Juneday

It is June 1, 2017.


As of today, Elections NL has still not posted a disclosure of campaign contributions to the candidates who ran in the November 2015 provincial general election.


In one nod to very-delayed accountability, the disclosure of contributions to central party coffers was posted on May 18th. Contrary to the provisions of the Elections Act, Elections NL did not distinguish contributions made during the campaign period from other contributions during that calendar year.

Mayday

It is May 1st, 2017.

Elections Newfoundland and Labrador has still not posted annual and campaign-period political financing disclosure reports for calendar year and election period 2015.

Access denied

Section 299 of the provincial Elections Act provides as follows:

299. (1) Where an authorized person, on behalf of a registered party accepts, in a year, a contribution, the chief financial officer of the party shall record the contribution as to amount and the name and address of the contributor.
...
(3)   A registered party shall file with the Chief Electoral Officer, within the period during which an annual financial statement shall be filed, a return with respect to contributions that either individually or in sum exceed $100 setting out all the information required to be recorded under subsections (1) and (2).

Read in conjunction with s. 303, the deadline for filing that return of "annual" political finance contributions is April 1st.


That is, the deadline for registered parties to file their financial returns for calendar year 2016 expired on Saturday past.


As of now, Elections Newfoundland and Labrador has still not posted such annual returns for calendar year 2015, which were due on April 1, 2016, nor the campaign-period returns relative to the 2015 election, which were due the day before that.

How'd they vote?

As usual, it is taking Elections Newfoundland and Labrador an unusual amount of time, compared to its peers in other Canadian jurisdictions, and given the small number of data points involved, to publish the final poll-by-poll results of last November's provincial election.

So here they are, in cleverly colour-coded map format. Enjoy.

The map

General elections results of 2011 on the left.

 

Current standings (including provisional November 25, 2014, by-election wins) on the right.

 



 

Extinction level events

Earlier today, CRA came out with its quarterly report from its August fieldwork.

(If you are a Newfoundland and Labrador Progressive Conservative, this is a good time to close your eyes, stick your thumbs in your ears, and hum loudly.)

Here's what the notional seat forecast looks like, based on today's CRA numbers, if they were the popular-vote numbers in a provincial general election. (Click to enlarge.)

Dark red indicate Liberal holds, paler reds are projected Liberal pickups, and oranges are notional NDP holds. The only small splotch of blue is Humber East, which is, presumably, about to be vacated by Interim Interim Premier Marshall after the PCs pick their new leader in mid-September.

The only other faint hope for the Tory cause, on those popular-support numbers, are the dozen "toss-up" seats on which two projection models can't quite come to agree on the notional winner. The PCs are notionally in contention in ten of those districts. However, on the simplest forecast model, the "uniform swing", the Tories would lose all ten.

(Private to NL PC caucus staff: do you still think the games your guys played with House of Assembly opposition caucus funding was a brilliant idea?)

The NDP would notionally retain three of its 2011 seats, and be in contention in two or three others. However, one of those three holds would be St. John's North, where the formerly-NDP incumbent, Dale Kirby, is now a member of the Liberal caucus. While the NDP is well off the highs it witnessed during its polling surge in 2012-2013, at 15% it is still actually at historically high levels in an NL provincial vote-intent question. Between 1998 and 2011, the Orange team had only ever cracked the 15% mark in a CRA (or any other) poll once, in May 2004, in the wake of widespread unrest in the public sector.

The usual seat-forecasting caveats apply: the notional model does not take into account changes in affiliation since the last election, namely:

• In St. John's South, former PC Tom Osborne, after an interlude in self-imposed exile as an Independent member, is now a Liberal.
• In Mount Pearl South, former PC Paul Lane has also donned a red uniform.
• In St. John's North,  former NDP MHA Dale Kirby will re-offer, this time as the newly-nominated Liberal candidate in the 2015 (14? 16?) general election.
• In The Straits and White Bay North, former NDP MHA Chris Mitchelmore is now the Liberal MHA and nominee in that district.
• In Virginia Waters, Liberal Cathy Bennett now holds the seat following the by-election to succeed former Premier Dunderdale.
• In Carbonear–Harbour Grace, Liberal Sam Slade carried in last fall's by-election what was in 2011 the second-Toriest district in the province.
• In Cartwright–L'anse au Clair, a purely academic change saw Liberal Lisa Dempster succeed Liberal Yvonne Jones.
• In St. George's–Stephenville East, Joan Shea's departure resulted in last week's by-election pickup by Liberal Scott Reid.

As with all poll projections, the overall seat-count result tends to be more accurate than the district-by-district count when the models are tested post-election. The errors in individual district forecasts tend to cancel one another out in the overall composition of the notionally-projected legislature.

Third party, redux, redux

In the 2011 provincial general election, there were 268 regular voting-day polling divisions, in ten different electoral districts, which were contained wholly within the city of St. John’s. (A handful of polls which straddled the border with a neighbouring suburban municipality are disregarded here.)

In those 268 polls, Stjohnsians cast a collective 37,750 valid ballots.

Of those 37,750 votes, the Tories took 48%, the NDP 45%, and the Liberals 7%. The uncomfortably tight margin, in what is traditionally the Tory chateau-fort, led to the defeat of several incumbent PC MHAs, the conversion of three districts from the PC to the NDP column, close races in a few other metro-area districts, and no shortage of morning-after hand-wringing inside Tory circles.

Fast-forward not quite two years to the present day.

In the context of the current municipal elections, VOCM and Abacus Data have put out a poll of St. John’s residents, examining the public mood, the issues, and the top-line horse-race numbers. The poll was carried out over several days in late August. VOCM has helpfully published its reports on its website, with the horse-race numbers, released earlier today, available here.

The VOCM-Abacus Data poll is cross-tabulated on a number of interesting demographic and other factors, including, happily enough, current provincial voter intention.

For argument’s and this blog posting’s sake, let’s take the Abacus provincial political numbers at face value.

Of the VOCM-Abacus sample, the largest share of Stjohnsites, 33%, say they are undecided in their provincial voter preference. This is a bit higher than, but roughly in line with, the recent province-wide undecided vote as reported by CRA in its quarterly polls.*

Of decided voters, 42% support the provincial NDP, 33% the Liberals, and 23% the Progressive Conservatives. **

As compared to the 2011 actual results in the city, the NDP support is, within the margin of error, unchanged. St. John’s is the new chateau-fort of the Dippers.

The provincial Liberals, having been shut out of the city, and even its suburbs, in three consecutive general elections, now enjoy nearly quintuple the support they saw in the last general election. Their gain is entirely at the expense of the Progressive Conservatives.

And of the Tories, once the undisputed rulers of the St. John’s roost and nine of the ten electoral districts which, in whole or in part, are made up of Townie voters?

Their popular support in the capital city, their redoubt in even the worst of electoral cycles, has been halved in less than 24 months. The PC Party, per the CRA and Abacus polls released today, are not only the third party province-wide, they are the third party in the capital city that they once owned.

The implications of these numbers are astounding: In a notional election where the popular vote was reflected in the Abacus numbers, the incumbent PCs would be entirely shut out of the city of St. John’s. That has never happened in provincial electoral history.

The Liberals would make a modest beach-head of one or two seats in Town for the first time since 1999 – and perhaps three, depending on the impact of the Osborne Decision.

The NDP would gain, or hold, the rest.



* Percentages are calculated here using Abacus' own weighted data, but the unweighted values yield the same outcome to within a very small variance of 2% or less.
** A handful (2%) said they would vote for “Other”. Tom Osborne, former PC and Independent MHA, announced that he was joining the Liberal caucus half-way through the Abacus fieldwork.

[Reformatted and lightly edited since initial posting.]

The slope

Herewith, a graph of Newfoundland and Labrador provincial vote-intent figures over the past three years, cobbled together from a number of sources, including publicly reported CRA, MQO, Telelink, and Environics polls.

The graph shows each party's share of decided voters. The thick lines are the rolling three-poll averages, with the raw data as faint background lines. The colour scheme reflects the traditional party identifying colours.

The horizontal lines on the right half of the chart show the level of support that each of the three parties received in the October 2011 general election.

The governing Progressive Conservatives have steadily lost about 5% of their popular support per quarter, or more than 1% a month, since the start of 2011. They have lost well over half of the supporters who showed up to vote for them less than two years ago.

Other than a very brief post-election honeymoon, and a slight coming-up for air in late 2012, there is virtually no sign that the free-fall is coming to an end.

Mitigating factor

As ugly as things are for the Tories in recent polls, it could be worse.

This is a map of the notional projection, across the province, of MQO's figures from August 2012. (Two seats, Ferryland and Harbour Main, were notionally too-close-to-call NDP/PC pairings.)

The colour scheme is the same as before.

Squeeze play

The MQO poll reported today, projected across the province using uniform swing models, would result in a very narrow, hobbled, and unstable PC minority government of 18 or 19 seats.

Incumbent Premier Kathy Dunderdale's would not be among them: on the numbers reported today the NDP would dominate metrotown, including a sweep of the city of St. John's itself.

The NDP would surge to second place, with 17 seats, while a Liberal caucus of a dozen or more would hold the balance of power. Both opposition parties would gain their new seats by cannibalizing the festering carcass of the Tory electoral map from 2011. Very helpfully for them, neither of the two opposition parties would pick up seats from the other.

This map shows the notional province-wide projection, using traditional party colours. For the Liberals and NDP, dark shades indicate "holds", while paler shades indicate pickups from the governing PCs. For the Tories, pale blue indicates notional wins by a margin of less than 10% over the closest opposition challenger.