Nowhere else in Ontario are Kathleen Wynne's Liberals polling worse than in southwestern Ontario. That makes the region a microcosm of the entire election — with the PCs dominant in the rural parts, the New Democrats well-positioned to pick up urban Liberal seats and the overall winner to be decided between the two.

this is the exact wrong analysis.

the fact that the liberals are polling worse in southwestern ontario than they are anywhere else makes the projections there inapplicable to places that they are polling better. when you see a situation where a party is doing worse in a specific area than they are anywhere else, you don't take that as the rule and extrapolate it, you eliminate it as an outlier. grenier is merely exposing his own biases, but that is the status quo in this election: the entire media establishment decided the liberals were hopeless before the writ even dropped.

if the liberals are underperforming their average in the southwest then that necessarily implies that they're overperforming it elsewhere, doesn't it eric? yeah. that's right. it does, doesn't it?

if you look at the graph in the article, it seems to me like a lot of liberals are voting strategically to defeat the pcs in areas that are both historically strong pc ridings and ridings where liberals are currently being seen as distant and toronto-centric. i've talked to some people in windsor, and while the logic is often blurry, the basic idea is that they think the liberal party doesn't care about the region and the ndp will spend more money here. the people here seem to feel abandoned by capital flight, are attaching that to liberal policies, are concluding that liberals only care about toronto, are feeling personally distraught by this and are concluding, for whatever specious reason, that the ndp have a deeper personal investment in ensuring the region thrives. unfortunately, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the liberals really do need to focus entirely on toronto, because it's the only place they can win.

if the result of a 20% swing from the liberals to the ndp in southern ontario is that a handful of seats swing from red to orange, that's going to skew the polls pretty hard - but not make a really big difference at queen's park.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-southwestern-ontario-1.4684641