Upcoming elections:
SEP 11 - Sweden - unclear (might not cover)
OCT 03 - Quebec - likely huge CAQ majority (might not cover)
NOV 01 - Israel - Bibi is doing well (will cover)
So yes, I'm not gone; but, as is likely clear by now, the amount I post here has gone way down.
I'll be short with this. I'm continuing to get my life in order with personal improvements. One of said improvements is to stop wasting time. In some, if not many ways, I feel some, if not most, of what I do on this blog, qualifies, as wasting time.
The blog is not going away. I plan to continue posting for years to come.
However, I have made the decision to stop my focus on timing. That means posts will become less often, similar to what you may have seen over the past 6 weeks. I will continue to cover events, but in a far more "short" manner. I'll still point out important things as I see them, but, will no longer feel pressure to report on an election the day after it happens with analysis.
I am still planning on discussing the Ontario election, and will explain how taking off Del Duca's glasses directly lead to a Ford majority. But. I will not be posting that today. Or tomorrow. Perhaps not even this weekend.
I will keep you all updated on any other steps in my path to personal improvement that may impact the blog. For now, however, less frequent posts is the result.
Don't forget to check out my post from earlier today if you've missed it.
This is simply a reminder that the small dots in the ridings mean that riding is winnable. As such any momentum towards the PC party, could, if they do well enough, look like this:
Not saying this will happen. Simply that it could.
Turnout.
This election has been boring. I won't mince words. There have been some policy announcements, interesting debates, and differences between the parties; but overall, this election has been quiet, and boring.
As such, Turnout is going to decide what happens. How, and more importantly, why?
The Liberals. In 2018, it was time for the Liberal government to take a break. As such, many regular Liberal voters didn't show up to vote. You can see this in turnout of ridings with traditionally high Liberal vote shares.
As such, to perhaps grossly oversimplify, higher turnout = more Liberal seats.
Doug Ford has not done a terrible job; and Andrea Horwath has failed to convince anyone new to give her the Premier's chair. Del Duca has done a bad job at getting people to vote Liberal, but, it's unclear just how bad. This is why things depend on Turnout. There are roughly 250,000 voters across ontario debating if they are going to bother voting tomorrow, and the vast majority would vote Liberal. This is, very roughly, 2K voters per riding, with more in Liberal ridings. If none of them bother voting, the Liberals take perhaps a dozen seats, gaining next to nothing over the last election. If all of them bother voting, the Liberals hold the PC Party to a minority.
So, what will turnout be?
My guess: moderate.
Other people doing projection's guess: low
This is why I have more Liberals winning than they do.
As such, this is what my prognosis looks like:
You'll notice more dots. You may notice particular ridings, like Peterborough, or Lisa MacLeod's own riding, where I have perhaps controversial calls. This is due to the impact of the recent storm, which, I think may have a heavy impact on the PC vote. I also have all 3 of the larger "far right" candidates listed as possibilities. This is because I'm not certain that their voters are honest with pollsters, and so I have suspicions.
Regardless, I'm expecting a PC Majority, but, one that's smaller than many others are thinking for the reasons I've outlined. If turnout is low, expect a larger win, if it is high, a minority could be on the cards.
I have a new prognosis (projection) for the ontario election.
Not much to say about it, heavily based on math, with the vast majority of the work being shown via twitter posts. Will comment on it's meaning, before the election.
Just a quick numbers post; on the results of the Australian election, which are still being counted.
Current topline results from the ABC show the following:
but we can do better than that.
This, I think, is a far more useful way to look at things. It includes the in-doubt seats (1 green, 5 labor, 6 coalition) and breaks the teal independents off from the remainder of the independents (interestingly, the teal flavor seems to have taken more votes than all other independents combined!) I went through the 22 seats they ran, and simply added the first round vote result to determine this.
Senate, new grand totals, estimated:
This makes the same assumptions that the above list for the House result does. Interestingly, the Teal Independents could still win a seat, pending how the count goes in the ACT. If so that seat would come from the Coalition.
One thing you may notice is the Sensate would be split 36-36 for both the left and the right. If the count holds, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, even if not really unprecedented.
