Seats:
BC Liberals 45
NDP 39
Independent 1

Popular Vote (rounded to 0.5%):
BC Liberals 44.5%
NDP 41.5%
Greens 10.0%
Others 4.0%

Predicted Voter Turnout: 59% (2005: 62.36%)

Analysis:

The striking similarity of results to the 2005 election seems odd, but there are similarities between the two elections. Both leaders are the same. The chief concern is the same – “Do I have a job, can I care for myself and my family?”. Almost everything else (Crime, Environment, the Gateway project, etc.) is secondary to most middle-aged voters (i.e. the people that actually vote in elections).

A voter in 2005 that voted NDP is very unlikely to vote BC Liberal in 2009, and vice-versa; it is far more likely that a BC Liberal and NDP voter is not likely to show up. If they do show up to vote, that vote is likely to get parked into the third party position – the Green party has been the chief recipient of such protest voting (which can easily be seen by analyzing the Green vote in safe ridings vs. non-safe ridings), but there is now the BC Conservative party to park the vote as well. The Conservatives will cannibalize some of the Green vote in their 24 ridings, hence the Greens will be very lucky this election to get into the teens.

The BC Liberals’ campaign was designed as a mirror image of their 2005 campaign, and took some elements of the 2008 Federal Conservative campaign book; steady-as-she-goes, boring as possible, highly scripted, less scandalous campaigning. For the most part, this strategy cost them some winnable seats, but this tradeoff was made knowing it would drastically increase the probability of a majority government, which is the real objective of the campaign – better to have a 99% probability of winning 45 seats, instead of selecting a campaign style that would have a 90% chance of winning 60 seats, but with the risk of a 10% chance of losing government. It is likely that the low-key style of campaigning will work.

The NDP’s first two weeks in the campaign were disastrous. They were completely unprepared for the onslaught of news concerning the anti-endorsement from environmental groups after making the “scrap the gas tax” pledge official in their platform. The plane trip over some run-of-river projects, with Carole James and everybody on the verge of throwing up, was the peak of the dysfunction of the campaign. Somehow, they pulled out their trump cards and caught two big breaks on the April 24th Friday with John van Dongen’s driving record and Marc Dalton’s emails hitting the news. This gave them much needed breathing room for the weekend and the following Monday.

After this happened, the NDP got their act together, started calling their main pledge “scrap the carbon tax” (not the gas tax), and they capped it off with a successful debate against Gordon Campbell, where Carole James really got underneath his skin and got the Premier to say things that he probably wouldn’t have wanted to say had he had another chance.

The Green Party really never got the exposure they needed in order to make any significant breakthroughs – the prime opportunity they had was with Jane Sterk in the television debate, but her performance can only be described as disappointing.

In terms of economic policy, there are a few items which affect various jurisdictions over the province. By far and away, the biggest plus that has helped the government province-wide has been the continual reduction of income and corporate taxes. This is unquestionably a benchmark that the government can be proud of – aggressive tax reductions will continue to pay off in spades in the future when companies decide where to park their capital.

The biggest minus for the government has been the carbon tax. While it is small on an absolute level, it has split the population significantly in terms of its support; unfortunately for the government, its supporters tend to be of the lower taxation variety, which means they have spent a ton of political capital to implement it. It will particularly affect them in the non-urban ridings.

The government has been generally good on the economic portfolio; they have taken a lot of action to encourage capital into the province. The concern the public has with the BC Liberal government is how much of the province they will be giving away in the process of encouraging investment – a sentiment that Carole James and the NDP have done an excellent job tapping into.

On the issue of crime and justice, neither party will do anything of substance on the issue; it has been a lot of all-talk and no action, which is a contributing factor why Wally Oppal is likely not to get re-elected. He has been the “fall guy” for this issue. Crime and justice is a very complex issue and while silver bullet solutions (e.g. promises to “Hire hundreds of police and prosecutors and fund them”) sound good on paper, this is a societal issue that is not solved with money alone. The very nature of crime and punishment has to be more thoroughly explored, but this process would be very politicized and no government will ever touch it.

Healthcare and education have been surprisingly silent this campaign. The government smartly (from a political perspective) prevented this from ever occurring by massively increasing the health budget over the past four years and gave nominal increases to education. Unfortunately, the real political issue will come up in the future when somebody will eventually point out that the billions of dollars that are being poured into healthcare have gutted practically every other ministry.

The last issue I will touch upon is First Nations – the government has banked a lot of capital into improving the relationship with First Nations. Electorally, my guess is that it will bear them no political fruit. In fact, it might have even cost the government a lot of support.

When one looks at the policies, and estimates of what demographics and population would support the BC Liberal party, the closest stereotype would be that of sub-urban British Columbia. This is easily seen in vote results in places like Richmond and Kelowna.

The NDP have their core support that could be described in two areas – “dense urban” cores (e.g. downtown Vancouver), union areas (e.g. Campbell River).

Both parties have support bases in rural British Columbia; this appeals more to the “decentralize Victoria’s influence and leave me alone” electoral districts; Nelson, BC is a good example of the NDP support, and the Peace River region is a good example of the BC Liberal support.

On a side note, I had no idea how to interpret the advanced voting turnout statistics. I know there is predictive information there to be dredged out, but I spent a couple hours playing with it to no avail.

Seats:

 
Notable seats to look out for:

Boundary-Similkameen – This will be close, but John Slater will pull it out by a narrow victory, despite Joe Cardoso being able to get about 8% of the vote in the riding.

Burnaby North – Richard Lee by a hair, yet again.

Burnaby-Deer Lake – Should be a good test of the Derek Corrigan effect – if he can’t get his wife elected, then he will look quite politically marginalized.

Cariboo (both ridings) – On paper, they look tight, but the NDP candidates should expand their leads.

Comox Valley – Stan Hagen was the only person keeping this a BC Liberal seat.

Coquitlam-Maillardville – Diane Thorne stands a good chance of falling victim to the suburban effect of the BC Liberal policies.

Delta South – Delta has always been a very unique municipality and the NDPers will give Vicki Huntington the push she needs to get above the BC Liberal base vote. The 2005 result will give her the credibility she needs in order to do this.

East Kootenay – Bill Bennett will keep his seat. I do not think Wilf Hanni has enough vote drawing power in this riding.

Esquimalt-Royal Roads – Prediction: NDP 43%, BC Liberals 35%, Greens/Jane Sterk 22%.

Maple Ridge-Mission – Marc Dalton’s email will not cost him a seat. He would, however, be high on my list of “candidates most likely to get kicked out of caucus” after the election.

Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows – Michael Sather ordinarily would likely be a one-term MLA, but he has been outspoken on enough issues (specifically farmland conservation) that, despite the fact that he failed to win the mayoral race, should have enough traction to barely keep his seat. Not opposing the construction of the Pitt River Bridge will likely help him as well.

North Coast – Will be closer than expected.

North Vancouver-Lonsdale – This has the highest potential for an NDP upset, but I do not think it will happen.

Saanich North and the Islands – On paper, this is a BC Liberal area, but the NDP have their stars aligned correctly with a proper candidate to take the necessary Green vote from the region to make this much closer than it was in 2005. My guess is that the NDP takes this riding by a hair, but it will be very close.

Surrey-Fleetwood – This riding involves Indo-Canadian politics, which is unfortunately a topic that I do not have much knowledge of. I am just guessing this will be an NDP seat based off of Jagrup Brar’s status as an MLA and coupled with a BC Conservative candidate, but this is really a coin toss when one factors in the suburban strength of the BC Liberal party. This seat is probably my most ill-informed prediction.

Vancouver-Fairview – Have to go with my by-election data on this one. Although Jenn McGinn loses some support from the boundary change, everything east of Oak Street and north of King Edward screams demographically NDP. The Cambie Line backlash also is still very prevalent in this area.

Vancouver-Fraserview – Kash Heed is facing a much more difficult candidate in Gabriel Yiu. Yiu has had much more time to prepare and there is an interesting ethnic factor involved in this riding – a high density of Chinese population, plus a high density of Indo-Canadians in the central south. It will be very tight.

Vancouver-Kensington – This will be much more closer than it was in 2005, but the NDP and Mable Elmore should squeak it out. Syrus Lee should give Elmore a run for her money, however.

Disclaimer

I have been very wrong in the past before when it comes to making these sorts of predictions, and I make them with the full acknowledgment that I could be wrong again in the future!

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 9 comments | Filed under category Analysis, Predictions.

The 60% requirement on a binary question makes it very difficult for the referendum to pass – for every 2 people voting for status quo, it requires 3 STV voters to offset.

The way that the ballot was worded (from a yes/no question in 2005 to a much more wordy ballot in 2009), combined with the general lack of public education on the nuances on the electoral system, meant that the pro-STV forces had an impossible task at hand.

The referendum was likely to fail on that basis alone – if you have enough people voting on an issue they know nothing about, it will normalize to 50/50. If you have 100 people in a room, and 60% of them don’t know of an issue (which is generally what proportion do not have a good grasp of electoral reform issues), you then require the remaining 40 people in the room to vote 75% in favour of STV in order to have the room reach the 60/40 threshold.

For those of you that understood the previous paragraph, it becomes mathematically obvious that the referendum was never going to be passing. In fact, it was a statistical miracle it ever came to 58/42 as it did in 2005 – most of this was due to the positive wording on the ballot. Specifically the change of the words from the 2005 ballot of “as recommended by the Citizen’s Assembly” to “as proposed by the Citizen’s Assembly” is crucial.

The pro-STV campaign made some serious mistakes. The first mistake was that their main slogan on signage everywhere was “Power up your vote”, which might work well for a video game, but the bulk of the voting populace will be older than the “video game generation”. The second mistake they made was spending too much time on the mechanics of how STV worked (which is an unwinnable proposition). A better alternative would have been to tap into the general detachment the public has with the government (“Don’t like Gordon Campbell or Carole James? Choose STV!”), and to link together the concept of STV and better government.

Conversely, the anti-STV campaign was very successful on their messaging – the single message that “STV will cause larger ridings, which will reduce your local representation” carried. For rural ridings, the argument of “all of your representatives can be elected from a single city” is incredibly powerful, easily understood, and will crush the STV campaign. It doesn’t even matter if it isn’t true (which it is not!), but counter-arguments will get lost in the noise.

In terms of measuring the relative effectiveness of both campaigns, my guess is that Bill Tieleman and David Schreck beat the pro-STV campaign.

Prediction on 2009 referendum on electoral reform:

First Past the Post 54%
BC-STV 46%

STV ridings that vote above 50% for STV: 20/85 (24%). My guess is that Vancouver Island would vote for STV, and dense urban ridings. The interior of the province will reject STV convincingly.

I’ll consider this post to be the obituary on any serious electoral reform in the province. It is too bad considering that STV is the best of alternative systems. For the record, I consider first past the post a good system – just that STV allows voters much more precision in voting. I voted for BC-STV.

Inevitably, if people want “proportional” results in elections with the First Past the Post system, they will need to consider increasing the numbers of members in the legislature to a higher level. The more electoral districts there are, the more proportional the FPTP results will be.

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 10 comments | Filed under category Predictions, Referendum.

Real people with real names

Jordan Bateman – BCL 49, NDP 36
Nick Boragina – BCL 52, NDP 33 (Link to seats predictions: 1, 2, 3)
Milton Chan – BCL 46, NDP 39
Keith Freeman – BCL 42, NDP 43 (Link to seats predictions: 1, 2)
Freddy Hutter – BCL 54, NDP 31
Eric Lanoix – BCL 57, NDP 28 (Link to seats predictions: 1)
Trevor Loke – BCL 49, NDP 35, Ind 1
Vaughn Palmer – BCL 47, NDP 37, Ind 1
Bernard von Schulmann – BCL 55, NDP 30
Andy Shadrack – BCL 46, NDP 39, Ind 1 (note: 86 seats is a bold prediction!)
Kennedy Stewart – BCL 52, NDP 33 (Link to seats predictions: 1)

If you know of any other people posting an election prediction, feel free to add them to the comments, with a link to their website. I will only link to people with real names. My prediction will come out on May 11th. (and no, my prediction won’t be influenced by what other people are predicting!)

The only other prediction mechanism that I would have loved to have seen was the ESM, but alas, they were not open this time around.

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 35 comments | Filed under category Predictions.

53% of the people polled said they would be supporting STV, while 47% said they would support FPTP. Nothing stood out more elsewise given the same size except for generally greater support for STV on Vancouver Island than the rest of the province.

The full results can be found here (Angus Reid, Local Copy).

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Filed under category Polls, Predictions.

BC Liberals – 49
NDP – 36

I have made these predictions exclusively with the information concerning the riding boundary changes. I have not factored in at all recent polling, nor have I factored in anything relating to events that have happened over the past 3.5 years. In other words, this prediction is certainly preliminary and is guaranteed to change between now and May 12th!

You can see the exact predictions in the Ridings page (you can also find it on the top tab).

Some general observations are as follows:

- I have resolved some of the “swing seats” from Bernard’s original posting from 22 to 18. I am not considering Vancouver-False Creek, North Vancouver-Lonsdale, Delta North, Skeena, Burnaby-Deer Lake, Burnaby-Lougheed and Coquitlam-Burke Mountain to be battleground ridings. Conversely, I am projecting Fraser-Nicola, Nanaimo and Stikine to be tight battles.

- It is clear that the NDP are facing an uphill battle. Assuming the NDP keep their 11 swing seats, and capture the 7 BC Liberal swing seats, that will be their route to a majority government – 43 seats to 42 seats. If the NDP do win the election, it will be with a very slim majority.

- One important note is that the NDP do not need to win the most number of votes in order to win a majority government. The BC Liberals have seats where they will rack up massive majorities. The NDP have a far greater amount of marginal seats to fight for, so if they win a majority it will likely be with less popular vote.

- This will, yet again, likely be an election where third parties have no chance of winning seats.  The nearest exception is Vicki Huntington of Delta South.  Oddly enough if the NDP’s performance this election is better than expected and there is a 42/42 split in the legislature, Huntington would be the balance of power.

This election is not over by any means; three months of campaigning remain, and as everybody in politics knows, campaigns do matter.  The BC Liberals and NDP are looking to strike the right chord with the public, and if they manage to strike it, these results will change very quickly.

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Filed under category Predictions.

Vancouver-Burrard: Spencer Herbert, NDP
Vancouver-Fairview: Maureen MacDiarmid, BC Liberal

The reason strictly deals with voter turnout. The areas with high voter turnout in Burrard heavily favour the NDP, while the areas that favour Fairview lean toward the BC Liberals. Both Lorne Mayencourt and Gregor Robertson were strong influences in their respective 2005 local campaigns, and with them gone, the two ridings should revert back to their original biases.

For example, the maps above shows the areas that have greater than average voter turnout from the 2005 election. The BC Liberals have to get the Yaletown corridor out in order to win Vancouver-Burrard, while the NDP have to get the Cambie corridor out in order to win Vancouver-Fairview.

Incidentially, if the BC Liberals manage to capture Vancouver-Fairview, it will be the first time that a government party has won a by-election in a very long time.

Posted by Sacha Peter for BC Election 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Filed under category By-Election, Predictions.