I've added some new "Nominations Progress" queries on the Search the Database page tonight, which will help readers follow the parties' preparations in several different categories of "ridings to watch".

The media love "ridings to watch", because picking a few of them helps boil down a big complicated story of 308 ridings into a few colourful local scrimmages. But what makes a riding worth watching?

• Professor Michael Geist has identified 27 ridings containing universities that were previously won by 10% or less as ones to target in his Digital Copyright campaign, for example.
• The Hill Times wrote this past February about how parties might be targetting the 49 ridings previously won by 5% of less, and called them "swing" ridings.

The trouble with these approaches is that they assume past voting behaviour in a riding can predict future voting behaviour or at least future electoral jeopardy. Demonstrably this is not the case when a government changes hands, at least not in every riding.

"Swing" ridings, in my view and contrary to what the Hill Times suggested earlier, are not necessarily "close" ridings, but rather ridings that change hands when the government changes (aka "bellwether ridings"). I don't have a dataset spanning enough elections to determine which they all are, but anecdotally the most commonly identified "swing" ridings in English Canada are Peterborough, ON and Ottawa West-Nepean, ON (both currently held by Conservatives).

I can say, though, that being a close riding in the previous election did not necessarily predict a seat changing hands party-wise in the next election, because I ran an analysis myself not long after that story ran. Only half of the ones that were close in 2006 had been close in 2004, and more ridings that wound up changing hands had been won by > 5% than by <.

This is why I prefer indicators that look at incumbency and competitiveness between parties, rather than simply "close margins". But I do love a good race too, so today I'm adding a few new queries and therefore a few more perspectives to the two already identified under Queries for Current Election(s). In order of potential volatility and therefore excitement, I would rank them as follows:

• Nominations Progress in Ridings with Retiring Incumbents
• Nominations Progress in Ridings with First-Time Incumbents
• Nominations Progress in Ridings with the Closest 4-Way Races (MargPct MargPct_1_to_4 <= 25%)
• Nominations Progress in Ridings with the Closest 3-Way Races (MargPct MargPct_1_to_3 <= 15%)
• Nominations Progress in Ridings with Close Races (MargPct <= 5%)

I've also improved on the earlier versions by adding riding counts, party candidate counts and party women candidate counts for each category.

As a note to the data, the ridings shown here in the "Nominations Progress" queries for the current election may be slightly different than the ones that appear when running the "Elections Pundit Queries" with the same names. This is because the latter looked at the electoral event in question. The former looks at the last electoral event for each riding.

For example, Outremont, QC was one of the 3 closest four-way races in 2006, yet it doesn't show up in the Nominations Progress query on 4-way races because the 2007 by-election was its last electoral event and that was not a 4-way race (however, the riding now shows up under First Time Incumbents). Similarly, Vancouver Quadra, BC now shows up as a 4-way race (it barely meets the mathematical criteria ... really it was a 2-way race for first place and a 2-way race for third place), which it wasn't at all in 2006.

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As your Guide was a golf widow last week, the lion's share of it could be spent fixing database performance issues, resolving some charting problems, and fixing various bugs that required some deeper concentration.

When I got bored or tired with that, I started looking up and adding web-site addresses where available for candidates in the above categories, or anywhere else that readers have sent me addresses for. As there are almost 1000 candidates identified to date, this will be a long, drawn-out process, so be patient ... and sending me any candidate web-site addresses you do have would be a big help. Or, you could invite my partner out golfing to give me more time to work.

Meantime I have a pretty long list of new functionality and new datasets I'd like to add to the database ... with one eye on the Parliamentary Calendar and one eye on the Election Fever Meter at National Newswatch (personally I think it should be a little higher than 20% though). If readers have suggestions for items they consider higher priorities than others and would like to see here soon, leave a comment, drop me a line, or stand by for a survey I'll try and compile for a separate blog post in the near future.

[UPDATE: I had to correct the criteria for the 3-way and 4-way race definitions, which were written far too late into the night.]

Labels: Data Analysis