they called the election on the popular vote falling, and i understand why they did that.

but, i'm not at all convinced.

they're barbarians, you expect that kind of shit.

don't say we didn't arm the kurds.

yeah, but are those american potatoes, though?

you know, i've noticed this before - whenever my computer gets into a crash/reboot cycle, the thing they go after is adblock.

that seems to be the thing the cia is most concerned about - that i watch the fucking ads.

listen...

i have no fucking interest at all in the ads. there is a 0% possibility that i'm going to even look at them, except maybe to laugh at them. the only way i'm going to ever click on an ad is by accident.

you can't brainwash me. i'll close me eyes. i'll scream "la-la-la". i just won't watch it.

and, the more i see an advertisement for your product, the less likely i am to want to buy it. like, the act of seeing an ad is enough. i don't care what the ad's about - it's mere existence is enough to get me to boycott you.

i actually think i'm at the ultra-paradoxical stage with it, where over-exposure to advertising has brought me to the point where i get a negative reaction to it. nothing about the ad really matters to me - just knowing it exists is enough to make me hate you.

i've mentioned before that i couldn't live on an internet with ads. if they somehow break adblock, if they take this away, if they force the ads on me, i'm going to end up going to the library and reading books instead. it's actually one of the reasons i stopped watching tv.

i just can't handle it. and, i'll fight it as hard as i can.

i was being lazy in leaving my computer on and my internet on. so, if you want to get aggressive with me, i'll go back to disconnecting from the internet when i'm not using it. that's fine.

i want to clarify a point in case it's unclear.

if singh hangs around for a few elections, if he can hold off the inevitable leadership challenge, he could end up with a bigger and more durable coalition than layton could put together. this isn't really a question of total appeal - there's lots of indo-canadians here, and the religious left has a history here, too.

but, any kind of longterm coalition or tent that singh is going to build is going to be dramatically different than layton's - and the outcome of this election is probably going to be more about breaking up layton's lingering coalition than building singh's new one.

the older parties, the liberals and conservatives, have roots in their communities that go back centuries. that's not true of the ndp, which shifts in allegiances through different leadership phases. tommy douglas' base was drastically different than broadbent's, which was different than layton's, and singh's will be unrecognizable from any as well, should he be able to build it. so, if you're building a model, it would not be a good idea to rely on past ndp results the same way you'd rely on past liberal results. the same thing is true of the bloc, even if it's only going through it's second shift. remember - it started off as a splinter of the conservatives.

douglas was a religious reformer, a prairie populist, that preached the "social gospel" of wealth redistribution, as well as fire and brimstone for the gays. he supported eugenics, and opposed abortion. he was wildly popular amongst farmers, but viewed rather derisively by people in the cities that saw him as a bit of a nut. in the end, he was pushed out by the first lewis, a socialist jew, who tried to swing the party to the hard left. it wasn't even until broadbent in the late 70s that they became the union party, and only after unionism had started to decline. layton took over after nafta ripped them apart and tried to convert them into a party of latte liberal urbanites that supported small businesses, family values and social programs. in the end, he built a coalition of quebecois leftists, rural libertarians, young people and advocates for the urban poor. mulcair, a right-leaning former quebec cabinet minister who ran on eliminating the deficit, lost quebec and lost young people, but kept some of the party's legacy in tact. this is what singh inherited: a dying union movement, skeptical anti-poverty advocates and a mish-mash of rural parties.

singh is not going to do well with much of any of these groups. his coalition may include students, if he can hold them, but he's not going to win back quebec. he has a lot of work to do in winning over antipoverty activists, as well, and in the end may abandon them. his coalition is more likely to include ethnic voters in the 905 and in vancouver that have historically leaned a little right, but see something of themselves in him. and, where his religious beliefs are a liability in winning secular leftist voters, he may find it an asset in winning votes in more upscale, ethnic-dominated areas of vancouver and toronto.

so, how do you fix the model?

you need the data first.

i'm not going to break this down in too much detail; i've done this in the past. but, i want to use this chart to explain why this kind of modelling doesn't work well in these kinds of situations.

what he's doing is taking national and regional polls and trying to cram the results into local ridings. he may look to past results in specific regions, but that's just going to confuse the outcome, if you try to separate it from context - sometimes, when you overcomplicate, you just confuse things. and, then you've got rounding - so he adds an extra 3.5 ndp seats as a consequence of rounding error. it's bizarre.

so, i look at this and i see 2.6 seats for the ndp in the east and the initial question i ask is "where". and, if your model throws out 2.6 seats (are you rounding up or flooring on that? or threatening to cut the seat in half and giving it to the one that objects?), and you can't find where they actually are, you need to pull back from the model, right?

well, i took a look through the map, and the only seat he's calling for the ndp is the one in st john's, newfoundland. so, his map contradicts his model. so much for mr. fournier.

he would appear to actually be calling for liberals 24, conservatives 7, ndp 1. if the ndp are lucky - that seat is listed as a toss-up.

likewise, i can only find one seat for the ndp in quebec, and it's in montreal, and isn't outremont. crucially, he has the bloc listed second, probably because they did well in that riding in the duceppe years. but, an urban riding that voted for duceppe isn't going to find blanchet nearly as appealing - this is a statistical relic, and all you're doing by bringing in duceppe numbers is confusing the reality of it.

that's probably true for the bloc across the province. blanchet may appeal to the nationalist core of the old bloc, but he's lost the social democratic bent that gave them their actual electoral victories. if they stick with the ndp - and vote qs provincially - that's going to leave the bloc uncompetitive in montreal. and, that is indeed likely the difference between the 30% they're at and the 40%+ they ran at under duceppe. but, how many seats do qs have, in a riding system that is more favourable to them?

if the ndp hang on, it will indeed likely be on the island.

but, i wouldn't count on it...

likewise, he has them winning three toss-up seats in toronto (despite local polling having the liberals running at 70% in the 416), holding three very close ridings in hamilton, holding a toss-up in london, and holding a toss-up in windsor, along with two more likely ridings here. so, that's ten seats, if you add them up - but at least seven of them are a coin toss. he also has them winning five seats in northern ontario based on the strength of ndp results ten or fifteen years ago, when all of the polling i'm aware of has singh doing exceedingly poorly with rural voters, for obvious reasons. and, three of them are toss ups.

so, that's fifteen seats - but ten of them are a coin toss, and that coin toss relies on the premise that people look at jagmeet singh and see jack layton, a pretty sketchy premise, given the actual data in front of us.

i penciled them in at five, and i was being conservative when i did.

i counted five liberal seats in the prairies (4 in wininipeg + ralph), and 2 ndp seats (niki ashton + one in saskatoon). so, why does he have the numbers he does? where? show me. his model is going to overshoot conservative numbers in winnipeg, on the strength of the conservative rural vote, and this actually happens every election, and the pollsters just don't fucking learn. so, when i said 5-7 in winnipeg, i was undoing the aggregates on purpose. but, still - he needs his numbers to accurately reflect his actual map, or he's just demonstrating that his model is flawed.

we agree that alberta will probably go entirely conservative, and by large margins. except he still has the ghost of linda duncan holding on...

i can count 13 ndp seats and 9 liberal seats on the map - numbers that are at least consistent, and that i have less disagreement about, even if it's by accident.

so, on his map, he has the ndp winning 32 seats, including ten very tentative wins in ontario that rely on singh getting the layton vote out. i had them at 20, give or take a reasonable error in bc. what i need to do to put the numbers in line is take that layton phantom effect out of the numbers - something i'm more than willing to do - and round them back down out east.

so, singh will need a divine intervention to get to 37 - and maybe he's into that, but i'm not. my numbers do not attempt to quantify the effect that jack layton's ghost will have on current ndp voters, many of whom were toddlers at the turn of the century, and are consequently more realistic...

again: the difference is those ten toss-up votes in ontario, and another handful in quebec and out east, which there's not any convincing evidence for - it's a relic of an over-reaching model. essentially all of the 15-17 seats should be liberal at the end of the day. the exaggerated bloc seat totals is also a relic of duceppe that is neither justified by the current political alliances nor by the actual numbers. that takes the ndp down to 20, the bloc down to 30 and the liberals all the way up to 161 - and is all in the east.

what's left is the question of the 905 and urban ontario - will the conservatives get 37 seats in ontario as the model suggests or 6 as i trollingly lowballed them at? the fact is that the 905 polls have them well ahead, meaning they're poised to not just hold but pick up. and, we'll see if the greens can split or not, but, i acknowledge the sketchiness of this in my write-up, and i'm less confident in really pushing it down.

as has become the norm, this election will be won or lost in the 905. and, if we split the difference between 37 and 7, you still have the liberals with 176 seats.

i tried to avoid this until the last minute, but there you go.

so, to summarize, themes are:

1) the ndp retreats from secularism and gets wiped out of the east as a result of it.
2) the greens had an opportunity to walk into the vacuum left by the ndp but squandered it, opting to a run as a rural christian party, instead. they will see almost no gains, but they may take a good bite out of the conservative vote in the east.
3) the conservatives are in the process of packing up and going back to where they came from, but they're taking their time in doing it.
4) the bloc are half-back. not really. last gasp....last hurrah...
5) the liberals win by default - because they're the natural governing party.

so, i stopped for a second around 23:00 last night and crashed, unexpectedly, instead.  i had a few system crashes over the weekend (i suspect that csis is trying to stop me from spreading russian propaganda about the election at the last minute :\) which forced me to retrace my steps a few times  but, the master is updated and synced, now, and ready to be broken apart.

the sewers never really resolved themselves this week, forcing me to run the water for most of the weekend, and exposing that the p-trap may be a dominant but not a total cause. the temperature seems to have something to do with it. and, i'm increasingly suspecting that the natural gas is wired incorrectly through the piping, because there seems to be excess natural gas in the lines, as well. it's a subtle difference in smell, and i wouldn't have been able to tell the difference even a few months ago. but i'm (unfortunately) gaining the experience to differentiate it. i need a plumber to figure this out. as far as i can tell, he just still hasn't come home yet so the lines are still sitting dry upstairs. i'll need to send him a note when i get back this morning...

i need to pick up an rx balance and get some end-of-the-month grocery shopping in so it does look like i'm going to vote this morning. i haven't seen any last minute voting shifts that change my analysis - i still think the liberals are headed to a majority, and the ndp "surge" is mostly just a bullshit bradley effect, except in bc. and, the conservatives are actually probably headed for the lowest levels in the east that anybody's seen in decades.

so,

- expect the ndp to poll in the 20s in bc and in the low teens almost everywhere else. weak ndp support east of the rockies will be a theme. they may keep most of their seats in bc, but it's going to be brutal elsewhere, and expect calls from the east for jagmeet singh to resign immediately.
- expect the liberals to poll in the 40s in ontario, quebec and the east and the 20s (or lower) in the west. exceedingly weak liberal support west of winnipeg will be a theme. but, it may make little difference in terms of actual seats if they get out the vote in the east. they're essentially set to lose seats they don't have much chance of competing in by even larger margins than they've ever lost them before. justin may turn out to be the less popular trudeau, in alberta.
- expect the conservatives to poll as high as 70% in the west, but as low as 10% in quebec (and in the 20s in ontario and the east). weak conservative support east of winnipeg will be a theme. expect people to be taken aback and surprised by low support levels in ontario. scheer took a hard right turn in the last weeks of the campaign that could have long-term consequences. the narrative over the next few years may be how the conservatives are retreating to their roots as a western protest party, and their decline in ontario may actually just be starting - it could get worse for them.
- expect the greens to poll in the teens in the far west of bc, in rural ontario and in the eastern provinces and lower than that elsewhere. the greens will not get the breakthrough people projected earlier in the campaign, but they have put themselves on the map nonetheless, perhaps unexpectedly (and for some people undesirably) as a primarily rural party that does not do well in the urban cores. i don't know of any other rural green party. but, they seem to be attracting the same kind of rural voters that picked sanders over clinton in 2016 by large margins, and it could throw a serious wrench into conservative support levels here. they ran on jesus, that's what happens when you do that. but, it's good for democracy to give the conservatives a run for the rural vote, too. i'm disappointed in the green campaign, too - they could have and should have run as a secular environmentalist alternative to the liberals, not as a christian left alternative to the conservatives and ndp. greens should be running on the future; maybe it wasn't purposeful, but by picking up ideas like the responsibility to protect and by focusing on christian values, they ran on the past and scared urban people (including me) off. it's not going to win them seats in the rural east, but it may split the vote enough to let the liberals win in unexpected places.
- expect the bloc to poll in the high 20s or low 30s in quebec, and to be shut out of montreal, which will expose the limitations of flirting with running on the right in far left quebec. they seem to think this is a smart strategy; i think the results will demonstrate that it's not. so, expect a moderate increase in bloc support, but also expect them to come up against a brick wall in terms of seat counts and to find themselves with little opportunity to expand further. the bloc may win their core base of constituents back, but the strategy they used is a dead-end, and opens up more questions than answers. it's going to be another four years of soul searching for the bloc...

as it is, my vote is local, not national.

if i were to use a ranked ballot (which is the electoral reform i'd prefer), i'd vote like this:

1. green
2. liberal
3. ndp

the election will be a tight race between an incumbent ndp mp with a bourgeois voting record (he's not a hard leftist new democrat) and a popular former liberal mpp that is known for anti-poverty activism. as an odsp recipient, as well as a secular leftist, my self interest is to vote for the local liberal candidate. she'll be a prominent voice to the left of justin trudeau, but she's also well connected enough to the banking establishment to actually get heard. brian masse will sit in the house as a representative of the wealthy autoworkers, and nobody else, and essentially just get ignored. as mentioned: from a purely local perspective, this is actually not that hard of a choice. she's obviously the better candidate.

the conservatives will probably finish a distant third, but conservative voters in an area like this are also mostly recent immigrants and the fact that upwards of a third of the region (if not the riding, right now) is recent immigrants opens some questions as to the strength of the conservative vote. it's a mostly white riding, with large numbers of international students from india (who i presume mostly cannot vote.) and a muslim (mostly arab) minority of something like 5%+. the conservatives have run conservative muslims here in the past, but are opting for a pro-market east asian this time around in an attempt to key in on the ethnic vote. we'll see which approach works out better for them (i suspect the former). in this election, the conservatives are unlikely to seriously compete, but the trendlines are something to keep an eye on. there's some evidence that the conservatives may be more competitive in the riding next door, which has a larger ethnic voting bloc that would naturally lean to the right.

it will be close - potentially very close. a few votes could swing this. so, i feel compelled to vote.

one last time....

the liberals are supposed to do better than this