marleau & Montpetit here.)

Here's how the York North results changed from the 1988 general election to the 1990 by-election and on to 1993:

Raw Vote and Vote-Share by Party, 1988 GE, 1990 By & 1993 GE, York North, ON

So, the Liberals and PCs were even-steven in 1988, but by the time the by-election rolled around the Tories had dropped to 3rd place behind an unusually strong NDP candidate (in the wake of the 1990 Ontario NDP provincial victory and in the depths of the Mulroney government's second-term unpopularity). 1993 went on to be a rout for Bevilacqua and the Liberals.

Vote-Shifts in Etobicoke Centre from 1988 to 2011

So, we can see the risks of going to a by-election in a narrowly won seat in the midst of a government rolling out the toughest parts of its agenda. This is clearly one of the considerations facing the Conservative Party in any decisions about appealing Justice Lederer's ruling to the Supreme Court, and to the extent that voter identification is said to be going on already in the riding of Etobicoke Centre, if it's not a media organization trying to break a quick story with an IVR poll, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the calls were being made by the Conservatives themselves to quickly gather some data to help with that decision-making.

UPDATE 2: According to a tweet, but nowhere else on the Internet yet that I know of, Forum Research (which does IVR polling) has the Liberals 10 points ahead in Etobicoke Centre. It seems unlikely that candidate names were used in the question, when not everyone would be known yet, so I'd take that as a measure of party preference more than anything else.

While we know the past doesn't always predict the future, understanding a riding's history can sometimes help rule out some less plausible hypotheses, so let's turn to the vote swings in the three incarnations of Etobicoke Centre since 1988.

[Note that 1988 and 1993 were fought on the 1987 representation order boundaries; to which were added a bit of Etobicoke North while another chunk was lost to Etobicoke Lakeshore in the 1996 representation order covering the 1997 and 2000 elections; followed by a further small annexation from Etobicoke North in the 2003 representation order which was in effect from 2004 through 2011. This means that exact numbers of raw votes are not directly comparable between 1993 and 1997, nor between 2000 and 2004.]

Raw Vote and Deltas by Party, 1988 GE – 2011 GE, Etobicoke Centre, ON

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Because turnout played an important role in at least two recent junctures here, I've plotted the results using raw vote, and showing the number of Non-Voters (NV) in purple (NV = Electors – Total_Ballots).

You can see that after Michael Wilson's last election in 1988, the combined conservative vote (Ref + PC; shown in the broken blue line) dropped by about 4,700 votes in 1993 while the NDP shed another 3,800 votes or so, as Allan Rock picked up some 5,400 of those 8,500 loose voters, with the other 3,100 either staying home (2,900) or supporting one of the smaller parties.

Rock maintained his lead over the combined conservative parties in 1997 and 2000, as they traded places a few times and the NDP staged the first leg of its comeback.

In the first election waged against the newly reunited Conservative Party in 2004, new Liberal candidate Borys Wrzesnewskyj grew both the party's raw vote, and its lead over his single Conservative opponent, while meanwhile the NDP staged the second leg of its comeback under newly-elected leader Jack Layton. Note here that the Liberals, NDP and Green Party all grew their vote at the same time, while the Conservatives fell back, and turnout increased by around 5,000 voters.

2006 saw most parties in a holding pattern, but the Conservatives making big gains out of the ranks of previous Non-Voters (note the left-most oval on the line chart above), returning to nearly the combined tally of their ancestor parties from three elections earlier.

By contrast, the story of 2008 was the "Liberals who stayed home", shown in the near exchange between the Liberal red and Non-Voting purple lines in the right-most circle, while the Conservatives this time held their ground, and the NDP and Greens exchanged a few votes between themselves.

This brings us to the quandary of what happened in 2011 in various parts of Greater Toronto, a matter of some debate in the literature, and something I'm looking forward to hearing about more definitively when the Canadian Election Study data is released at this June's Canadian Political Science Association meeting in Edmonton.

There are two main hypotheses, both of which are accepted as true in the popular press, but which seem to be mutually contradictory given the above set of numbers. Either:

1. the "blue Liberals" fled to the Conservatives (implying that hikes in the NDP vote came from out of the 2008 Green vote and the ranks of 2008 Non-Voters), OR
2. the hike in the NDP vote came from out of the Liberals and Greens, thus "splitting the progressive vote", but also meaning that the clearly observable Conservative gains must have come from out of the ranks of previous non-voters (perhaps the Liberals who stayed home in 2008 in that case)

Perhaps the resolution to this contradiction is that hypothesis (i) held true in the kinds of seats the Conservatives wound up taking decisively from the Liberals, while hypothesis (ii) was found more often in closer fights. Certainly there were many seats around Toronto in 2011 where the Conservatives gained more votes than the Liberals lost, meaning that "vote splits" were not the final culprit in the seat actually changing hands, but that doesn't mean some switching didn't happen between the Liberals and NDP either.

But even in that case, Etobicoke Centre was one of the 11 seats in Greater Toronto where the Liberals lost slightly more votes (2,919) than the Conservatives gained (2,805) – though only very very slightly. The magnitudes of the various parties' vote shifts mean that either of the above hypotheses is plausible here: a strategic conundrum for the parties to also consider as they plot their next steps in the riding.

Risk Assessment for the Four Parties Going Forward

The Conservatives need to figure out which trend is their friend in this case. Is it that they should avail themselves of some of the best election lawyering in the country to appeal the case and try to keep the seat for fear the national polling trends (and even Rob Ford is having some troubles holding onto Ford Nation these days too) could see them underperform in a do-over, as happened in York North. Or should they rely instead on the finding that defeated Liberal incumbents can rarely stage comebacks these days, and try to bank on a better split.

A risk for the party in pursuing the appeal is that it will further commit them to the position taken by Mr. Opitz's legal counsel before the Ontario Superior Court that it is not necessary for every procedural detail of the Elections Act to be followed in order to have a vote counted. This is the exact opposite of the strategy being pursued by the Republican Party south of the border, where very strict voting rules are being promulgated in Republican-controlled states apparently in order to curtail voting by certain groups and in areas less favourably disposed to their party.

Still a seat in the hand is worth two in the bush, so unless the Conservatives have or quickly obtain opinion research showing that the provincial deterioration in federal Liberal support would give them a much stronger shot at winning the riding (in which case I would call a by-election almost immediately in the PM's shoes to catch the other folks off-guard), I suspect we'll probably see an appeal.

For the Liberals, a by-election here would be either their time to shine in an old-school pure two-way Liberal-Conservative contest – the kind they love, and want to recreate in as many other places as possible – or another quantifiable measurement of their reduced status on the federal scene. The party will also likely try to have some fun at the expense of the NDP and its new role as the official opposition, or by stirring up a little trouble over the now-discarded Cullen Plan.

It would seem unimaginable for the Liberals not to renominate Wrzesnewskyj as their candidate, given his enormous personal (and indeed financial) commitment to seeing the legal case through to this point. Although, looking back to the York North parallel, it's interesting to note that Maria Minna unsuccessfully challenged Maurizio Bevilacqua for the Liberal nomination in the 1990 by-election.

On the other hand, Wrzesnewskyj has been offside with the party leadership before, is an advocate of party reform, and was even talked about as a possible leadership contender (though I think that story was subsequently denied – perhaps a reader in the know could fill us in, in the comment section). A party about to enter a leadership contest has to be very careful about the conduct of by-elections during that period, as we've seen elsewhere.

As to the NDP, they really cannot win this seat unless newly-elected leader Thomas Mulcair has some really game-changing candidate recruitment tricks up his sleeve this early in his tenure that we don't know about. Even if they were trying to form a majority government, I doubt this seat would be in the Next 70 or 85, or even in a 338-seat strategy it would almost certainly be in the "Last 50".

Still, they will have to play the expectations game carefully. A competent campaign with a credible candidate that shows growth, say, at the expense of the Conservatives as well as the Liberals would be a plus for them, while a sloppy afterthought of a campaign that saw them fall behind the Greens and miss an opportunity to experiment with new issues, language and target groups would be a minus. It's not surprising to see the "Toronto-area Conservative strategist" speculating on NDP gains in the seat to Postmedia's Stephen Maher in this light, since if you may have to take a hit, it's only smart to make sure someone else is at risk for one at the same time.

Finally, the Greens now have to consider the next steps in their party's strategy. By-elections can be ideal openings for parties following beach-head strategies, but again the party is also at risk of seeing its shrinking national profile (as compared with that of its leader Elizabeth May) quantified in a poor result – in a seat that is not likely its ideal profile either. Not that there is any shortage of environmental issues to run on these days, but it's less clear to me that they would play vote-determining roles in a riding such as Etobicoke Centre.

One cheap and easy out for the party would be to decline to run against Wrzesnewskyj in a Cullen-esque cooperative gesture (much as they decided to do in Cumberland-Colchester against Bill Casey in 2008 after their previous candidate there stepped down), and then dare the NDP to follow suit. No cost, no risks associated with a poor showing, a story the media loves-loves-loves to cover, and a bit of grief for the party that probably ate their lunch there in 2011. It's almost a gimme.

In Conclusion

In the absence of the constant election scares of minority parliaments, the occasional by-election offers one opportunity to quantify the parties' relative standings, albeit in particular ridings that may not be representative of the overall national picture at all.

The Conservatives clearly have much more to lose here than in the Toronto-Danforth by-election earlier this spring, even though their performance there was one of their worst outings ever since reforming as a party in 2004, but all the parties have some strategic risks to manage around the likely do-over of the election in Etobicoke Centre.

What I haven't discussed here is the ruling itself, and what it says about two significant changes made to the Elections Act since 1988, but hopefully I can find the time to write about that next.

[Thanks to Chris Carter of the CBC for taking the time to post the entire ruling to documentcloud.org.]

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You can almost never go home again; not if your home is the House of Commons at least. In fact, defeated MPs can rarely reprise their winning vote-shares in subsequent comeback attempts, raising the question of whether their losing vote-share can really be considered a party baseline for next time around. Seat projectors beware.

Of 33 Members of Parliament who were defeated and then attempted one or more immediate comebacks in the same riding over the past dozen years or so, only two [CXN: three] of them — John Duncan in Vancouver Island North, BC, Peggy Nash in Parkdale–High Park, ON and Françoise Boivin in Gatineau, QC — were able to be re-elected after their defeat, and in the latter case it took a change of party and two tries to do so.

Of the other 30, eight of them were able to remain within 2.5 percentage points or better of their vote share in defeat, while the other 22 experience an accelerated further drop in support when trying to stage a comeback.

Mind you, even at that, the former MPs usually did as well or better than their successors went on to do in the same ridings later on (dashed line segments in the chart below).

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This whole topic became of interest to me, given how many former Liberal MPs had been seeking the nomination in their former ridings during last year's federal election. At the time I wondered whether they would have some cachet at the ballot box to go along with their name recognition and experience as a candidate, or whether the fact of their defeat would put them at a disadvantage relative to what a new candidate might have been able to hope for, or whether again they would just rise or fall with the bigger cycles of changing party support. (I've charted the Liberal Party's national vote-share from 2004 – 2011 in black, by way of a benchmark.)

A few notes on the dataset collected for this experiment:

• It omitted former MPs who returned after a big break in their service. This would include folks like Ralph Goodale, Bob Rae (though he was never defeated federally) and Jack Harris who had become provincial party leaders in the meanwhile, or Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Rob Nicholson who had been defeated along with most of the Mulroney government caucus in 1993, but were re-elected in a different era with the Harper Conservatives over a decade later. Of those not successful in this category were names such as Jim Karpoff, Ian Waddell, Derek Wells, and Martin Cauchon.
• It also omitted former MPs who tried to run in a different riding, such as Gordon Earle, Peter Mancini, Svend Robinson, David Pratt, Paul Forseth and Paul Zed [thanks to a reader for that name as well!], for whom the vote shares would not have been comparable. Then there were a couple of long-ago former MPs who agreed to show the flag in different, completely no-hoper ridings as a service to the party, such as Ray Skelly or John Parry. And of course, Joe Clark came back to take the leadership of the PC Party running in a Calgary riding rather than his former seat of Yellowhead.
• [UPDATE:] It also omitted MP's whose defeat and rebirth pre-dated the 2003 representation order, which was the boundary I set for this exercise. However, one of those – Liberal M.P. Geoff Regan from Halifax West, NS – remains in the House of Commons today. Thanks to another reader for reminding me to mention him.

Amongst the 33 former MPs included in the study, a few did not completely match the observed pattern (lines are shown in bold), or had some interesting sidenotes:

• As mentioned, former Gatineau, QC Liberal M.P. Françoise Boivin staged two comeback attempts as a New Democrat, the first one suffering in all likelihood from a belief that she was not the better tactical choice to defeat the Bloc incumbent, while the second was clearly the beneficiary of an extra burst of wind in her sails from the orange wave.
• Parkdale–High Park, ON NDP M.P. Peggy Nash achieved a higher vote-share in her comeback attempt than she did in her previous winning election.
• Former Regina–Qu'Appelle, SK NDP M.P. Lorne Nystrom had already been successful in an earlier comeback bid, when he switched ridings after being defeated in Yorkton–Melville, SK.
• Former Haldimand–Norfolk, ON Liberal M.P. Bob Speller tried two comebacks, in 2006 and 2011, but he skipped the 2008 general election. Including Eric Hoskins, the 2008 candidate in that riding, the Liberal vote-share showed a straight decline over the entire time period. Susan Whelan also showed a further decline on her second comeback attempt in Essex, ON, though the Liberal party vote tanked much further after her departure.
• Former Saskatoon–Rosetown–Biggar, SK NDP M.P. Dennis Gruending actually won a higher vote-share on the occasion of his defeat than he had when winning the earlier by-election, but never varied outside a band of about 5 percentage points in that very competitive riding.
• Conservative M.P. John Duncan did him one better (not shown on the chart yet, as I'm updating remotely; chart now updated as well), by increasing his vote share through both a defeat and subsequent comeback in Vancouver Island North!
• On the other hand, both former Conservative M.P. Fabian Manning in Avalon, NL and former Liberal M.P. Denis Paradis were able to improve on their losing vote-shares, though in Paradis' case it fell apart for him again on his next comeback attempt.
• While successors generally failed to hold the former MPs' vote-shares, to a greater or lesser extent, in a couple of cases they improved on it — slightly in the case of Dennis Gruending's sister-in-law Nettie Wiebe in Saskatoon–Rosetown–Biggar, SK, or by over 50% in the case of Hélène Scherrer's replacement in Louis-Hébert, QC, the businessman Jean Beaupré.

So, what does this all mean? Are we saying that new candidates might have fared better than returning defeated candidates? Well, we'll have to draw a second sample of ridings lost by the party where they picked a different candidate next time out, and compare the outcomes to be sure of the answer there. The situation is further complicated by the fact that most of the cases found here were former Liberal MPs in a time of general decline for their party's fortunes.

But the major point I want to make — which I hope is made sufficiently clear from this dataset — is that, when it comes to seat projections or other calculations for example for pre-electoral coalition negotiations or so-called strategic voting recommendations, the baseline party vote in a riding just lost by that party should be considered to start out in most cases considerably *below* where it finished up at the time the MP was defeated.

For example, John Cannis was defeated as the Liberal M.P. in Scarborough Centre, ON last May. Even if he were the candidate again in 2015, and if past trends hold in the future, we should not expect the Liberal base vote in that riding to be starting at the 31.7% he got last May. Particularly not if the NDP, as we might expect, would be planning to recruit a strong candidate early, and run a full campaign in 2015 (as opposed to the 13% of the limit they spent in 2011). Part of the Cannis 31.7% would have been his incumbency value, and the value of the Liberals having been seen as the likely alternative party. And, as we've seen, that incumbency value doesn't carry forward to comeback efforts. Not to mention that the value of "incumbency" itself could come into question on redistributed riding boundaries.

Indeed in many of the ridings where Liberal incumbents were defeated in 2008, the NDP had already moved into second place last May, such as Saint John, NB, Fredericton, NB, Miramichi, NB, Brant, ON, London West, ON [CXN: a very very close third in this one; thanks to a reader for pointing out my boo-boo], Huron–Bruce, ON, Kenora, ON, Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River, SK and West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky Country, BC.

Thus I expect we'll see the NDP making early moves to consolidate their position as the presumptive alternative party in a number of ridings where Liberal incumbents were defeated in 2011, including the successor riding to Scarborough Centre, but also successors to the Moncton area seat, Madawaska–Restigouche, NB, Bramalea–Gore-Malton, ON, Winnipeg South Centre, MB, Vancouver South, BC, Yukon, and perhaps even some new targets in Peel Region of Ontario such as Mississauga East-Cooksville or Brampton Springdale.

We've seen the pattern whereby seat projection methodologies can tend to overpredict seats for parties in decline. Anyone making seat projections now (to what purpose, we might ask, but that ship sailed long ago) would do well to discount party base votes in seats they lost in the last election, by an appropriate factor.

Next time we'll take a general look at seats lost by the various parties, as part of a series of blogposts leading up to the first anniversary of the May 2nd election, and the release of the first Canadian Election Study reports at the Canadian Political Science Association meeting in Edmonton this June.

In the meanwhile, did I miss any former MPs who tried a return to office recently? If so, let us know in the comments section.

Vote Shares of Defeated Incumbents Returning in the Same Riding, Last Elected 1999 By-election or later

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Nathan Cullen narrowly won all of the real-time voting he appeared on during last weekend's NDP leadership contest, but his rival Thomas Mulcair's victory was already a foregone conclusion by the time the convention started, detailed vote breakdowns show.

Unfortunately for Cullen, the convention-day round-by-round voting never accounted for more than 17.5% of the total ballots counted, and he had too big a gap to catch Mulcair in the preferential ballots cast in advance.

Brian Topp and Mulcair dominated the mail-in ballot segment of the advanced voting, while the other candidates showed better in the online preferential voting that concluded on the eve of the Toronto convention, including a notably better vote-share for Martin Singh.

First Ballot

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First Ballot Results by Voting Method, NDP Leadership Contest, March 24, 2012

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The same pattern repeated itself across subsequent ballots.

Second Ballot

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Second Ballot Results by Voting Method, NDP Leadership Contest, March 24, 2012

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Third Ballot

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Third Ballot Results by Voting Method, NDP Leadership Contest, March 24, 2012

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Fourth Ballot

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Fourth Ballot Results by Voting Method, NDP Leadership Contest, March 24, 2012

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Growth Between Ballots

When it came to winning over the preferences of advance voters, or down-ballot support on voting day, Mulcair was the overwhelming second choice of Saganash, Ashton, Singh and Dewar supporters after the first ballot, while on the next ballot Topp proved somewhat better than Mulcair in winning the second choices of Nash supporters.

By the final ballot, Mulcair edged ahead of Topp in second-choices of Cullen supporters (45% vs. 39%, vs. 16% who had no remaining preference on the ballot, and whose votes were thus "unassigned"). To win, however, Topp either needed over 80% of the previous Cullen supporters (excluding the unassigned), or else he needed new voters who had missed the earlier ballots that day to cast a vote for him on the fourth ballot. It was a tall mountain to climb, though given that the 4th ballot started at supper-time in the BC time-zone, it was at least worth a try.

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NDP Leadership Contest Results by Candidate and Ballot, March 24, 2012

The Value of Various Predictors

We noted a few months ago that in 2003 the cumulative share of fundraising by the various NDP Leadership contestants had predicted their vote share on the first ballot to within 1.5 percentage points.

With that in mind, and now that the last of the four weekly sets of financial disclosure reports have been filed, how did the various possible predictors measure up?

We looked at the cumulative share of fundraising, the cumulative share of the number of contributions, along with the last weekly shares of both. Let's see how they wound up.

First Ballot Vote Share as Against Hypothesized Predictors, NDP Leadership Contest, March 24, 2012

None of the four hypothesized predictors fared as well as 2003, with only the cumulative share of fundraising even getting the order right. Still, fundraising appears to have been somewhat more reliable than endorsement point-counting schemes, or social media traffic (the latter in spite of the complete dumb-foundedness in some quarters that the world can't somehow be changed merely by sitting in front of a computer screen and watching the Twitter ticker scroll by).

Perhaps what the table shows us is the impact of Ed Broadbent's bombshell in the final week of the campaign, which seems to have had the effect of polarizing the choice back between Mulcair and Topp.

But if any candidate could really be said to have had a surge in the last week of the campaign, it must surely have been Mulcair himself, who outlasted and outwaited all his squabbling opponents. His first ballot vote-share exceeded that predicted by his fundraising to the tune of six full percentage points, as Nash wilted and Dewar positively collapsed. And, as his win looked more and more inevitable over the course of subsequent ballots, the air came completely out of any putative efforts to "stop him".

In any event, here's what the final fundraising charts look like, starting with the cumulative fundraising:

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NDP Leadership Contestant Fundraising, by Weekly Report

Here are the weekly charts for fundraising totals and numbers of contributors:

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And here are the charts showing the weekly shares of each:

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The origin of the term "red herring" to describe a diversionary tactic actually originates not with the British dog hunt, but in some political analysis that drew on its imagery.

Pundits have spent the better part of two days now chasing their tails; trying to divine the tactical imperative behind attacking Bob Rae on election day in the Toronto–Danforth by-election that the NDP was heavily favoured to win. Was it intended to muddy the waters on voting day in the by-election, toss a grenade into Liberal ranks just as they were about to lose a by-election in their interim leader's former riding in a campaign that had been in many ways more closely associated with Rae than his candidate, was it a misfire altogether, or do the Conservatives now view the Liberals as more of a threat than the NDP?

Lost in all the combing of entrails about the online ad recalling Mr. Rae's time as the NDP premier of Ontario was the coverage of two simple facts:

• At 5.3%, the Conservatives' share of the vote in Monday's Toronto–Danforth by-election was amongst the worst ever showings posted by that party since it was formed in 2004, and
• The gains posted by the Liberals in their vote-share in Danforth Monday came – not out of the NDP share – but at the expense of the Conservatives.

In fact, apart from 17 ridings in 2004, just after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, the Conservatives have only obtained a lower vote share on three occasions: Justin Trudeau's Papineau riding in Montréal in 2011, and Gilles Duceppe's old seat of Laurier Ste. Marie in 2008 and 2011.

Meanwhile, though they didn't quite return to 2008 levels, the Liberals posted a roughly 10-point gain in their vote share in Toronto–Danforth on Monday, and in fact raised their raw vote absolutely by just under a thousand votes. But earlier Liberal bleeding to the NDP there was already baked in the cake: the NDP maintained its 2011 vote share of roughly 60%, having gained from the Liberals in 2004, 2008 and 2011.

Not to overread the results of one by-election, but if anything it confirms the least reported aspect of recent national surveys as well: the Conservatives remain in the lead, but have come down significantly from their election high. That support will go different places depending on the province, but strategically the Conservatives cannot afford to have it migrate back to the Liberals in ridings where demographically they are the only alternative to the government, particularly not in the coveted and hard-won 905 area code seats around Toronto which handed them their majority.

Turnout in Toronto–Danforth Monday was actually pretty healthy by recent by-election standards, coming in at 43.4% — the top-end of the recent range of 20-40% over the last few decades. And while that's down from 65% in last May's general election in Danforth, it was higher than Fort McMurray–Athabaska posted last May, with another few ridings coming in only points higher then as well. So, while we ought to apply the prudent proviso that changes in vote-share should not be compared between cases of different turnout, it would be wrong to cast this by-election as well below the norm for turnout.

I don't fully buy the "blue Liberals" explanation about why the final election polls didn't predict the election outcome, but it certainly did account for the key vote shifts in the ridings located just outside Toronto. And if people were picking up concern about Bob Rae at the doorstep back then as a reason for that shift, it makes perfect sense for the Conservatives to raise the spectre of Rae's record again now.

The case at hand and the general pattern it suggests also raise questions about the strategic rationale for the so-called Cullen Plan of joint nominations. (Not that he intended it to apply to ridings not held by the Conservatives such as Toronto–Danforth, but no-one has successfully argued why voter migration patterns would be so different in those ridings than others.)

The question is this: if the presence of a Liberal candidate in a given riding could be counted on to cut into the Conservative vote, why would the NDP want to take them out of the mix? Across the prairies, one of the major reasons the Conservatives have consolidated their hold on a large number of ridings is because outside the few remaining Liberal incumbencies, the party's vote share had dropped to low single digits nearly everywhere. When the NDP last won prairie seats in any number, they had similar vote shares to the 2011 election, but could count on the Liberals taking a chunk out of what is now the Conservative vote there. Same goes for seats in the interior of B.C.

Taking the Liberals out of the equation could make for a higher gap for the NDP to make up in reaching the Conservatives if the government become unpopular again. If the Prime Minister has a continued strategic reason for wishing the demise of Bob Rae's new party, that's what it is.

Meanwhile, Cullen's plan would see the NDP abandon seats such as the 905 to the Liberals, but with no guarantee that the Liberal MPs thus elected would support an NDP minority or coalition government, rather than a Conservative one. For all the power of the "cooperation" mantra (and it's clearly significant at this moment amongst Cullen's very committed supporters), none of the plan's proponents have ever addressed that strategic point. Being from British Columbia, where the NDP wins government provincially only when the more right-leaning parties split the vote, one would think Cullen was acutely aware of the dynamic.

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We pretend that some magic dataset or formula is going to help us predict the outcome of a given electoral contest, but in fact no-one really knows which indicator will turn out to be right until after it's all over. Except for one.

We believe that where there's money, there's momentum.

But all we know for sure is that where there's momentum, and the stakes are high, the mud is sure to follow.

The Money and the Momentum

To the extent that money means momentum, Thomas Mulcair and Nathan Cullen still have it. As of the second-last fundraising report the candidates will have to file before voting day, Mulcair is well ahead of his closest financial rival, Brian Topp ($303K vs $239K), while Cullen had pulled ahead of both Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar ($208K for Cullen vs $196K and $188K respectively).

[Analysis of the earlier financial filings can be found here.]

[Click on image for full-sized version]

Martin Singh and Niki Ashton trail the pack at $68.3K and $45.8K respectively, though Singh has raised barely $1,500 since February 4, while Ashton's campaign has pulled in more than ten times that amount ($18.7K) during the same time frame.

Looking at changes over time, while Thomas Mulcair is showing continued growth and strength in fundraising over recent weeks, it's Nathan Cullen who has continued his last minute burst of momentum — not only in the amount his campaign is raising where he all but matched Mulcair in the week ending March 3, but also in the number of contributions where Cullen again bested Mulcair, albeit with a smaller average contribution size.

Anecdotally, at least two other campaigns claim to have broken the $300K barrier after the reporting deadlines, both Brian Topp's campaign (which issued a news release about that milestone earlier in the week) and more recently Nathan Cullen's as well.

Here are the details of the three separate financial reports:

Gross Fundraising and Number of Contributors*, as reported in Weekly Leadership Contest Financial Reports, by Leadership Candidate and Report, Part 2(b) Directed Contributions only

As well, I've updated the regional distribution documents (open PDFs), both by (a) province, and (b) postal region, though no particular changes in the regional patterns have occurred in the intervening two weeks.

Now to the timeline. Last time we looked at fundraising by month, but given that the new totals are coming in by week, maybe that's the better way to look at them this time around (except for the average contribution size chart, which is too herky-jerky to look at with weekly data).

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

With the exception of a few peaks and lulls associated with the change in the calendar year, the leadership campaigns have been raising a combined $50K a week or so once the contest got going, moving up towards $100K weekly in the last few weeks. But again, how those global weekly takes are distributed gives some clues about the changing field in the race.

If we treat the weekly fundraising performance of each campaign as a share of the weekly total, we see that to March 3, Cullen and Mulcair are each sitting at 35% of the weekly fundraising, with Topp, Nash and Dewar clustered back together betweenh 7% and 11%, and Ashton bringing up the rear at 2.6%.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

In terms of the campaigns' shares of the number of donations, Cullen garnered 42% or so of the contributions in the week ending March 3, to Mulcair's 32%, with the other three leading candidates much farther back at 7% to 8%, and Ashton at 2.3%.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

A couple of strategic points should be noted. First of all, to the extent weekly fundraising shares are a predictor of anything, Mulcair and Cullen's momentum has come largely at the expense of Peggy Nash. Given an assumption that the presumed party stalwarts might try to combine forces after the first ballot against a perceived centrist threat, if none of Topp, Nash or Dewar found their way into a strong second place finish on the first ballot, that combination would become orders of magnitude harder to achieve.

Secondly, and on the other hand, it was not in fact the weekly fundraising totals that predicted the 2003 outcome, but the cumulative ones. If that's the better indicator, why might that be? Well, for one thing, because late money is hard to spend well. It's too late to hire full-time organizers and put them to much effective use signing up members or lining up local endorsements, too late to invest in national mailings, or predictive dialling phone banks, or well-designed database systems, or to organize a full-on get-out-the-vote campaign. It will buy some robocalls and telephone town halls (the first advertise the second, no matter what any candidate says about running a "robocall-free campaign"), and it might cover a quick IVR survey, a bit more travel, and a better floor show at convention.

On the other hand, 2003 organizing was done before blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools that have dropped the cost of direct campaigning substantially in the meantime.

Thirdly, the reason we think money might predict the final outcome, and by implication why it might indicate momentum, is because the same kinds of ground organization are required to raise a lot of money from small donors, as are required to sell memberships, and then reach, persuade, identify, keep track of and pull your vote in a one-member-one-vote (OMOV) race.

Or are they? If you really have the wind in your sails (think back to the NDP in Québec last spring), a ground game is not necessary. In closer races, on the other hand, it certainly is.

In any event, looking at the overall shares does give a somewhat different picture than weekly shares, and it could thus help to explain the other major dynamic in the race on display this past week as well.

Cumulative NDP Leadership Candidate Gross Fundraising Shares to March 6, 2012, Part 2(b) Directed Contributions only

The Momentum and the Mudslinging

Tom Mulcair told me last summer that — long before any poll numbers arrived to confirm the orange wave in Quebec — they knew they must have been growing in the province, when the first reports arrived about the Bloc Québécois pulling down the NDP's signs in Joliette. Looking back, the early Bloc poaching of NDP candidates was probably a reliable signal as well.

Fast forward to the leadership race at hand, and I think we can say that while Nathan Cullen has late-day money momentum, no-one has really pulled out the stops to try and stop him in his tracks, and thus while that does give him "wildcard" status in my books, I also think it means he's not yet perceived as a true threat.

Instead, the target has been primarily Mulcair: first through anonymously sourced stories about his parallel negotiations with the Conservatives and NDP, then a completely anonymous website encouraging voters to "kNOw Mulcair" (featuring a series of rather stereotyped NDP positions that sound like they either came from an outsider or the classic "overzealous party youth member"), followed by a series of anonymous spoof Twitter accounts (which were mean but, let's be honest, in their meanness were not that much worse than the generally appalling tenor and sycophancy on the #NDPldr Twitter feed overall).

Predictably each of the attacks, being unable to kill the king, made him stronger – particularly in a notoriously contrarian party like the NDP.

So out came the big guns this past Thursday. Globe reporter Gloria Galloway told CTV Question Period on the weekend that Daniel Leblanc of their bureau called up Ed Broadbent to ask him the questions, who in turn said he expressed his concerns about Mr. Mulcair's candidacy "frankly, because I was asked". Many others have assumed that Mr. Broadbent was put up to it by Brian Topp's campaign, which the former party leader has supported from the beginning. Whatever the origin of the story, Broadbent did not hesitate to repeat those concerns to the Toronto Star, CP, the CBC and Postmedia in subsequent days. (h/t Aaron Wherry)

He told the Globe that many people in the party are “supporting Brian, who doesn’t have a seat, over Tom, the man they have worked with. I don’t think it’s accidental,” and then unrepentantly told Postmedia two days later that "I have never had a personal vendetta or something so trivial or banal against Tom. But I have strong convictions about the truth in politics and I dislike intensely when someone gets a bum rap or when someone else tries to take credit for what other people are doing".

Broadbent's intervention brought a voluble response from the party's first elected MP in Québec, Phil Edmondston, who averred in an interview with La Presse that a defeat of Tom Mulcair would represent une «insulte magistrale» for Québec (basically a "major insult"), and that Brian Topp (the only other candidate he saw as having a chance to win) did not have the charisma necessary for the job.

Read Tim Harper in the Star for a wrap of the strategic fallout.

Another highly recommended overview of the Leadership race for those just now tuning in is this post from TC Norris, and just about anything written by Greg Fingas ("the Jurist") at the Accidental Deliberations blog.

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For the latest on the NDP Leadership Race, don't forget to follow the half-hourly news updates, and social media tickers at the Pundits' Guide NDPLdr portal page:  http://ndpldr.punditsguide.ca

[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]

A closer look at monthly donation data in the NDP Leadership race suggests that Nathan Cullen's momentum may see him overtake Thomas Mulcair in the next week, if current trends prevail. More people gave money to Cullen than Dewar, Mulcair or Nash in the first 18 days of February, and he raised nearly as much money as the front-runner Mulcair over the same period.

The Headline News

Cullen's share of the Total Number of Contributions from the beginning of February to the filing of the last financial report (end of business on February 18) moved him ahead of Dewar and Mulcair (27% of all the contributions made vs. 19% for the other two) compared with January, while Mulcair remains ahead of Cullen in the share of Total Fundraising (26% of the total funds raised vs. 24%) over the same time period of time.

Of course, a new frontrunner means a new target, and a whole new level of scrutiny. If we've learned nothing else from the GOP primary season down south this year, it's that.

Unfortunately for Cullen's national prospects, however, the lion's share of that money (some 74.8% of it) is coming from BC. Still Cullen is not the only leadership candidate with a regional base of financial support as we'll see in a minute.

Over the course of the entire leadership race, Cullen's take still places him fifth, but his fundraising has been accelerating in recent weeks. Nevertheless, early favourite Brian Topp still remains in a strong second place. The next weekly report is due on Saturday.

The data for this analysis is contained in the detailed reporting of the leadership contestants' reports filed with Elections Canada on the weekend. The last of the donor geographical information was just posted late on Tuesday afternoon.

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The Fundraising Primer

First a primer on how financial data is reported in a leadership race, as opposed to the other donations data we're used to seeing (skip down if you are only interested in the bottom line).

1. Leadership candidates (or "leadership contestants" as they are called under the Elections Act) have to file a one-time Registration Report with Elections Canada, which gives various items of information, and includes a report of any contributions or loans made to the campaign *at the time of registration*.
2. Leadership candidates can technically accept contributions in one of two ways:
   1. Directly to their campaign (called "Direct contributions"), in which case the donation is not eligible for a federal political tax credit.
   2. Passed through the political party's national office (confusingly called "DirectED contributions"), in which case the donation is eligible for a tax credit, and the party may also retain a share of the funds. The NDP, in the rules it established for this leadership race, decreed that all contributions to leadership contestants must be passed through the party (except for "pass the hat" small contributions, which would be reported under (i) above), and it is keeping 15% of the directed contributions in order to cover the costs of running the leadership race.
3. All leadership contributions directed through the party are reportable by name. This is different from the case with direct contributions to a leadership contestant, which follow the same rules as for a party, riding association, election candidate or nomination contestant, whereby only contributors giving more than $200 in a reporting period are named. Of course, in both cases all the other information must be reported for named contributors as well, such as the date of the contribution, and the contributor's city, province and postal code.
4. Contributions made to a leadership contestant are reported in six different places:
   1. By the political party on Part 2(b) of its quarterly and annual financial returns. This is how we knew about the leadership contestants' fundraising performance (or the lion's share of it at least) up to December 31, 2011, because the party had to report the directed contributions in its third and fourth quarter returns of 2011. Note that the amount of directed contributions to leadership contestants is in addition to the fundraising reported by the party itself on Part 2(a), and is not included in its party fundraising totals. Also note that no direct contributions to leadership candidates would be seen here, such as "pass the hat" small contributions made prior to the end of 2011.
   2. By the leadership contestant on his or her "Registration Report" (see A above), if any to begin with. Nathan Cullen was the only candidate to report pre-registration fundraising, but all those contributions were subsequently reported elsewhere, as they occurred after the launch of the leadership contest.
   3. Cumulatively, by the leadership contestant on his or her first "Weekly Contributions Report", covering the period from the beginning of the contest to four weeks before the vote. These are the reports that started to show up on Saturday night, and which I analyze below. Direct contributions, including "pass the hat" small contributions, are reported on Part 2(a), while contributions directed through the political party are reported on Part 2(b) of these reports.
   4. Incrementally one week at a time after that, in the next three weekly contribution reports leading up to voting day, and
   5. Comprehensively, by the leadership contestant, together with all campaign and candidate personal expenses, in a "Final Return", filed six months after the end of the campaign.
   6. Comprehensively, by any leadership contestant with outstanding financial obligations, in "Interim Reports" filed every six months thereafter with the Chief Electoral Officer (for example, here are the Interim Reports for the 2006 Liberal Leadership contest).

So, to get a complete picture of the contributions made to leadership candidates in the NDP leadership race, you need to total:

• any contributions made prior to the start of the leadership contest on their Registration reports, plus
• any contributions made directly to the candidate and directed through the party, as reported in the first of the weekly reports, plus
• any subsequent contributions reported in each of the next three weekly incremental reports, plus
• any contributions not previously reported (i.e., from the last week of the leadership contest, or after voting day) as shown in the Final Report and/or any subsequent Interim Reports filed until all outstanding financial obligations have been cleared.

Or, to keep it simple, you can just leave the heavy-lifting to me.

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The Fundraising Totals

Here are the totals for each candidate to date:

Gross Fundraising by NDP Leadership Candidate, by category, to February 18, 2012

First a few notes on the totals:

• Since the NDP does not allow direct contributions to leadership candidates, the only Part 2(a) amounts shown here are "Pass the Hat" amounts, which take a bit of explanation in terms of how they're reported. Basically, if you pass the hat at one or more events, you have to record both the total collected, and the total attendance. The attendance is then reported as the number of contributors. So, for example, say Martin Singh attended a series of events at which a total of 5,950 people attended and where his campaign passed the hat for donations: it looks as though 5,950 people contributed to his campaign, at an average of 11 cents each. Now I guess you could count the total number of contributors for each candidate and pretend that it's a good indicator of organization, but to me it just looks as though someone couldn't raise much out of "pass the hat" operations in a big room, so I'm not sure that's very predictive. Probably better to stick to the number of contributors in the other categories instead.
• In my earlier blogpost on money, I reported on the number of contribuTIONs (i.e., line items), because that was all that was available to go on from the third and fourth quarter party reports. In the weekly reports, the candidates have to report on the actual number of contribuTORs (i.e., consider that a contributor might have made more than one contribution). These are the numbers now reported above (except for Messrs. Chisholm and Saganash who do not have weekly filings, and thus I'm taking their number of contribuTIONs data from the Dec 2011 filings instead). In practice there were 249 more contributions than contributors, so the gap between the two figures is not too big. To get really complicated, a given contributor could have given to more than one campaign as well, which wouldn't have been caught in either tabulation.
• It follows, then, that if the number of donors data is wonky because of distorted "pass the hat" contributor counts, one should really read the overall average contribution size with a lot of scepticism as well, if what you're looking for is an indicator of success. The most obvious example again is the financial situation of Martin Singh, whose 5,950 "pass the hat contributors" donated an average of 11 cents each, while his other 156 contributors gave an average of $422.54. I guess we could say that he had an average donation size of $10.90, but it would likely mislead us as to the breadth of his organization, or the skewness of that dataset.
• Finally, the totals above won't match the Elections Canada totals reported on their site, because Elections Canada sums up *all* direct contributions, plus only the transferred portion of the directed contributions (i.e., net of the party's 15% cut). To me, that's adding apples and oranges, but enough of the Cullen plan … ;-)

In light of those cautions, we see that Thomas Mulcair has pulled ahead of Brian Topp in the amount raised by their respective campaigns ($242K vs $215K), and Paul Dewar has pulled slightly ahead of Peggy Nash (170K vs 164K), but that Nathan Cullen finds himself not that far behind now ($152K).

Moreover, while Mulcair again claims the greatest number of named contributors (see above to understand why I'm not counting the total contributors), Cullen has passed the others and snuck up on him (924 to Mulcair's 1,005), and is followed a ways back by Dewar, then Nash, then Topp (782 vs 667 vs 524).

Now, as mentioned above, here's where it gets interesting. Let's look again at the candidates' cumulative fundraising over time (since this analysis depends on dates, and since no dates are reported for "pass the hat" donations, it includes the directed Part 2(b) contributions only):

[Click on image for full-sized version]

You can see that Mulcair pulled ahead of Topp in the last month or so, in parallel with the growth in Cullen's fundraising success. More recently, Paul Dewar was able to put a bit more distance between himself and Peggy Nash.

Now no sooner had the media started reporting the fundraising figures, or me tweeting the initial graph, when campaigns started getting in touch to advise us of what was in their pipelines and did not get included. Peggy Nash's team says that another $20,000 is yet to be reported, Paul Dewar's team claimed total fundraising of $171,000 in their "Paul Dewar By the Numbers — Priceless" release yesterday, and Nathan Cullen's campaign hinted that their next fundraising report would also shake up people's perception of the race. But, hey, we've got to save something for next week, right.

The Monthly Timelines

But more insight is gained by looking at both fundraising performance and number of donations by month. And, remembering that the percent of the fundraising take predicted to within 2.5% of the final outcome in the 2003 leadership race, the changing shares of the total money raised this time does seem to mirror many observers' soundings of the changing state of the race.

Monthly shares of total fundraising by NDP Leadership candidate, to February 18, 2012, Part 2(b) Directed Contributions only

This all looks more dramatic on a chart, so let's look again at all the different ways to view this dataset. One caution to bear in mind, however, is that we are only comparing 18 days of February to full months in all other cases except last September, and so any conclusions drawn should be tentative until next week's tallies are reported and included.

First of all, the monthly fundraising of each leadership contestant.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

Here we see that after building to a strong year-end for most candidates, January and February established a new but lower equilibrium for most of them, with only Nathan Cullen substantially bucking the trend in total dollars raised. This counter-trend is what saw Cullen's share of the total start to move upwards toward Thomas Mulcair's.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

Cullen's burst of fundraising in February was largely the result of a big hike in his number of contributors, relative to the counts of his competitors, as seen below.

Monthly shares of total numbers of contributions by NDP Leadership candidate, to February 18, 2012, Part 2(b) Directed Contributions only

Although it was share of the fundraising totals that predicted the first ballot vote in 2003, we did notice that share of the total number of contributions better predicted the results of at least one of the recently released internal polls, so it is worth taking notice of this potentially explanatory indicator as well. Here is where Cullen's presumed momentum appears particularly strong.

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[Click on image to open full-sized version]

The pattern of monthly average contribution sizes for each candidate confirm the general principle that leadership contestants need to raise some seed money from large contributors at the beginning of the race, and then once their campaign's fundraising infrastructure is built up, they slow down to a dull roar in which more smaller-sized donations are pursued (currently ranging from $130-$150 on average in February to date, with Mr. Mulcair a bit closer to $200).

The only two candidates who haven't followed that path are Niki Ashton, whose January totals probably reflect the fact that much of her December money didn't get processed until after the New Year, and Martin Singh, who has lent his campaign $170K and must raise the necessary funds to pay it back. Raising large-scale donations does not appear to be a problem for him, however, certainly not recently.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

The Regional Distribution

Nearly half the funds raised since the beginning of the Leadership Race have come from Ontario, and it's also the province that accounts for the majority of fundraising for Paul Dewar (78% of his take), Brian Topp (77.8% of his), Peggy Nash (71.9%) and to a lesser extent Thomas Mulcair (38.6%). Québec produced less than a quarter of Ontario's yield, but Mulcair picked up three-quarters of that, making up another 38.4% of his overall fundraising.

BC was responsible for about a fifth of all money raised. After Cullen, at 74.8% of his fundraising take, the west coast province was next most important for Martin Singh, making up 51.0% of his total raised; whereas 58.1% of Niki Ashton's fundraising was concentrated in Manitoba.

As a percent of each province or territory's tally, Thomas Mulcair has so far "won" in Québec, Alberta, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nunavut, while Brian Topp has "won" in Ontario and Saskatchewan, Paul Dewar in Manitoba, Peggy Nash in Newfoundland & Labrador, Nathan Cullen in BC, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and Martin Singh in Nova Scotia.

[Click here to view all the provincial fundraising totals and percents (opens PDF)]

Drilling down a bit further to the "postal regions" (i.e., grouping by the first letter of the contributor's postal code), we see that Paul Dewar's main fundraising strength in that province is Eastern Ontario (K), while Brian Topp, Peggy Nash and Thomas Mulcair were concentrated in the City of Toronto (M) instead.

As a percent of each postal region's fundraising tally, Dewar "won" in Eastern Ontario (K), Topp won in the 905 (L) and the City of Toronto (M), Nash won in the Southwest (N), and Mulcair won the fundraising stakes in the North of the province (P), along with all three postal regions in Québec (G, H and J).

[Click here to view all the fundraising totals and percents by postal region (opens PDF)]

We'll repeat this analysis in a week's time (without the long-winded explanations) and see where things move next.

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For the latest on the NDP Leadership Race, don't forget to follow the half-hourly news updates, and social media tickers at the Pundits' Guide NDPLdr portal page:  http://ndpldr.punditsguide.ca

[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]

Just three NDP leadership candidates have a path to win, according to new poll results released by the campaign manager of one of the three, but naturally no-one else agrees with him on which three they are.

In an email sent to that campaign's inner circle Wednesday afternoon (see below), Dan Mackenzie outlined further details of the large-sample IVR poll commissioned on behalf of his candidate Paul Dewar, showing how the second-ballot preferences of other candidates' supporters broke down (opens PDF), and arguing that they show only Dewar, Nash or Mulcair as able to win.

The poll, as we reported earlier, is several weeks old now, and predated the withdrawal of Romeo Saganash, the Québec City debate, Dewar's Québec caucus endorsements, and the membership cutoff, but it is still the only evidence that has emerged to date as to the direction of other candidates' down-ballot support.

According to the N=6,373, Feb 8-9, 1.9 MoE IVR poll conducted by , the second-choices of first ballot supporters of all the then-contestants were as follows:

With ballots and voting instructions set to arrive in the mail of NDP members any day now, of course, all the campaigns are turning their minds to what they need to do to get over the finish line in first place.

But let's take a look at what it would take for each of the top five candidates to win, using those numbers as a starting point.

First of all, we need to keep in mind that while Romeo Saganash has suspended his leadership campaign (he continues to raise money for it, however), I understand that as he did not withdraw from the race before the deadline of January 24, his name will therefore remain on the printed version of the first ballot. How they handle the drop-offs after the first ballot I'm unsure, but let's work from the known at least, inasmuch as the bottom person and anyone having less than 1% of the vote must drop off, along with anyone else who voluntarily withdraws after that ballot.

Using the first and second choice data from the Feb 8-9 Dewar poll, as weighted using the February 2 membership provincial totals, here's a rough approximation of how things might unfold.

As you can see, any number of variables since the survey was conducted could change the very tight ranking between its 2nd-5th place finishers.

But according to these numbers, Dewar makes his first big move in this scenario as the leading second choice of Niki Ashton supporters.  On the next round, however, he loses ground to Peggy Nash, as the result of her being the leading second choice of Brian Topp supporters. But then Dewar moves up to nearly match Nash after Nathan Cullen drops off, given that he is somewhat more favoured as the second choice of Cullen supporters.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

Suppose, on the other hand, that Topp was placed ahead of Cullen. Now the second-choices of Cullen's supporters would kick in one ballot earlier, putting Dewar into second place ahead of Nash — at least according to these numbers.

On the other hand, if Dewar could push past Nash, he might be able to benefit from his above-average second choice support from Ashton, Cullen, and Nash herself, to offer a stronger challenge to Mulcair.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

Finally, if Dewar were in fifth place (say with 12.5% on the first ballot, rather than 15.1%), his supporters' second choice votes would give slightly more to Peggy Nash than to Thomas Mulcair,  but not enough to close the gap between the two front-runners in that case, and Mulcair goes on to win.

Careful readers will wonder why, in the last ballot for example, not all of Dewar's hypothetical 25.8% of the vote is distributed to the other two candidates. This is because those voters' stated second choices have already fallen off the ballot. In real life, their third or fourth choice would then be counted, as this system always counts the highest remaining preferential vote still on the voter's ballot,.

While these exact results would also be subject to a number of additional factors, such as:

• new membership sign-ups
• changes in support of the various candidates
• a shrinking undecided rate
• third and subsequent choices down-ballot
• early withdrawals by one candidate or another
• voting on Convention day itself
• etc., etc.

… they still give the reader an idea of the kinds of challenges involved in winning when needing to break out of a pack of four fairly equally weighted challengers to a front-runner. Subject to these considerations, I think we can say that the chance of any another candidate beating Thomas Mulcair at this stage will depend on their placing even slightly ahead of their competitors, and hoping the rest of the candidates drop off in the most opportune order.

For Peggy Nash, she is the leading second choice of Brian Topp's and Paul Dewar's supporters, but also Thomas Mulcair's in this poll. So long as Mulcair places ahead of her, she will never get to claim that tranche of support, and thus her overall second-choice tally is misleading. She could win if Mulcair were behind her, but has a much harder path to victory if he's ahead.

[Click on image to open full-sized version]

Brian Topp shows little second-choice support in this poll, while Nathan Cullen's first- and second-choice support in it is no doubt underestimated by now.

In any event, several other campaigns have been in the field since the membership cut-off, including a two-question IVR poll from the Nash camp a week and a half ago, an online poll that looked a lot like the Topp poll from last November, and another 5-question IVR poll the other day, asking for membership status, gender and the respondent's first, second and third choices. If any of them show the least break-out for any of the challengers, we can be certain we'll be seeing their results in some form or another in coming days.

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From: danxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:40:46 -0500
Subject: Insider Update – Paul Dewar polling
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear Dewar Campaign Activist,

With just under 4 weeks until the leadership convention, I want to share some internal campaign information with you about Paul Dewar’s path to victory.

As you know, a few weeks ago we conducted a large IVR poll of NDP members to ask who they are supporting for NDP leader on the first and second ballot. We contacted 56,522 NDP member households and received 6,373 responses from every region of Canada. The poll had a margin of error of 1.19%, 19 times out of twenty. At the time we publicly released the raw and weighted (to reflect the membership figures) results of 1stand 2nd ballot support. Those results are at the bottom of this email.

As a key Paul Dewar supporter, I’d like to share some more key information from that poll showing that Paul is well-positioned to win. Attached here is a PDF that shows where the second choices of each candidate get distributed should they fall off the ballot. This is information we haven't yet shared publicly as it has a great impact on our campaign’s strategy. Please keep in mind that this data was collected before Romeo Saganash withdrew from the race, before leading members of Romeo's campaign came to Paul, and before Paul picked up some impressive Quebec MP endorsements.

What the numbers show is that three candidates are in a position to win: Thomas Mulcair, Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar. While the other candidates in this race have run strong campaigns, none of them have the combination of first and second ballot support needed to win.

While Mulcair is running first he is far from a first ballot victory. Our numbers show that as candidates lower in the polling drop off the ballot, and their second choices are distributed, the gap closes significantly. Based on the distribution of 2nd ballot choices, if the election were held today it would be a tight finish with either Paul, Peggy Nash, or Thomas Mulcair winning.

Here’s where you come in. With less than four weeks to go, our campaign is gaining momentum. We are in a strong position to win this race. But we need your help in this home stretch, to seal the deal.

Over the next week, when the ballots are mailed to members, it will be crucial for our campaign to identify as many voters supporting Paul on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd ballot.

We need to continue to contrast Paul’s experience, passion, popular appeal, and social democratic values with the other two leading candidates.

Now I know we ask a lot of you, but now is the time to re-double your efforts. In the phone banks, on the candidate’s tour, at events, by donating, tweeting, and through our canvassing – let’s give it one last push and win this.

Keep up the great work!

Dan Mackenzie
Campaign Manager
Paul Dewar Campaign

RAW NUMBERS BEFORE WEIGHTING

Count %

Niki Ashton 466 7.3%

Nathan Cullen 470 7.4%

Paul Dewar 726 11.4%

Thomas Mulcair 1098 17.2%

Peggy Nash 807 12.7%

Romeo Saganash 171 2.7%

Martin Singh 154 2.4%

Brian Topp 508 8.0%

Undecided 1973 31.0%

Total 6373 100%

FIRST CHOICE (weighted to NDP membership numbers by province)

Thomas Mulcair 25.5%

Peggy Nash 16.8%

Paul Dewar 15.1%

Nathan Cullen 12.8%

Brian Topp 12.7%

Niki Ashton 9.5%

Martin Singh 4.1%

Romeo Saganash 3.6%

SECOND CHOICE (weighted to NDP membership numbers by province)

Paul Dewar 21.2%

Peggy Nash 19.4%

Thomas Mulcair 16.7%

Nathan Cullen 14.4%

Brian Topp 12.4%

Niki Ashton 10.7%

Romeo Saganash 3.6%

Martin Singh 1.8%
 

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[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]

British Columbia and Ontario will have the lion's share of the say over the outcome of the NDP leadership race, final membership counts released today confirm. With just under 60% of the total eligible voting membership on February 18, the two provinces combined could pick the next leader of the opposition.

[Click on image to open full-sized version.]

While Québec boasted the biggest increase in membership (up 623.7% to 12,266 from 1,695 at the beginning of October), its final weight in picking the leader will be well under its share of the total population, and also well under the ambitious 20,000 targeted by leadership candidate Thomas Mulcair earlier in the race.

For comparison, 14,039 of 36,341 eligible members of the Bloc Québécois voted in their leadership contest last December 11.

Remember that it was in order to facilitate a significant sign-up in Québec that the leadership vote was pushed back to the end of March, rather than sometime in January as some in the party's leadership had privately preferred.

On the prairies, the three provinces will hold roughly equal weight to Québec, Saskatchewan having shown the highest growth in membership after running a provincial membership renewal drive alongside the sign-ups by the leadership candidates.

While there were large percentage increases in the Atlantic provinces, they are of relatively small magnitude in the overall outcome.

 The overall boost in membership numbers may be a very good omen for the first ballot positioning of Nathan Cullen, given the last minute campaigns by both the LeadNow.ca and Avaaz.org groups to encourage their members to sign up to the opposition party of their choice. Lead Now told CP's Joan Bryden that 5,000 people had clicked through from their page to the NDP's membership sign-up website, which if they all completed the transaction would represent approximately one-sixth of the increase since November 1. Cullen was already said to be doing well amongst the current BC membership, though he should share that with Topp and increasingly Mulcair, Dewar and Nash.

The Ontario increase may result from the work of several camps, and at this stage I simply don't have enough information to gauge the impact, though it's believed that Nash, Dewar, Mulcair and Topp would all be the beneficiaries of the traditional sign-ups, while Cullen would benefit from any LeadNow/Avaaz efforts.

Dewar and to a lesser extent Ashton are expected to carry the greatest proportions of support in Manitoba, while Ashton and Topp would be the leaders in Saskatchewan. Dewar and Ashton are also the presumed leaders in Alberta. Mulcair predominates in New Brunswick and is said to be strong in Newfoundland as well, with Nash also having a strong showing in St. John's, while a number of campaigns are thought to have strength in Nova Scotia.

The following table also updates the "membership density" numbers. Again, this means that one in 118 British Columbians is a member of the NDP, while one in 791 New Brunswickers holds a party card. Overall one in 269 Canadians is an NDP member eligible to vote in the March 24 race.

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For the latest on the NDP Leadership Race, don't forget to follow the half-hourly news updates, and social media tickers at the Pundits' Guide NDPLdr portal page:  http://ndpldr.punditsguide.ca

[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]

A series of moves and counter-moves by NDP Leadership campaigns over the last few days has set the race on a much more competitive - even combative - footing for the next few weeks leading up to the Winnipeg debate at the end of February.

The Push

This time last week, both the Topp and Mulcair camps had been hoping and really expecting to be able to push Paul Dewar out of the contest Monday after what was expected to be a difficult Quebec City debate for him on the weekend. An exit by Dewar, who has been working hard on his french and his performance, but still making uneven progress, would have simplified the race for both (perceived) front-runners. And many observers (and some spinners) were also counting on an early exit by Manitoba M.P. Niki Ashton after weak fundraising numbers became public.

But the lady was not for turning, and Dewar was not born yesterday.

Ashton's campaign took a look at their fundraising progress since the new year, and retooled their message to highlight her ability to speak for her generation. Coupled with her academic background in foreign affairs and facility in the french language, it all allowed her to deliver a much-improved debate performance on the weekend, and live to fight on.

Meanwhile, the pros on Dewar's team had built handling the Quebec City debate into their campaign plan for months, and they were well-prepared to deal with the incoming volleys. The strategy had three parts.

The Pin

There is a chess move called "a pin", where an opponent's piece is caught in a Catch-22 situation: either move and lose something else, or stay put and be sacrificed. You can't pin your opponent unless they are already badly positioned or step into it, but then again you have to be able to see the opening. The Prime Minister for example thinks he has the NDP pinned when he reportedly says that "if Mulcair wins, I win, and if Mulcair doesn't win, I win".

The move on Sunday began with an innocuous-sounding question from Dewar to Peggy Nash about whether she supported public healthcare, to which she gave the predictable answer "yes". He then followed up by asking what she would do as prime minister if the Québec government were to charge hospital user fees. Wanting to demonstrate that she understood healthcare to be a provincial matter, Nash answered that "We hope that we want our health care system to be public, but really it’s a provincial jurisdiction, so it’s the decision of Quebecers" (translation courtesy Joanna Smith of the Toronto Star).

Fast forward to the scrums after the debate, and Nash was pressed further for details by both english- and french-language reporters, saying that as PM she would make sure the provinces had sufficient funds to run a public system, but again repeating the assertion that it was a provincial jurisdiction and was therefore "their choice".

In his own scrum, the last of the day, Dewar took the obvious questions on his performance and his french, and then on his organizational plan for Quebec, and finally he was asked what he thought of Nash's reply to his question. "I was disappointed," he said. "Why?" the reporters asked him. "Because we dealt with this question in the last election, and Jack was very strong on it. We want to have the Canada Health Act enforced for everyone, and it's not fair that some people would have to pay user fees and not others," Dewar said. And all the reporters went over to mark down that spot on their recorders.

Nash was thus pinned. She would either have to retract her statement, or double-down on it. Dewar showed that he could challenge a female opponent while still behaving like a gentleman, and wedge Nash on an issue that would cause some of her supporters or potential supporters to think again. She responded the next day with an email blast from a young Québec M.P. who had recently endorsed her (Élaine Michaud), and a strong statement to Aaron Wherry of Macleans.ca saying she stood both in favour of the Canada Health Act and against user fees, but still never answering the question of what she would be prepared to do to prevent them if implemented.

UPDATE: Nash finally clarified this last point in a letter to the editor in the Toronto Star on Wednesday.

The Polls

The next morning at 10 AM Eastern, minutes after Brian Topp's campaign released an endorsement letter from Jack Layton's mother Doris, the Dewar campaign sent a depth charge into the leadership race. They issued a media advisory saying that they would be releasing the results of a very large IVR poll at noon, previewing its sample-size and methodology, and asserting that only three candidates had a path to victory.

Since Brian Topp's "shock and awe" entry into the leadership race, he has been accorded the status of a frontrunner by every observer. But as with the Iraq war, shock and awe after awhile gives way to push-back; and Topp has been struggling to learn the performance aspects of being a candidate as much as Dewar has struggled with his french. To many observers, Topp's shyness, cheshire smile, confidence and occasionally awkward shots at his opponents have not come across well, and his phone bank was renowned for its excessively negative hits on his opponents when voters identified as supporters of other candidates on the first ballot.

That Topp was not in first place was not really a surprise to anyone (likely even him). That a poll would place him slightly behind Nathan Cullen in fifth place was unimaginable for that campaign, which shot back in complete disbelief of the results, impugning their validity and the integrity of the polling firm and the campaign that had commissioned it, and unleashing a torrent of innuendo on Twitter. This was followed by a statement extolling his campaign's own phone canvassing results, hinting that they were more reliable than "robo-calls" (as though calling on behalf of a campaign did not introduce any response bias, when everyone knows that phone canvassing is far better at picking up checks than X's).

Meanwhile, the poll's reported leader, Thomas Mulcair, was left to watch his opponents duke it out for the right to take him on later, while his campaign released their own poll later in the evening, also showing him in first place, though with Dewar lower than Topp. Never get in the way, as they say, when your opponents are already busy with each other.

The Plea

Finally, Dewar's camp released their raw unweighted results with some other regional information in an email blast later in the evening, accompanied by a defence of their candidate's campaign to date, and a plea to rally the "strong social democratic" forces against a move to take their beloved party to the right. To say this email was badly received by its intended audience (the party establishment backing Topp) would be an understatement, but it clearly signalled Dewar's intentions as to the eventual outcome of the contest.

The Counterpunch

By Tuesday, the Topp campaign decided it needed to bomb the bridges not only on Dewar's french but on his entire strategy, with the candidate personally giving an interview to the Globe and Mail attacking his opponent (something he had earlier sworn he would never do), and other supporters calling the campaign's late evening e-blast "bizarro".

The Side Story

Meanwhile, Nathan Cullen appears to be building momentum – in some quarters because of his joint nominations proposal (for example, the boost by the LeadNow.ca youth engagement organization, and recovering strategic voting advocates such as Project Democracy's Alice Klein and Catch-22's Gary Shaul) - and in other quarters, increasingly, in spite of it.

And under the radar of the other storylines at the Sunday debate, Cullen happily served as the foil against which Tom Mulcair could demonstrate his bona fides to party faithful by criticizing the Cullen plan, all the while giving it and Cullen more oxygen.

The candidates are each heading out on their own tours between now and the Winnipeg debate on February 26, and thus are unlikely to cross swords again except through the media.

But if there's one thing we can say now, it's that the two ingredients for the national media to find a contest interesting (polls and conflict) have finally surfaced in the NDP leadership race. And these are stories they know how to cover.

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Finally, some notes on the data.

The Mulcair poll was done by a consulting firm (they won't say who), which conducted live phone interviews with a sample of 1,105 between February 6-8, 2012, having an undecided rate of 32%, and a margin of error on the national decided vote of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. It reported the following first ballot results, as given to Postmedia News, which were weighted by the proportion of members in each province (as of an unknown date):

Thomas MULCAIR – 31.1 %

Peggy NASH – 17.5 %

Brian TOPP - 14.8 %

Nathan CULLEN – 14.2 %

Paul DEWAR – 13.8 %

Niki ASHTON – 5.3 %

Martin SINGH – 0.9 %

Membership sales close on Saturday, February 18, and the party will be releasing the final membership counts by province on Tuesday, February 21 (five days before the Winnipeg debate). The Mulcair campaign is now setting expectations that it won't meet its earlier goal of 20,000 new members in Quebec, but more probably a figure somewhat above 10,000. Will there be a February upside surprise? I guess we'll have to wait and see. That lower number would represent approximately 270 memberships sold per Québec MP endorsing him for most of the race (I used the figure of 37, although he's recently up to 40 Québec caucus members).

Brian Topp's campaign reports that their checkmarks are running 28% of contact across both phonebanks (Montréal and BC), and that they expect good membership sales from a number of target groups. Martin Singh's campaign earlier reported selling 3,800 new members. The Nash campaign is apparently targetting CAW members for sign-ups, as well.

[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]

The Paul Dewar campaign just released further regional details of their leadership poll, and make a clear pitch to Brian Topp's supporters.

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Dear New Democrats,

I want to share with you some of the polling that has been done by the Paul Dewar campaign to give you a clear indication of how this leadership race is shaping up.

On February 8th and 9th our campaign used an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) poll to contact 56,522 households of NDP members according to the latest NDP membership data (as of February 2nd) from Federal Office. Of those households 6,373 responded from every region of Canada.

The research asked respondents to select their first and second choice for leader from a list of the candidates. The poll also asked respondents if they are a current NDP member. Results were then weighted to reflect the membership numbers in each province – and have a margin of error of 1.19%.

The results of the polling are as follows:

RAW NUMBERS BEFORE WEIGHTING

FIRST CHOICE (weighted to NDP membership numbers by province)

SECOND CHOICE (weighted to NDP membership numbers by province)

Our polling results challenge some of the assumptions about this race that circulate in the national media. I won't reveal our exact regional breaks as that information is integral to our strategy and besides the other campaigns can do their own polling.

Our regional research does show that Thomas Mulcair leads handily in Quebec with over 50% of the vote. This is what provides Mulcair with his national lead. Brian Topp runs fourth in Quebec. Nathan Cullen runs first in BC and Brian Topp runs third. In Ontario, Peggy Nash runs first and Paul Dewar and Thomas Mulcair are statistically tied for second. Brian Topp runs a distant fourth.

Most important, the results show that nobody will win on the first ballot; that second ballot support is essential in a one-member-one vote system; that the race is narrowing to a top three, and that Paul Dewar is very well positioned to win.

Finally, I want to comment directly on the leadership campaign and why I support Paul Dewar.

My background is in organizing and more than any other candidate Paul Dewar has grassroots organizing experience. He understands that we will not win the next election without building a true grassroots on-the-ground base in our Quebec ridings and in the next 70 ridings outside of Quebec.

Paul has faced a withering attack during this campaign about his abilities in the French language. He is not the best French speaker of the leadership candidates, but he has performed admirably in both French and English debates and improves everyday. Paul's French comprehension is excellent and like Jack, Paul knows how to connect with voters. Quebec voters, like all voters, will ultimately judge us on our values and principles and those must be social democratic values and principles. In 2011, Quebecers accepted Jack's offer to join us in building a social democratic governing option.

Paul Dewar has not reshaped or adjusted his social democratic principles and values just for this leadership campaign. It is no surprise that Paul has released more policy than the other candidates, as he wants to ensure New Democrats know what he is all about and that he is a genuine social democrat.

Paul is not about to dishonour or set aside our party's principles. He is not about moving our party to the right and becoming another Liberal Party. He will lead and campaign as who we really are, and not sacrifice the hard work of the past to create a new "Third Way," or emulate Tony Blair to form the next government.

At the same time Paul knows that we must encourage more Canadians to get involved in politics and must especially mobilize the energy of young people.

Paul Dewar recognizes the contributions made to this party by thousands of members and activists. He will not alienate or remove the members and staff who have done an excellent job working with Jack, at the Federal Office and in the caucus to help get us where we are today. We must all work together when this leadership campaign is over.

Our party needs a leader in the House of Commons ready to take on Stephen Harper and the regressive Tory agenda the day after our leadership convention is over.

As an organizer, international aid worker, teacher, union activist and MP elected three times, Paul embodies the meaning of Jack's call on all of us to take better care of each other.

Paul Dewar is the right leader at the right time for our party.

Dan Mackenzie
Campaign Manager
Paul Dewar for Leader

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For the latest on the NDP Leadership Race, don't forget to follow the half-hourly news updates, and social media tickers at the Pundits' Guide NDPLdr portal page:  http://ndpldr.punditsguide.ca