Red tide

Tonight's MQO poll, reported by NTV, has set tongues a-waggin' and chatterers a-chatterin', as expected.

It shows the provincial Liberal surge that started earlier this year is no fluke, with the party now commanding the support of a majority, 52%, of decided respondents. It has been twelve years since the provincial Liberals have polled this high. The NL Liberal party, before July of this year, had not led in any public poll since May 2001 (other than a statistical tie in May 2004). And no party has had majority support since the PCs slipped to 47% in March 2012.

Speaking of the PCs, there will no doubt be some among their number who will find not just schadenfreude, but the regular kind of freude in a poll that has them back up to 29%, and back into second place, ahead of the Dippers, for the first time since January. A little mathematical reality check for those gleeful Tories: you are still polling at barely half the actual popular support you got in the general election two years ago this month. And (for you, at least) that is a Very Bad Thing. An outright majority of a notional House of Assembly, elected on the MQO numbers, would be newly-elected Liberal MHAs who defeated a PC incumbent to get there, in the process defeating luminaries such as Eli Cross, Tony Cornect, Doctor Darin King, Dan Crummell, Nic McGrath, Glen Little/john, Keith Russell, and Kevin O'Brien. Even the Premier's own seat, on the MQO vote swing, would be doubtful.

The continuing smell of Outgoing Government lingering as it is over the PCs, explains the curious thing about the NDP result. On the face of it, 18% is bad. It's worse than the MQO poll in July, which had them at 30%, and worse than the actual 2011 election result, and any public poll since May 2011, when the federal NDP's "Layton Effect" seems to have first given the provincial party serious wind in its sails.

But the NDP got 25% in the last election. As bad as it is to be 7% off that mark, the Tories are in much more dire polling straits. And that explains why, even as a 52% Liberal vote would result in a big whopping Liberal majority, the NDP would notionally — and not adjusted for any of the recent, um, changes in its caucus — hold on to most of the seats it won in 2011, and might even be able to snatch a few from the debris of PC implosion.

Here’s the notional district-by-district map* based on the MQO vote-intent figures. For the current opposition parties, dark colours indicate holds and pale colours are pickups. For the incumbent outgoing PCs, dark blue is a hold, while paler blue is a hold by less than a notional 10% margin of victory. Light grey indicates a district where the projection models are in disagreement about the notional winner. The projection model does not take into account changes in affiliation of incumbent MHAs, including the NDP schism and the Osborg migration from the blue to red teams. (Click to enlarge.)

The Liberal caucus would notionally jump to at least 29 members, with another eight districts too close to call — and all of those, potentially in the Liberal column — for a total of up to 37 seats. For the first time since the general election of 1999, that would include anywhere from one to seven Liberal seats in St. John's and its suburban communities.

The NDP could retain a caucus of up to five or six, including one or two potential pickups, thanks to the continuing Tory doldrums. And the incumbent PCs would notionally be reduced to somewhere between six and twelve seats, depending on which way the tossup districts were to fall — including recently PC-bedrock Carbonear–Harbour Grace, soon to be the site of the governing PC party's first by-election test in one of its "held" seats.



* To be taken with a grain of salt – the overall seat totals in swing models are more accurate than district-by-district projects, as the errors in the latter tend to cancel one another out.

The electoral map

From figures "leaked" to Telegram political reporter Scary Novelty Name, herewith a map showing the variation — and there's impressively little of it — in the rate of provincial Liberal supporters signed up by electoral district, expressed as a percentage of the 2011 list of electors.

[Click to enlarge.]

The deeper the red, the larger the percentage of people signed up as supporters. Numbers in the legend show the number of districts in each percentage cohort.

Even if only 5% of the voting population had signed up to vote in the party's leadership process, it would have been an impressive achievement. In fact, the vast majority of the 48 electoral districts have seen signup rates between 5% and 15%. The level of signups is surprisingly even province-wide: the experience of other parties in other Canadian jurisdiction has usually been that supporter signup rates are geographically "lumpy".

The "lowest" rate is found in Labrador West, with "only" 6.2%, a rate that is high in comparable leadership votes. A few districts, including the two held by the candidates who are sitting MHAs, as well as historically fertile Liberal ground in coastal Labrador and Bonavista Bay, exceed that 15% mark. In Cartwright–L'Anse au Clair, the leadership signup is nearly 1/3 the size of the district's population of eligible voters.

The nearly 38,000 people signed up as supporters or members, and thus eligible to vote in the leadership election, make the 2013 NL Liberal leadership, in raw numbers, one of the largest such exercises in Canadian provincial history. On a per-capita basis, given that Newfoundland and Labrador is the second-smallest province by population, it may well be the most broadly-based one-member or weighted-one-member party leadership election in Canada ever.

High water

Dear Newfoundland and Labrador New Democrats:

Do you remember this map?

After what the four backbench NDP MHAs did on Monday, you'll be remembering it for a long, long time.

All just a little bit o' history repeating

From the Memory Hole, a March 14, 1987 CP wire report on the leadership thrubbles of a Newfoundland and Labrador opposition party.

ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) - Four months after he won 98 per cent of his Newfoundland Liberal party's support at a leadership review, Leo Barry is facing another challenge - from within his own caucus.
In what Barry himself described as a coup, virtually the entire caucus has demanded his resignation. Barry, a former Conservative cabinet minister, says he will take the weekend to decide his political future.
Government officials said if he doesn't resign, as many as three Liberals are ready to bolt from the opposition benches. Barry said at least one has been offered a cabinet post.
There are 35 Conservatives, 15 Liberals and two New Democrats in the 52-seat legislature.
The demand for his resignation came in a letter handed to Barry after he returned from Boston Thursday night.
Yesterday, all but one of Barry's Liberal colleagues - Eugene Hiscock - issued a joint statement that they "have identified certain concerns" they conveyed during a 3 1/2-hour caucus meeting and "the only adequate way to clear the air is to convene a leadership convention at the earliest possible date."
Monday is St. Patrick's Day, a holiday in Newfoundland. Barry said he will hold a news conference Tuesday morning to announce his decision.
The party's constitution does not require a leadership convention unless Barry resigns.

Memo to file

Dear everyone:

The area on this map shaded in red, and only this area, is the Ungava Peninsula.

Nothing else is the Ungava Peninsula.

Seriously.

Yes, you might ask yourself, "But in that book—

THAT BOOK IS WRONG.