Comparisons - United Right

I'm working on various spreadsheets to show historical results of elections. One of the things I'm compiling, is Federal elections, with popular vote by province.

I've done some math with that to show some interesting things that should be kept in mind when judging historical results compared to the 1990's and it's divided right.

First, lets start with Ontario.

At the top, we have the simplest way to present the results. The "Conservative" vote follows both the modern Tories, and the old PC Party. You can see during the 90's, there was a clear drop in popular support. At the highest level - 18.8% in 1997 - it comes nowhere near the next lowest - 32.0% in 1968.

Seen in the middle, switching the PC Party for the Reform Alliance does not help either. Our newest high, 23.6%, is still a long distance from our lowest low from outside the period.

In fact, these results only really follow a clear pattern if you merge the two, as seen at the bottom. Now we get results that fall in line with history, all right about 38%, within 0.3% to be exact. You'll find many results above this, and many below, which tells me that the "historic" voting patterns of Ontario are best shown, during the 1990s, as a "divided right".


So, we've concluded that in order to best compare to history, we should simply add the PC+CA vote, right? Not so fast. Next, look at Alberta.

At the top we can clearly see the "Tory" line makes little sense.

The middle line is far better, and though there is a drop down to the 50's from the 60's, both before and after, this line fits in much better with our historical trends.

However, the bottom shows why it is not a simple addition. 72.4% would be, by far, the largest we've seen. Even the "low" of 66.9% only compares to the massive Mulroney majorities, or the Harper majority of 2011, at a time when the country had a Liberal majority.

As such, in Alberta, it clearly makes more sense, in context, to "replace" the PC vote totals with that of the Reform Alliance for the period in question.



I don't have a PEI graphic ready just yet, but, I have created tables like this before. In that table we see a pattern at the top; in that it is the PC Party that retained the "vote pattern" of right-wing voters in the province, with the Reform Alliance never able to establish itself.


As such, this post is sort of a "heads up" for what to expect when I do finish transcribing all this data. While I do plan to have a "clean" version of votes from 1988-2000, I plan to "merge" the numbers for comparison purposes where needed.