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". . . with the Conservatives winning between 92 and 132."

It is truly disheartening to think that there still people who support this crooked, fascist regime.

Jessica Murray
they have roughly 100 safe rural seats. i'm starting to think they may poll around 20% in the end - and in that scenario i'd *still* give them around 100 seats.

meanwhile, the liberals could poll at 30% and win 20 seats if the ndp are ahead of them across the board.

it's just how the vote is distributed. if you want to take this party down, you have to find a way to compete in the sticks.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-aug28-1.3206184

i wouldn't be surprised if you see the greens push ahead of the conservatives in the *next* election, but it requires two pre-conditions:

1) the ndp has to break it's base, pushing them into the greens & liberals. i think this is almost a given. if mulcair hangs on long enough to form the first ndp government, it will almost certainly be the last ndp government. this is the overriding trend in areas where there are three parties - they get one chance, they prove themselves conservatives and they obliterate themselves. mulcair has a lot in common with bob rae.

2) the conservatives need to get stuck in an existential struggle with the christian right, which will force them to swing right on social issues. of course, the party heads will seek to avoid this at all costs. but, if they do poorly enough in this election, they will have no choice. they've been told to be moderate, and wait it out. if they get beaten down to third this election, that strategy will have clearly failed.

in such a scenario, the conservatives would move back into their previous place on the spectrum before the tory-reform merger as a minor party on the far right. this is the place in the spectrum that the social credit party occupied for many, many years. this party has been all but forgotten, but it was an integral part of the canadian spectrum for 40 years. it didn't disappear so much as it eclipsed the pcs in importance. but, it created a lot of confusion as to what the merger was - it's inherently unstable and must eventually fall apart.

the greens would move into the space the ndp used to occupy.

and, here's the counter-intuitive part: the ndp would move into the space the pcs used to occupy.

only the liberals would remain in place on the spectrum.

of course, harper will no doubt be gone by then. it will be left to somebody that is more socially conservative, like jason kenney, to deal with the resulting mess.

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Cayyce
Not only is it not working, this negative strategy and "nice hair though" commercials couldn't be a bigger disaster and are driving voters away in droves especially women.

Jessica Murray
it's ok - they'll bring them back with a puppet show that inconceivably suggests that trudeau is some kind of hopeless alcoholic. where'd that even come from?

you'd think they'd have learned their lesson with the attacks on chretien's face. trudeau needs to be waiting, tactically, to pounce.

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Cayyce
And because these polls rely on traditional ways of contacting the electorate, specifically land lines, they're samples are more than likely to be biased in favour of the Conservative so it's potentially even worse than it currently seems.

Jessica Murray
it's kind of complicated, but it seems to balance itself out relatively well. they weight the results via the census, so if they get less young people in actual results they inflate their weight before they publish. that said, there's a growing consensus that they need to stop weighting under 34s relative to the census because they vote in lesser numbers. most phone firms claim they're doing that now....

i want to update my understanding of the ongoing realignment mildly. i think that the broad, general idea is correct - and that what we're seeing in the election polls up to this point is broadly consistent with the conveyor belt i've described. it seems as though the ndp are going to take a large amount of voters away from the liberals, and that the liberals are very solidly solidfying the red tories as their own - and perhaps even eating into traditional urban conservative support, leaving the conservatives as an almost solely rural party. this is maybe a bit faster than i expected. the conservative--->liberal support is probably being exaggerated by disgust over the duffy scandal, but if the conservatives swing right on social issues under new leadership with a purely rural base then this could end up setting in permanently. it sounds like a dumb strategy, but the mps have to represent their voters. and, if it ends up that badly for them, they're going to see increased competition by entities like the christian heritage party. as soon as they lose power, all their moderating arguments collapse. there's going to be thousands of people that pumped thousands of dollars into the party, and didn't get a single thing out of it - and they're going to be upset about that.

however, it's becoming increasingly clear that the ndp want to leapfrog the liberals to the right. and, while the federal party has historically stayed to the left of the liberals, provincial ndp governments have often been to the right of their provincial liberal counterparts. added to this mix is the fact that thomas mulcair came out of a quebec liberal party that is the major right-wing party in that particular spectrum.

i maintain that we're realigning, and that these are the four ingredients that will stabilize in the new system. however, i think that it is becoming clear that the ndp will fulfil the role of the centre-right party in this new spectrum, while the liberals retain their place on the centre-left.

the election has only just begun. but, a clean sweep by the ndp would have the following ramifications between 2015 and 2019:

1) the ndp would lose it's left base to the greens, as i previously postulated.
2) a rump conservative caucus would place them in competition with openly social conservative parties, and force them to the right. such a rump caucus would be more concerned with it's own existence in the short-run than retaining power in the long-run.
3) a rump liberal caucus would be progressive by nature and force them to oppose the ndp on the left. this will allow them to regain some of the votes they have lost to the ndp as of the moment, and place the traditional red tories back between the ndp and the liberals. they will need a new name, of course.

so, the duffy thing may be acting as a catalyst of unknown strength. and, it seems as though the ndp and liberals are changing places on the spectrum. but, i otherwise hold to my theory - and think it's actually proving rather predictive.

that means my new prediction is as follows:

quasi-fascist ("conservative party"): 20%
*moderate conservative ("ndp"): 40%
left-leaning centrist party ("liberal party"): 25%
**left libertarian party ("green"): 10%
others: 5%

* the ndp's place on the spectrum will not be understood by most voters at the time of voting.

**the new left is not really going to be a social democratic left as it was in the past. we're moving out of the era of industrialized labour. a lot of the policies are similar, but the core principles are at times drastically different. it's something i overlooked previously for brevity.

i can't see them settling somewhere in the low to mid 20s. the strongest argument they have for voting for them is that they're in power. as soon as that begins to erode, the whole stack of cards falls apart. and, you have to understand that the conservative party *is* a stack of cards.

they've never polled under 27 since confederation [if you add up reform & pc support in the 90s]. it's stretching credulity.

if they can keep the glue together, they'll poll closer to 30. i've changed my electoral predictions downwards, but i'm forcing myself to do it - i still can't really actually believe it.

if they start to unravel by consistently polling in the mid-20s polling, they will plunge towards the teens - because they will start to leak on all sides.

liberals won't vote for the tories to keep the ndp out, or at least not in measurable numbers. but, conservatives will vote for the liberals to keep the ndp out - because the conservative propaganda is surreal.

and, if they're no longer seen as seriously vying for power, the argument they've been pushing on their base for years - "patience, minions" - will not just erode, but evaporate. the floodgates will open, and you'll see movement out of the party to their right.

see, you have to understand that stephen harper is a very bad reflection of the people that fund the party. they've got all this money, right? it's not really coming from corporations, like the left likes to imagine. we've got laws against that. it's coming from private citizens that have an agenda for right-wing social policies. the single, biggest driver is abortion. that's not fantasy. it's the blunt truth.

now, suppose you're one of these donors that's been giving this party thousands of dollars a year since 1985 for the sole reason that you want action on abortion. you could very well have sunk upwards of $50,000 into this party. and, what did you get for this? absolutely nothing. you're bound to be irritated, and not likely to want to play this game of pretending to be moderate in order to reposition the spectrum anymore.

so, it's this one way or another thing. they will perform around their historical floor if they can get the perception out that they're still in it. but they can't hold themselves together if they're not competitive - they will collapse into whence they came.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-aug28-1.3206184

those job creation numbers seem slightly exaggerated. 17,000 construction jobs? really?

see, it's probably calculating spin-off jobs and keynesian multiplier effects. the right may be broadly clueless on economics, but the left simply does not understand that keynesan theory assumes a closed economy and collapses under the reality of free trade. that is absolutely imperative to address.

i don't know how many construction jobs the plan would create. that part is valid. the rest is using a 20th century model for a 21st century economy, and needs to be re-examined to take into account the consequences of living in an open, global economy.

if we want this kind of analysis to work, we need to get rid of free trade.

if we want to keep free trade, we need to leave keynes in the past.

there's no middle point. it's a hard choice.

you can have multiplier effects or you can have free trade. you cannot have both.

experience is good and all. but the economic policies of the continent were entirely shattered by nafta. and while it may seem like good politics to reassure voters of steady hands, the liberals really need to be looking forwards. what worked in 1995 will fail today.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-liberals-infrastructure-deficits-1.3206550

Cayyce
....conventionally 1.5 to 3.0 multiplier, is that consistent with your understanding?

Jessica Murray
the multiplier effect relies on forces, like tariffs, to contain things within boundaries as they spread. an open economy doesn't reverse the idea of a multiplier, but it distributes it outside of the country.

let's look at what actually happens in 2015 when you hire construction workers to build a bridge or a road or a monument to the people that built the monument or whatever else - although we have plenty of infrastructure issues, and arguments about holes in the ground and bridges to nowhere as "make work" are currently not well utilized. there's plenty of things to do.

first, chances are the worker has some debt. credit card debt. maybe some loans. a student loan, maybe. that's likely to be the first issue to be dealt with. and, the numbers suggest that this is a pretty big issue right now. so, you have to acknowledge a lot of it gets eaten by the banks right off the bat - it's as dead as an economic driver as debt repayments.

but, if you stick with it, that goes away, eventually - or is at least minimized. and, we're all better off with less people in debt.

so, our construction worker has made positive movement on their debt. what's next? a trip to walmart, of course!

and, where does the multiplier from spending at walmart come from?

the theory suggests that spending at the local hardware store will lead to further purchases from the local hardware supplier, will allow them to expand production, which creates more jobs and etc.

in reality, spending at walmart does not help local suppliers. walmart will not hire more workers, they'll make customers stand in line longer. it may increase production, but production is out of the country.

rather than a multiplier effect, we should be talking about a vacuum effect: all of the money that we print gets sucked out of the country.

in order to get that multiplier effect back in place, there has to be barriers in place that keep the circulation local.

it's free trade or multiplier effects. you have to pick one. you can't have both.

see, the mild green boost after the debate was predictable - but that it would come back relatively quickly was also predictable. and, that it will slowly bleed back (i wouldn't expect to measure it week over week) over the next several weeks is also predictable. mulcair still has lots of time to piss of his base, and he will. it's going to be a series of "last straw" moments had in sequence as, one by one, people burst veins in their head and fall out. it probably won't cost him the election. and it probably won't win the greens any seats. but, it will be realigning for the protest vote minority. protest voters are not swing voters; they don't come back. they vote with their hearts, not their heads. it's the price the party pays for moving to the centre. i don't think they'll hit 10. they might get close.

it's that liberal/conservative swing that you can tie to the scandals, and these are all conservative voters moving out. it's various degrees: the red tories seem almost fully swung, now, and it's traditional conservatives that are lending their vote out because they've just had enough. even while this is happening, the liberals are probably not done bleeding to the ndp - although what's left to go will likely be strategic. this might not be thought out well, because the liberals will become more competitive in certain ridings as upset conservatives vote liberal by default, and out of spite. the result of this kind of strange voting pattern (where liberals vote ndp strategically to beat the conservatives, while conservatives vote liberal or chp out of disgust) is not something i want to predict.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/08/28/ekos-poll-duffy-awakening-slumbering-electorate/

steal?

i admit i don't watch much (any) tv, but this makes no sense to me. i've always assumed that the conservative base is primarily composed of social conservatives and that, if you were to measure it directly, you'd find out that they are the least knowledgeable about basic economic ideas and terminology. the exception to this comes in the form of certain types of investors and just flat out upper class earners, but they're certainly not interested in "jobs and growth" when they vote for the conservatives on "economic issues" - they're concerned about markets and tax rates.

conversely, liberal party supporters tend to actually mostly vote on the economy - it's their primary vote driver.

i've posted about this elsewhere, but i just don't think we can draw much out of these polls as we think we can because we can't really determine what the respondents actually mean. when you have a government that is constantly barraging people with ads that claim they're best at "managing the economy" (which is an absurd concept), it should come as little surprise that they rank highly - not because people like their policies, or even understand them, but because it's what they're bombarded with. the polls become a measure of the effectiveness of the conservative advertisement. and, sometimes you have to wonder if it's even intentional - the poll questions are worded almost identically to the ads. it's the same thing with the leadership question.

so, when the polls shift, then, what are you seeing? ideological shifts? the onset of the ultra-paradoxical phase, where stimulus leads to rejection? collateral damage from something else?

essentially all data you could construct from any source at all suggests the liberals should be blowing away the competition on anything remotely related to the economy. it's really not debatable. it's in the realm of objective fact. and, my experience has been that pretty much everybody that i've ever actually *talked* to has understood this - even very solid ndp and tory supporters.

i'm just not sure this is actually what people care about, or if it's what they've been told they should care about; and i'm not sure that people actually support the government's economic positions, so much as they're constantly being told they're the best on the economy. and, if you unravel the situation with this in mind, and then you look at the polls, you're left to conclude that the opposition parties should be focusing on everything *except* what the narrative has been defined as.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/08/27/can-progressives-steal-the-jobs-and-growth-issue-from-the-tories-absolutely/

jh
Interesting analysis. Im going with collateral damage for something else. For example the cons marketed two things which have benefited the NDP. 1st -"Liberals have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. They managed to balance a budget on the backs of the most vulnerable and then pretend they are progressive. Of course it boggles the mind at why people aren't worshipping the Liberals!"

2nd- Liberal performance on managing the economy is very much debatable. They did balance the budget, but how they did it it, and at what cost is what people may remember. Did the actual Canadian economy grow and jobs increase? Were people better off ? Maybe on paper but most are not going to look that up. They are thinking what they are experiencing day to day.

Arrogance, deception and corruption scandals is what led to devastating election results the last time around. This was marketed very well by the Conservatives so uninformed people did buy into that narrative.

deathtokoalas
yeah, this is another media narrative that i'm convinced is wrong.

if you look at the combined pc & reform vote in 2000, it was 38%. in 2011, he managed a hair under 40% in an election where a lot of liberals stayed home. he got 38% in 2008 and 36% in 2006 - and 30% in 2004. the reality is that he's been spending the last 15 years hanging on to the progressive conservative vote for dear life, and he hasn't cut an inch into liberal support. so, where did all these liberal voters go, when he made a big stink about the scandals?

well, they went to the ndp, eventually, although a few seem to have parked with the greens on the way there. and, if you ask them about this directly, they won't tell you anything about scandals. they'll tell you that they didn't like the idea of electing paul martin (due to his budget cuts in the 90s) and didn't like ignatieff for his foreign policy views.

i'm less pointing out the objective supremacy of the liberal economic record in the sense of it being spotless, and more comparing it to the conservatives. harper & mulroney have both been just atrocious on any metric you could possibly pull out. it's just not a comparison.

i do think the scandals may be swinging some red tories to the liberals.

but i'm broadly leaning towards the ultra-paradoxical phase to explain the polling. you have to keep in mind that harper's economic competence (in the polling public's mind) has generally outperformed his polling results. people will repeat the ads, say the economy is most important and then tell the pollsters they're voting for somebody else. it's like the information sinks in on the surface, but doesn't *actually* sink in in the sense of forming voting intentions. how ads effect us is kind of weird, right? we sing major brand jingles and refer to products by their trademark names (like "mayonnaise"), but, at the end of the day, we buy the better bargain.

i think he may have over-advertised, to the point that now people just get irritated by the ads. and, the more he spends all that money, the harder hit he may end up.

maybe he could try flooding the lab, or something. i'm not giving him any ideas, though.

this is a more important issue than it appears at first glance - and that 15% number is misleading, given the low bandwidth definitions.

for people living in isolated, rural communities the internet is a kind of a gateway to the world. rural culture expects conformity, and often in ways that uphold social arrangements that much of the developed world considers to be out of date. this is the primary reason that the conservatives get such a lock on these constituencies. their policies are not particularly beneficial to farmers, but their perceived ideology places them as a buffer to protect their purity from infiltration by the outside world.

it sounds trite and cliched. but, wiring rural canada may be the only way to break the conservatives' perpetual lock on rural communities. and, as such, this is really a social engineering plan - one that both the liberals and the ndp (as well as the greens) ought to be backing with the strongest language. it would be very smart politics for them to stand up on this - and follow through with it.

that is, of course, why the conservatives will likely stall on it. they'll do it, sure. but only slowly, and with obfuscations that retain the national post as the de facto dominant source of information. this is simply not going to be in their interests until the dull roar turns into a resounding scream.

rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/fact-check/2015/08/fact-checking-conservatives-rural-broadband-strategy

i'm glad somebody did this, but it's youse guys...

first off, ivr actually has a far better track record than self-selecting online panels. this idea that you've got kids mashing numbers or whatever is kind of silly. but, the lack of randomness in the online polling is a significant problem - and this kind of polling has tended to do very poorly in shifting elections near election dates as a result of it [the last ontario election is an example where phone polling was very accurate and online polling was way off]. in stable campaigns, it's less of an issue. in this election, i would expect to see wide fluctuations, which is the particular weakness of the panel method.

after the bc election, firms have indicated that they will pay closer attention to overweighting the youth vote. they claim they got it wrong because they weighted young people by their size in the census, rather than their likelihood to vote. that correction would have taken most of the polling into the margins. this is a valid thing to point out, but it's not dependent on the survey method - and they claim they're adjusting for it. we'll see how that works out.

that said, this particular ivr poll is probably pushing the margins a little. that's an important point you forgot to mention. when a polling firm says they've got the ndp at 40 and the conservatives at 23 with a 3% margin of error, 19 times out of 20, what that actually means is that they claim there's a 95% chance that the ndp are between 37 and 43 and the conservatives are between 20 and 26. a little common sense will suggest that the ndp are probably closer to 37, and the conservatives are probably closer to 26. note that that also puts the liberals between 27 and 33, and comparisons to previous polls would suggest they're probably still in the 20s, anyways.

but, expanding on the regional part - i think the ivr polling had the ndp at 32% in alberta. that's a pretty good showing in a federal election for a party that isn't the conservatives. and, given the circumstances, it's entirely believable. but, it's really just good for second place everywhere outside of edmonton. the difference between 34 and 37 nationally would not be much if it works out purely to that kind of boost in alberta. they also had them in first in ontario, which is less believable. but, even a nice ndp bump in ontario is probably not going to make a lot of difference if it's almost entirely in traditional conservative-liberal races, and just ends up splitting the vote - while not making a dent in the conservative dominated rural areas. the reality is that the conservatives could easily win a plurality of 50+ seats in ontario with 25% of the vote, given the nature of the rural/urban split - and that they get very quickly diminishing returns as that number increases. they could get walloped in toronto, and still end up with the most seats.

the polling also broadly indicates that support for the ndp is largely "leaning", and that current snap polls may consequently be exaggerating support for the ndp and underestimating support for both the bloc and the liberals.

something else to keep in mind is to look at the swings and ask yourself "does this make sense?". if you saw a poll with a 10% swing between the ndp and the conservatives, you'd be wise to be wary. in the ivr poll, there was an apparent 6% swing from the conservatives to the ndp, which had the firm claim it was clear that the ndp was gaining at the expense of the conservatives. but, you can disentangle that a little if you look at it carefully.

you could first take note of the margin of error to cut it down to 3%. and, then you might want to take note that the liberals went up by 2% and the greens and bloc each went down by 1%. that leaves a 1% swing between the conservatives and the ndp, which is likely accurate if it's restricted to alberta - which makes sense, in context.

yeah. that's right. keep lobbing nonsense back and forth. the banks love it.

you want to know the actual truth?

trump would likely relax border controls. he'll very quickly fold to business interests. if he somehow wins this thing, nobody will even remember this phase of the campaign.

this guy is the biggest rubber stamp ever.

although you'll have to expect a lot of things will go "missing", too.