Alberta 2012

[Smid]

Someone commented on my blog saying they werent going to vote WRP because Smith doesnt have children.

Lol. Sounds thirdworldy Christian to me.

The number of people who would base their decision on that would have to be less than half a percent. Sounds like a partisan hack to me, trying to make an issue of it.

[Vasall des Midas]

Someone commented on my blog saying they werent going to vote WRP because Smith doesnt have children.

Lol. Sounds thirdworldy Christian to me.

The number of people who would base their decision on that would have to be less than half a percent. Sounds like a partisan hack to me, trying to make an issue of it.

It's still telling that someone would think this a worthwhile avenue to pursue in Canada. Even as a long shot.
Now if she were four times divorced... like certain German politicians who did get a wee bit of bad press over it[/i]... sure. That could be a salient character issue anywhere in Teh Westrn World.

[Hatman]

Analyzing some key races in Calgary: http://canadianelectionatlas.blogspot.ca/2012/04/2012-alberta-election-analysis-calgary.html

[Hatman]

By the way Smid, you can stop doing the vote redistribution, Hill and Knowlton have already done so for their election predictor: http://predictor.hillandknowlton.ca/#/alberta+2012/swing

ETA: There are a few errors in it though, eg Calgary-Shaw and Lacombe-Ponoka gave wrong numbers to the NDP.

[Χahar]

Why is Lacombe-Ponoka 27% NDP on the redistricted riding boundaries?

[Hatman]

Why is Lacombe-Ponoka 27% NDP on the redistricted riding boundaries?

It's one of the (at least) two errors I've found. I'm going to go through them at some point to see if there are any others. Then, I will make a map

[Smid]

By the way Smid, you can stop doing the vote redistribution, Hill and Knowlton have already done so for their election predictor: http://predictor.hillandknowlton.ca/#/alberta+2012/swing

ETA: There are a few errors in it though, eg Calgary-Shaw and Lacombe-Ponoka gave wrong numbers to the NDP.

Oh, that's great!

I'm going to copy their estimates across... will be interesting to see how similar we are in the ridings I completed. My method was transferring polls as per normal, as anyone else would do, but my treatment of declaration votes (that's what they're called here, and include pre-poll and postals and absentee ballots... so I'm using a similar term for the mobile booth, etc, at the bottom of the vote tables on the Elections Alberta website) - lengthy sentence, I'll start over. My treatment of declaration votes was that they were divided according to the partisan makeup of the polls being split off. By this I mean, instead of saying "Out of the 20,000 ordinary votes cast in polls in Riding A, 5,000 are going to Riding B. There were 800 declaration votes cast in Riding A, so I will transfer one quarter of the PC declaration votes, one quarter of the Liberal votes, one quarter of the NDP votes, one quarter of the Wildrose votes..." instead, I treat each party separately, which mainly affects polarised electorates - if the parts being split off Riding A were heavily NDP, the proportion of declaration votes transferred would be weighted accordingly.

I'm not explaining this well...

I will post an example later this afternoon, so you can see what I mean... probably my calculations in Calgary West, since it doesn't gain anything, just loses parts.

EDIT: Here are my calculations from Calgary-West, to demonstrate the way I've been treating declaration votes. It's not so much a "hey, look at how I do it, so you can do it this way, too" but more of a "this is what I've done, and I only have high school maths, so if I'm doing it wrong, perhaps someone could correct the record for me..."

In 2008, election results in Calgary-West were:

(rather than re-typing, the two numbers in brackets are Ordinary Votes/Declaration Votes)
Enrolment: 44,306
PC: 8,428 (7,572/856)
Lib: 5,693 (5,222/471)
NDP: 401 (360/41)
Wildrose: 2,273 (2,101/172)
Green: 773 (730/43)
Informal: 33 (26/7) (Informal are Rejected and Declined ballots, not spoilt ballots, because spoilt ballots are re-issued, and therefore the voter is counted in one of the party totals already).

Polls 1-13 and 86-100 are transferred to Calgary-Bow. Half of poll 81 is, as well, but it doesn't look like anyone lives in the part that is transferred. Polls 40-50 are transferred to Calgary-Currie. These are totalled as (ordinary votes, just including the actual poll votes, not any of the declaration ones):

Transfer - Voters - PC - Lib - NDP - Wildrose - Green - Informal
to Bow - 13,018 - 2,020 - 1,542 - 105 - 589 - 216 - 8
to Currie - 5,677 - 750 - 527 - 79 - 183 - 120 - 5
Remaining - 25,611 - 4,802 - 3,153 - 176 - 1,329 - 394 - 13

As a proportion of total ordinary votes,

Transfer - PC - Lib - NDP - WR - GRN - Inf
to Bow - 0.266772 - 0.295289 - 0.291667 - 0.280343 - 0.29589 - 0.307692
to Currie - 0.099049 - 0.100919 - 0.219444 - 0.087101 - 0.164384 - 0.192308
Remaining - 0.634179 - 0.603792 - 0.488889 - 0.632556 - 0.539726 - 0.5

So 26.68% of the PC votes were transferred to Calgary-Bow, while 29.53% of Liberal votes, 29.17% of NDP votes, 28.03% of Wildrose votes and 29.59% of Greens votes were transferred there as well. The parts of Calgary West transferred to Calgary-Currie were even more strongly weighted to the NDP (or another way of saying it would be, the NDP performed most strongly in that part of the riding, while PC and Wildrose performed worst in that part). The parts of Calgary-West remaining in the new Calgary-West were the strongest PC and Wildrose parts of the riding - 63.4% of PC voters and 63.26% of Wildrose voters and 60% of Liberal voters remained in the new C-W, whereas fewer than half the NDP voters, and only just over half the Greens voters remain in the new C-W.

Multiplying the number of declaration votes cast for each party, by the proportion of party vote being transferred or remaining gives (after rounding):

PC - 228 to Bow, 85 to Currie, 543 remaining
Lib - 139 to Bow, 48 to Currie, 284 remaining
NDP - 12 to Bow, 9 to Currie, 20 remaining
Wildrose - 48 to Bow, 15 to Currie, 109 remaining
Greens - 13 to Bow, 7 to Currie, 23 remaining

These figures are added to the original vote totals of transfers (ie, ordinary votes transferred), which gives the totals in my earlier post from a week or so back.

[Smid]

Actually... their results in Calgary are looking just... bizarre.

They say they've attempted to come up with notional figures on the new boundaries, but the numbers don't seem to be any different from the actual 2008 results. I realised this when I decided to just temporarily plug in the NDP figures from Calgary-Shaw from last election, and disregard their obvious data entry problem there, and realised that their PC figures were the same as last election, too. Thought that perhaps the boundaries hadn't changed (but too lazy to look it up), so started comparing results in other ridings to actual last election results...

Calgary-West has very obviously changed boundaries, losing (on my estimates) 13,018 voters to Calgary-Bow and 5,677 voters to Calgary-Currie. My new figures (as listed in the earlier thread, gave it as 5,345 PC votes, 3,437 Liberal votes, 196 NDP votes, 1,438 Wildrose votes, 417 Greens votes, for a total of 10,833 votes cast in polls remaining in Calgary West (including a proportion of the declaration votes cast in the old Calgary West).

Polls 1-13 and 86-100 were transferred to Calgary-Bow, and polls 40-50 were transferred to Calgary-Currie.

The Hill-Knowlton estimates were 8,428 PC votes, 5,693 Liberal votes, 401 NDP votes, 2,273 Wildrose votes and 773 Other votes. Meanwhile, Elections Alberta's Report into the 2008 election (Part 11 - PDF following this link is 4.42MB) show the 2008 election results were: 8,428 PC votes, 5,693 Liberal votes, 401 NDP votes, 2,273 Wildrose votes and 773 Greens votes.

I think they've only estimated new results in ridings which were completely split, like Fort Mac or Airdrie, although I'm still looking more deeply. Once I've finished collating their figures into a spreadsheet, I'll compare them to last election's actual figures and find out which ridings differ.

[Smid]

Okay, I have no idea what they've done because even the radically altered Airdrie-Chestermere being split in half to become Airdrie and Chestermere-Rocky View isn't done properly. The new Airdrie riding is exactly the same as the old results for the old Airdrie-Chestermere riding. The only thing they've done, it would appear, is transfer the results of old electorates into new, renamed electorates. The results for the new Calgary-Greenway are identical to the results of the old Calgary-Montrose. I'm yet to find any ridings with notional results that are any different to the actual results at the last election on the old boundaries. The new Chestermere-Rocky View is identical to the old Foothills-Rocky View.

I think the most cringe-worthy, however, is their handling of Fort Mac...

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (old) was split into two ridings. It was completely split, from what I can tell, there were no areas from other ridings added to either one of the new ridings, it was completely just split down the middle to form two new ridings. The relevant numbers are:

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (old):
Enrolment: 26,701
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Greens - 300

Fort McMurray - Conklin:
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Other - 300

Fort McMurray - Wood Buffalo (new):
PC - 4,519
Lib - 1,758
NDP - 550
Other - 300

All they did was directly transfer the results from the old riding into BOTH the new ridings!

[Hatman]

lol, oh dear! I should've taken a better look. Oh well, I guess it's back to the drawing board

Why would they advertise "why are the results different?" when they aren't?

[Smid]

lol, oh dear! I should've taken a better look. Oh well, I guess it's back to the drawing board

Why would they advertise "why are the results different?" when they aren't?

My query, exactly!

[RogueBeaver]

Why is Smith aping Ralphbucks? They're essentially a costly bribe. Do it properly with a tax cut or rebate.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/politics/alberta-politics/6404445/story.html

I hope Smith keeps it to tax cuts. Let the other 3 parties engage in their usual spending auction.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Political+parties+promise+billions+perks+Alberta+voters/6401438/story.html

[RogueBeaver]

New poll out from ThinkHQ/CTV: WRP 41, PC 30, NDP 12, LPA 11. If the PCs are about to drop below 30 in the second week...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/wildrose-poised-for-majority-in-alberta-poll/article2391311/

[mileslunn]

Seems to be following an eerily similiar pattern to 1971.  In both cases a party that had been in power for many years gets challenged by a party in third or fourth place and in both cases it was a battle between two parties on the political right.  The only difference is the PCs were more centrist than the Social Credit, whereas the WRA is more right wing than the PCs.  While taking a more centrist approach like Redford has might make sense in other provinces, it is a risky proposition in Alberta.  On the one hand it has marginalized the NDP and Liberals, but at the same time has opened room for a party on the right to emerge, whereas in other provinces that is less likely to happen as you would just get vote splitting and a centre-left would win by default.  Think New Brunswick 1990, British Columbia 1996 for example.

[RogueBeaver]

The Progs have always been centrist, that's why they were born and that's why they'll die. Good riddance.

[mileslunn]

The Progs have always been centrist, that's why they were born and that's why they'll die. Good riddance.

Peter Lougheed was, but Ralph Klein was pretty conservative, especially in his first term.  True less so towards the end of his career.

[Hatman]

New poll out from ThinkHQ/CTV: WRP 41, PC 30, NDP 12, LPA 11. If the PCs are about to drop below 30 in the second week...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/wildrose-poised-for-majority-in-alberta-poll/article2391311/

WRP is at 43, not 41.

[Hatman]

City breakdowns for the Think HQ poll

Calgary
WRP: 47
PC: 29
Lib: 11
NDP: 7

Edmonton
WRP: 31
PC: 30
Lib: 18
NDP: 17

This must mean the NDP is ahead of the Liberals in the rest of the province.

[RogueBeaver]

City breakdowns for the Think HQ poll

Calgary
WRP: 47
PC: 29
Lib: 11
NDP: 7

Edmonton
WRP: 31
PC: 30
Lib: 18
NDP: 17

This must mean the NDP is ahead of the Liberals in the rest of the province.

Wonder what this will look like in your next projection.

[Hatman]

City breakdowns for the Think HQ poll

Calgary
WRP: 47
PC: 29
Lib: 11
NDP: 7

Edmonton
WRP: 31
PC: 30
Lib: 18
NDP: 17

This must mean the NDP is ahead of the Liberals in the rest of the province.

Wonder what this will look like in your next projection.

Those breakdowns are fairly similar to the other polls, so not much change, other than a few more WRP seats.

[mileslunn]

I am guessing if those numbers hold up, Edmonton might be the PCs stronghold which in most cases is their weaker spot, mind you Edmonton usually is always more left leaning than the rest of Alberta and the PCs although still centre-right, they are to the left of the WRA.  I also wonder how many of the PC supporters are traditional NDP or Liberal supporters who are voting strategically to keep the WRA out of power as opposed to traditional PC supporters.  And likewise are the WRA supporters your traditional PC supporters are just your fed up types who want change?  I suspect it is somewhat of a mix although I should note federally in 1993 you did see a similiar strong swing from the PCs to the Reform Party and while many where traditional PC supporters, they did also attract some protest votes.  Also kind of like the 90s too with many of the types who voted for Joe Clark sticking with the PCs while those that went for the Reform/Alliance are gravitating to the WRA.  Although interestingly enough the PCs were strongest in Calgary not Edmonton where most who didn't vote Reform/Alliance went Liberal whereas Calgary was more of a mix.

[lilTommy]

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/alberta-politics/6404846/story.html

NDP Balanced Budget platform... could be(probably is) an attempt to lure Liberals over to their camp espcially in Edmonton.
Last election the PCs were stronger in Edmonton b/c Stelmach had the local boy effect, if you look at 2004 the Lib/NDP held all but three edmonton seats. This year the PC/WR leaders are both Calgary gals so Edmonton is going to be a battle between for who in the opposition can win over more voters.
If WR sweeps, it will be interesting to see which seats stay PC and weather its based more on local political leanings of the MLA themselves

[RogueBeaver]

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/alberta-politics/6404846/story.html

NDP Balanced Budget platform... could be(probably is) an attempt to lure Liberals over to their camp espcially in Edmonton.
Last election the PCs were stronger in Edmonton b/c Stelmach had the local boy effect, if you look at 2004 the Lib/NDP held all but three edmonton seats. This year the PC/WR leaders are both Calgary gals so Edmonton is going to be a battle between for who in the opposition can win over more voters.
If WR sweeps, it will be interesting to see which seats stay PC and weather its based more on local political leanings of the MLA themselves

As happened here in Quebec for both Grits and Tories federally last year.

[mileslunn]

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/alberta-politics/6404846/story.html

NDP Balanced Budget platform... could be(probably is) an attempt to lure Liberals over to their camp espcially in Edmonton.
Last election the PCs were stronger in Edmonton b/c Stelmach had the local boy effect, if you look at 2004 the Lib/NDP held all but three edmonton seats. This year the PC/WR leaders are both Calgary gals so Edmonton is going to be a battle between for who in the opposition can win over more voters.
If WR sweeps, it will be interesting to see which seats stay PC and weather its based more on local political leanings of the MLA themselves

It might also due to strategic voting too.  Many not on the right will vote for whomever is most likely to stop the most right wing party and considering the PCs are doing much better than the Liberals or NDP, so might vote PCs for that reason never mind Alison Redford is pretty centrist anyways.  I know many on the centre-left who despised Klein, Harper, and Manning but would have no problem supporting Redford.  In fact that is partly why the WRA is doing so well is many Conservatives don't see her as a real conservative. 

[RogueBeaver]

Campaign Research: WRP 45.5%, PC 28.8%, LPA 11.3%, NDP 10.2%. My only question is this: how many more PC seats tumble if they're below 30?

http://www.stephentaylor.ca/2012/04/new-poll-wildrose-up-by-17-points/