with the pieces in place, is it time for a 2019 election preview?

it's kind of insane, but i'm going to do this.

- the election of andrew scheer has put the socred/tory coalition in some serious jeopardy. he doesn't seem to have gotten any kind of a bump over the interim leader, who was probably a better choice for prime minister. given that inter-election polling always overestimates tory support (due to undecideds), this 30-33% polling average is probably something more like 25-28%, and these are approaching historic lows. these trendlines are old, and almost nothing was going to reverse them. in a lot of ways, andrew scheer is the right person to lead the socred part of the base, but he has almost no appeal to the center; a centrist would have just split the party, again. 30% is probably a ceiling for the conservatives in the next election, who are going to be more focused on tending to their base (which is really about one thing: abortion) than they are going to be on winning the most seats. as almost all millenials that would have been pcs grew up into liberals, they will not have a personal connection to the party, or feel any need to ride out a (perceived) temporary shift right. they will lose what few urban ridings they still have - including, potentially, in alberta. moving into 2023, the conservative party is going to see itself as a largely spent force, representing only a fringe of mostly aging voters that are concerned about social issues that the broader society considers settled. if this party comes back some time in the late 20s or early 30s, once it's base of boomers has died, it's going to be a completely different animal, and it's not really possible to predict it. i think it's more likely that the conservative party is in the process of unravelling back to it's socred base, while the tories have just been absorbed by the liberals - and the future is perpetual obscurity.

- the ndp is going to get trounced in 2019. it might think it's rebranding itself for a quick shot at power, but what it's really doing is entering a long process of transition. you don't build a new foundation on top of a leaky one, you have to rip it up first. so, how badly it does is going to depend on how quickly it can build a mobilized force of voters in it's new support base: if it cannot build this base in the next two years, it is going to be completely decimated. it will likely be somewhere in between: they may win some urban ridings, but i would also expect them to lose most of their remaining left-wing voices and most of their quebec mps, leaving a small group of mostly ethnic mps that singh will rebuild the party around. this is going to allow the party to redefine itself as a voice of minorities, and it's policies will shift along with it, into a space that is less concerned about advancing socialism and more concerned about religious pluralism. the new ndp is going to be a moderate conservative party, concerned about maintaining the sanctity of traditional culture, in advancing the dignity of the individual and in the application of the universality of human rights - one nation under god. might make the masons proud. they are going to find themselves fighting with the liberals for ethnic votes that would have leaned ideologically conservative in the last century, as well as for moderate christian votes.

- for 2019, the greens are going to, in some way, benefit from the ndp's swing away from the left, but it remains to be seen if this is going to be a fleeting protest vote or something more substantial. with the ndp abandoning the left, and the liberals just being dishonest, leftist voters are going to either need to find an outlet or accept being disenfranchised - and they may choose the latter, opting for struggle on the ground over participation in a bourgeois system full of lying and back-stabbing politicians. unfortunately, the current leadership of the green party is centrist to centre-right on most issues, and likely not particularly able to take advantage of what it should see as a clear opportunity. whether through hostile takeover or through retirement, the greens must eventually adjust to this new spectrum - but due to the continued existence of hanger-ons, 2027 is a better prediction than 2019, and in the process they may very well lose the opportunity to a new party.

- the ndp will not do well in quebec. is this opening up a space for the bloc? well, if you moved from the bloc to the ndp because you're a secular and federalist leftist, the liberals might not offer you what you want, and you maybe find yourself floating back. the bloc, however, are also shifting right, meaning quebec voters may find themselves badly disenfranchised. i would expect a new political force to appear in quebec within the next 5 years. it may be more regional than explicitly sovereigntist, but it may also be the only social democratic force in the country.

- the liberals are going to take a hit on voter apathy, as they have not lived up to even the weakest forms of expectation. this is probably the biggest bust of a government in the country's history. but, trudeau remains lucky: he doesn't have a serious opponent. the biggest opponent that the liberals are going to have in the 2019 election is apathy. they won a lot of close seats in 2015, and they will probably lose most of them. but, they will probably gain seats, too. where the other two parties are in a free fall that neither will be able to stop, the liberals are trying to maintain momentum in the face of friction created by their own feet-dragging. the best way for the liberals to fight this apathy is to actually do a couple of the things in their election platform, but that's probably not going to happen. nonetheless, they will likely keep their majority, and could even expand it.

i'd expect the results to look something like this:

liberals: 39%
conservatives: 28%
ndp: 13%
greens: 13%
quebec party: 5%
other: 2%

directed movements:
conservatives--->liberals (red tories, continuing)
ndp--->greens (protest voters & leftists, picking up)
ndp--->quebec party (historical bloc voters)
liberals---->non-voters (apathy, not as low turnout as 2011 but trending downwards)