Ontario By-election in Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey

The Ontario PC leader, John Tory, won a seat in the legislature last night. It was in some ways a typical by-election. The government candidate, Liberal Bob Duncanson, lost badly while the NDP and Greens made gains. The Liberal mistake was to contest the by-election. It gives voters a free pass to whack the government over various grievances.

I can take a by-election outcome and a calculate a province-wide result by comparing the results to the previous provincial election. Last night's result would produce a virtual tie between the PCs and the NDP in popular vote (with the NDP having a slight edge) but it would give the PC's a minority win - 50 seats. Last spring's Hamilton East by-election, actually won by the NDP, would have given the third party an easy win province-wide victory.

While one should take such projections with a huge grain of salt, there is no doubt that the Liberals performed quite badly in both instances. On this one, where they had the excuse, they should not have nominated a candidate.

B.C. 2005 Election

The B.C. election is coming soon. It is scheduled for May 17. The campaign begins mid-April. I will post on it from time to time.

The only point I would make today is that, because it appears the B.C. Liberals are heading for re-election, brand name confusion with their federal cousins means that polls of FEDERAL party preference over the next few months are likely to be distorted by the presence in British Columbia of a provincial election campaign. Specifically, it is likely that federal Liberal support will be higher than it would otherwise (possibly the NDP too) as the federal Liberals benefit from provincial spillover. It will likely take until the end of June for that to filter out.

Three good sites for following the election are:

1. The Election Prediction Project B.C. election website: http://www.electionprediction.org/2005_bc/index.html Anyone can enter their opinion on the race in each riding on this site. Most of the comments are uninteresting but occasionally you see some important on the ground observations you can’t get in the conventional media. For example, one riding likely to be competitive is Oak Bay-Gordon Head. The conflicting opinions on the site on the riding page are quite helpful in understanding the micro political climate here.

I don’t understand the process that translates the often contradictory comments into seat outcomes but the overall predictive record of the site is reasonably good.

2. The UBC election stock market site: http://esm.ubc.ca/BC05/index.php
This site gives you the expectations of the investors. It is based on a “wisdom of crowds” or “wisdom of the market” assumption. It tells you specifically what the collective expectations of the participants are at any given moment.

3. The Nodice 2005 B.C. election page has a comprehensive round up of links and all the background information you could ask for.

Media, politics, Democrats and Social Security

I have been both busy and vacationing and not posting. Time to start up again.

Josh Marshall has been mostly writing detailed posts about the fight over Social Security, but every once and awhile he stands back and delivers a really insightful brief essay on the over arching politics of it all. A recent posting begins thus:

One of the Democrats' greatest problems -- far more insidious than many realize -- is their desire to gain the approval and approbation of establishment Washington and its A-list pundits. The habit or inclination is rooted in a political world that ceased to exist 20 or 30 years ago, and even then was wrong-headed.

The rest can be found by clicking here. It is worth reading.

Two recent polls

SES and Ekos both recently released national party preference polls. Interestingly, the SUN news headline on the SES poll was: Liberals sinking in polls. The headline from the Toronto Star, publisher of the Ekos poll, was: Liberals within range of a majority. You would think the polls were in dramatic conflict.

The SES numbers are Liberal - 38, Conservatives - 29 and NDP -17, with the Bloc at 45% in Quebec. Ekos has the Liberals with 40.2%, Conservatives at 26.5% and NDP - 18.7% while the Bloc is at 45%, overall very similar to SES.

The SUN report made much of a 10 point Liberal drop in Ontario from 54 to 44 from a previous poll in the fall, attributing it, without any evidence, to the controversies over the sponsorship inquiry and same sex marriage. It is almost certain, however, that the 54% number in the earlier poll was simply wrong. In the 2004 election, the Liberals actually received 44.7% of the vote, close to the figure the recent SES poll . My view is that polls that deviate very strongly from election results should be viewed sceptically. Rather than a dramatic shift, it is more likely that opinion in Ontario hasn’t changed much since the last election. News reports like the one in the SUN newspapers rarely contextualize poll numbers by comparing them to the last election.

It turns out that the Star’s headline that the Ekos poll implied a Liberal majority was probably right. However, this is also true of the SES poll, although just barely. Using the Ekos numbers and my forecasting model, I have the Liberals at 163 seats (Conservatives - 66, NDP - 25, BQ - 54), while in the SES they are at 156 seats (Conservatives - 82, NDP - 20, BQ - 50). A bare majority in a 308 seat House is 155.

In both polls what pushes up the Liberals are large apparent gains in Saskatchewan and B.C. - that is what puts them over the top. However, the polls suggest the Liberals would perform better (much better in the case of B.C.) than they have in elections in these two provinces over the past few decades. This seems on the face of it to be unlikely. I conclude therefore that despite these results an early election still seems likely to produce another minority.

U.S. Social Security Debate

I have been following the debate over U.S. President George Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security mostly through the writings of Josh Marshall of http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/. I think this rather lengthy post, a critique of a column by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, does an excellent job both of explaining the critical policy matters at issue and delivering perceptive insights into the tactics of the campaign of those wishing to destroy the current system.

For an entertaining comic take on the issue check out the Social Insecurity video by Samantha Bee of the Daily Show.

More Iraq

Thinking further on the Juan Cole post from two days ago, it occurs to me that the U.S. is hostage both to events in Iraq, and the aspirations of the Shi'ites. When things did not work out according to their fantasies of 2003 and they became bogged down in a bloody counter-insurgency campaign, they had little choice but to begin listening to the locals in ways they had not originally intended. I think their core goal was to establish a friendly stable regime in the only nation in the middle east other than Saudi Arabia with large reserves of oil.

If today's posting by Cole is any indication, it is even possible the U.S. will eventually leave Iraq having been ushered out by a new democratically elected government that desires nothing more than to be rid of the occupiers.

Iraq Election

Not surprisingly George Bush is trumpeting the Iraq election as a great success.

Juan Cole provides some useful context that takes some of the shine off Mr. Bush's triumphalism.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded.

Robin Wright's column in the Washington Post, which quotes Cole, provides a good summary in today's paper, including the White House spin.

And Kevin Drum reminds us that, um, we have seen this all before.