UPDATED: Few Comeback Kids in the House of Commons
[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]
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).
[Click on image to open full-sized version]
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
| MP / Cand Riding, Prov |
Last Elxn Won |
Elxn Defeated |
Comeback(s) | Successor | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Try (1) | Try (2) | |||||||||
| Rank | Pct | Rank | Pct | Rank | Pct | Rank | Pct | Rank | Pct | |
| LIMOGES, Rick Windsor – Tecumseh, ON |
1999 By | 2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 43.6% | 2 | 39.9% | 2 | 33.9% | 2 | 26.4% | |||
| GRUENDING, Dennis Saskatoon – Rosetown – Biggar, SK |
1999 By | 2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 40.6% | 2 | 41.4% | 2 | 36.2% | 2 | 39.0% | |||
| SCHERRER, Hélène Louis-Hébert, QC |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 41.1% | 2 | 34.0% | 3 | 15.0% | 3 | 23.6% | |||
| HARVEY, André Chicoutimi – Le Fjord, QC |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 48.2% | 2 | 43.4% | 2 | 29.2% | 3 | 13.4% | |||
| PRICE, David Compton – Stanstead, QC |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 46.6% | 2 | 36.0% | 3 | 22.3% | 2 | 22.5% | |||
| ST-JACQUES, Diane Shefford, QC |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 45.9% | 2 | 39.7% | 3 | 23.4% | 2 | 21.4% | |||
| PERIC, Janko Cambridge, ON |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 46.6% | 2 | 36.7% | 2 | 33.6% | 2 | 23.4% | |||
| SPELLER, Bob Haldimand – Norfolk, ON |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 46.8% | 2 | 38.8% | 2 | 34.3% | 2 | 24.9% | |||
| WHELAN, Susan Essex, ON |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||
| 1 | 44.3% | 2 | 35.0% | 2 | 34.1% | 2 | 29.1% | 3 | 14.2% | |
| NYSTROM, Lorne Regina – Qu'Appelle, SK |
2000 GE | 2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 41.3% | 2 | 32.7% | 2 | 32.4% | 2 | 32.1% | |||
| BARRETTE, Gilbert Abitibi – Témiscamingue, QC |
2003 By | 2004 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 57.0% | 2 | 31.0% | 2 | 20.7% | 5.9% | ||||
| PARADIS, Denis Brome – Missisquoi, QC |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 42.1% | 2 | 28.0% | 2 | 32.8% | 2 | 22.1% | |||
| BAKOPANOS, Eleni Ahuntsic, QC |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 43.8% | 2 | 37.2% | 2 | 38.6% | 3 | 27.9% | |||
| GODBOUT, Marc Ottawa – Orléans, ON |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 45.0% | 2 | 39.1% | 2 | 38.8% | 38.4% | ||||
| MACKLIN, Paul Northumberland – Quinte West, ON |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 39.9% | 2 | 36.0% | 2 | 28.6% | 2 | 21.0% | |||
| TORSNEY, Paddy Burlington, ON |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 45.0% | 2 | 39.1% | 2 | 33.3% | 2 | 23.3% | |||
| LASTEWKA, Walt St. Catharines, ON |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 40.4% | 2 | 37.0% | 2 | 28.6% | 3 | 20.6% | |||
| BOIVIN, Françoise Gatineau, QC |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | ||||||
| 1 | 42.1% | 2 | 31.3% | 2 | 26.1% | 1 | 61.8% | |||
| DUNCAN, John Vancouver Island North, BC |
2004 GE | 2006 GE | 2008 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 35.4% | 2 | 40.6% | 1 | 45.8% | |||||
| THIBAULT, Robert West Nova, NS |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 39.2% | 2 | 36.1% | 2 | 36.4% | |||||
| TEMELKOVSKI, Lui Oak Ridges – Markham, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 47.1% | 2 | 41.5% | 2 | 28.3% | |||||
| ALGHABRA, Omar Mississauga – Erindale, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 44.8% | 2 | 42.0% | 2 | 33.9% | |||||
| REDMAN, Karen Kitchener Centre, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 43.3% | 2 | 35.9% | 2 | 31.3% | |||||
| TELEGDI, Andrew Kitchener – Waterloo, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 46.9% | 2 | 36.0% | 2 | 37.6% | |||||
| MALONEY, John Welland, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 35.5% | 3 | 27.9% | 3 | 14.0% | |||||
| ST. AMAND, Lloyd Brant, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 36.9% | 2 | 33.1% | 3 | 18.8% | |||||
| BOSHCOFF, Ken Thunder Bay – Rainy River, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 35.1% | 2 | 32.3% | 3 | 21.7% | |||||
| VALLEY, Roger Kenora, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 36.5% | 2 | 31.6% | 3 | 21.9% | |||||
| SIMARD, Raymond Saint Boniface, MB |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 38.6% | 2 | 35.1% | 2 | 30.8% | |||||
| NASH, Peggy Parkdale – High Park, ON |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 40.4% | 2 | 36.0% | 1 | 47.2% | |||||
| BARBOT, Vivian Papineau, QC |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 40.7% | 2 | 38.7% | 3 | 25.9% | |||||
| LUSSIER, Marcel Brossard – La Prairie, QC |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 37.2% | 2 | 32.5% | 3 | 17.5% | |||||
| MANNING, Fabian Avalon, NL |
2006 GE | 2008 GE | 2011 GE | |||||||
| 1 | 51.6% | 2 | 35.2% | 2 | 40.5% | |||||
Tags: 41st (2011) General Election, Defeated MPs, Seat Projections
What about Minister John Duncan? He won Vancouver Island North in 2004, lost in 2006, then won again in 2008 and 2011.
Good one. I wonder why he didn’t show up in my original query then. I must have culled him by mistake. Adding now, Sean !
A good calculation might be to compare the average drop in support between ‘08 and ‘11 for the returning Liberal candidates (they’re the only sample large enough) to the average drop in support in the 292 or so ridings that didn’t feature a re-run candidate.
Good point on the problem of looking at the last election’s closest ridings to determine a new election’s battlegrounds.
Parties usually experience fluid levels of support.
A few years between elections can make a world of difference for a party that’s in terminal decline (Liberals) and a party that’s on the rise (NDP).
I have always believed, that with a few exceptions. an incumbents
ability to overcome a national trend away from a particular party is very limited to perhaps 10% of his / her popular support.. Once that candidate has been removed from the scene for a few years it would make it even more difficult to remain in the public spotlight and retain that previous “incumbency advantage”. I can think of a number of people who thought that they could get re-elected on their name, only to discover that most people vote for the party of the day and not so much on the individual candidates. Would that not account for much of your outcomes here ?.
Indeed, Neil. The issue comes when people try to do seat projections starting with the last election’s results, and then applying the latest polls to them. The last election’s result – if it was from a defeated incumbent – would not be the right place to start, I’m arguing. You’d have to drop that value by a certain amount in order to be able to project going forward.
It’s also not safe to assume that running the former MP could guarantee you the same or better result next time, except in remarkable cases.
Shadow, I’ll be doing something like that next.
As proof of how a more generalized party decline over several cycles may skew the picture, I’m thinking back to 1988 when the John Turner Liberals actually came back at large and a few “unexpected” defeated-in-84 incumbents like Toronto’s Roy McLaren and Jim Peterson regained their seats–and I think there were a few New Democrats in the West that similarly benefited (Sid Parker, for one). And then there was the matter of the Grits’ Lloyd Francis making *three* comebacks (in ‘68, ‘74, and ‘80)
Lloyd Francis is actually an interesting example. He was a successful municipal politician before he became an MP, so his name recognition did not depend solely on being an MP. Moreover, his defeats were always in elections which resulted in minority governments, so the next election always came relatively quickly (65/68, 72/74, 79/80).
And all those pre-93 examples came in an era when Canada had a more stable federal “two and a half party” system, when there was practically an organic inhale/exhale element between elections, and eternal “swing ridings” (such as Francis’s and Parker’s) were legend…
It seems to me most of those comebacks failed because they were Liberal MPs trying to comeback while the party was in decline. New or old candidate, there was no way those ridings were going Liberal.
The real test would be to see if the comeback MPs experienced a larger decline in ridings from that same region the party lost that didn’t feature a comeback attempt. My suspicion is the numbers will be similar, which would imply there’s nothing wrong with using that baseline in a seat projection (besides all the other seat projection problems which I tend to agree with you on).
If anything I think comeback MPs would benefit from name recognition, so the parties running a new candidate might start 1-2% behind the baseline come the next campaign if they didn’t run again.
Yeah, I definitely need to do that test next.
Hi Alice,
I put this in the old article instead of here where I meant it to be. this is a comment about why vote prediction sites get it wrong when a party is going down rather than up. Perhaps you can delete the other post.
This, I think, may go further explaining some of the changes you are pointing to in this thread– and perhaps it has less to do with being an incumbent or comeback rather than the changing shape of support parties get when they are going up or down (not to do with the going up or down so much as being up or down).
*******
This is a phenomenon that I have been writing about for some time- the over prediction of parties in decline and under prediction of parties on the rise.
I go a step further and try to explain it so I wanted to add that here. I have also used it to create a model that would be more accurate.
The issue is I believe one of the complexion of support at different levels for a party.
A party that is very low in support has a flatter support level across ridings with the exception those with incumbents that have held on and win because of their personal popularity. A party higher up in the polls will see their vote max out in some places and clump to form winnable peaks in others. This can look like a bandwagon effect where a potential winning campaign gets extra momentum as it gets closer.
So if you look at a party that increases its support it does not do this in a level rising all boats increase as most prediction sites show — the increase goes disproportionately to the seats that it is strongest in and that is why it picks up more than prediction sites show.
By the same token a party losing support goes flatter losing votes disproportionately from the strongest seats and less so form the weaker ones flattening support making it less efficient.
My one warning on this is that a party that is very strong and highly inefficient (with a lot of blow-outs) could actually gain efficiency as it loses support using the same model. If that slightly. This would be the case for a party that was very high but even after a reduction is still the most popular party. Imagine the federal Conservatives in Sask or AB for example. Using this model you could presume that a modest loss would come more likely from the blow-out seats where they got 70% of the vote rather than the ones that were close. In that case a drop in support might not mean a drop in seats.
In other words– look at the complexion (relative support across many ridings) and presume when a party goes up it creates higher peaks and when it goes down the peaks come down disproportionately and you can create a more accurate prediction model.
The other reason they get it wrong is most people think political change is incremental because they see little for long periods. The truth is it is seldom incremental– usually things stay the same for a long period and then shift suddenly (like an earthquake pressure builds for a long time but the actual movement is quick). for this reason people are biased against recognizing the swift nature of political change.
Hope this helps add another perspective.
What about Give’em Hec (Butch) Clouthier this last election?
Butch was a one-term wonder back in ‘97,having run as an independant in ‘93 when he was blocked from challenging the 30 year incumbant for the local grit nomination; his defeat ending a 70 year grit stranglehold on a Riding that was once considered the safest in Canada for that party outside of Quebec. After he was humiliated in the 2000 election by Cheryl Gallant, he tried the next 4 elections to get his old party nomination, and was blocked each time, with the grits stooping so low as to fix-nominate then party pres Apps ’special friend’ Toronto lawyer from the same grit law firm Tabbert.
After claiming to have told Iggy off, demanding a fixed nomination for himself, he ran as an independant (again) in 2011, only to be humiliated, once again.
His hope is that the very popular Cheryl will be appointed to a Crown corp or the Senate ’cause he wants to run again….
John Turmel anyone?
Oh, darn: we all forgot about Hec. (And then there’s ex-Reform/Alliancer Jim Pankiw: defeated as a now-independent incumbent in Saskatoon-Humboldt in ‘04; defeated in Battlefords-Lloydminster in ‘06; then tried again in Sask-Humb in ‘11 and got only 679 votes.)
I cant be sure of figures and stats but there was no mention of the anomaly of the 1993 election (the PC reduction to two seats) and then for previously elected MP`s to revive in the next election. Bill Casey comes to mind with many examples of “survival”. I can also think of Greg Thompson and I would think there are many other examples.
I should have mentioned Bill Casey and Greg Thompson along with Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Rob Nicholson, Ian, you’re right.
Specifically in this case I limited my dataset to the ridings in the 2003 representation order, so I wouldn’t have to go back too too far. Casey and Thompson were both defeated in 1993 and came back in 1997, so they predated my time horizon. But it’s good to build a robust list, and so I thank you.
And of course, we mustn’t forget this example: former Mulroney Tory and 1993 PC leadership candidate Patrick Boyer, who tried (and failed) to regain Etobicoke-Lakeshore from Michael Ignatieff in 2008.
Former Social Credit Leader Réal Caouettes nephew Armand Caouette first elected in the 1974 federal election in Villeneuve, re-elected in Abitibi in 1979 election. Defeated in 1980 in Abitibi. Defeated again as a Progerssive Conservative in Abitibi in 1997, and defeated as a Liberal in 2006. He died in 2010.
Paul Macklin, MP for Northumberland-Quinte West, was re-elected in 2004 with 39.85% (4.85% below the Ontario Liberal average of 44.7%), lost in 2006 with 36.00% (3.9% below the Ontario Liberal average of 39.9%), and failed a comeback bid in 2008 with 28.59% (5.21% below the Ontario Liberal average of 33.8%).
Oops, please delete the above redundant post.
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