Liberals have early momentum in Monday byelections

Locutus

Locutus

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Jun 18, 2007
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OTTAWA - Justin Trudeau's Liberals are poised to have a breakthrough night in four federal byelections held Monday, mostly at the expense of Thomas Mulcair's NDP.

The Liberals were leading or in second place in all four byelections in early returns.

In the downtown Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina, Liberal Adam Vaughan was surging against NDP candidate Joe Cressy, each hopeful of succeeding the former New Democrat Olivia Chow as the riding's MP.

Chow, the widow of former NDP leader Jack Layton, resigned her seat in the House of Commons to run for mayor of Toronto. Though she and Cressy are close friends, she had avoided explicitly endorsing any candidate.

Thirty minutes after the polls had closed, Vaughan had 56% of the votes called in from more than 10% of polling stations. Nearly 110,000 were eligible to vote in the downtown Toronto riding. Cressy had 30% of those votes.

Meanwhile, in the northeastern Alberta riding of Fort McMurray-Athabasca, Liberal Kyle Harrietha hoped to put up a strong challenge to Conservative David Yurdiga.

Yurdiga is hoping to succeed MP Brian Jean in a riding that the Conservatives, or their predecessor parties, had held since the riding's creation in 1968.

With nearly 20% of polls reporting there, Yurdiga had 48% of the votes, compared to 35% for Harrietha. Even at 35%, that would be the best showing for a Liberal candidate since 1980 in Fort McMurray.

In southwestern Alberta, the riding of Macleod appeared set to send yet another Conservative back to the House of Commons. John Barlow was leading early, with almost 68% of votes with 10% of polling stations that had reported by 10 p.m.

Back in the Toronto riding of Scarborough-Agincourt, Liberal Arnold Chan was the favourite to be the second MP from that riding since its creation in 1988. The only other MP, Liberal Jim Karygiannis, resigned earlier this year to seek a seat on Toronto city council.

Chan had 60% of the votes of the 12% of polls that had reported by 10 p.m. The Conservative candidate, Trevor Ellis, was in second with 28%.


Liberals have early momentum in Monday byelections | Canada | News | Toronto Sun


libs 35% in Fort Mac eh. 8O
 
mentalfloss

mentalfloss

Prickly Curmudgeon Smiter
Jun 28, 2010
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Wuh ohs.

The Liberals were also putting up a fight in the Alberta riding of Fort McMurray-Athabasca, the heart of the oil sands and a riding that’s typically overwhelmingly Conservative. Tory candidate David Yurdiga nonetheless had a 13-per-cent lead over the Liberal candidate with roughly 60 per cent of the polls reporting, the narrowest margin of the night. The Conservatives won the riding by a whopping margin of 59 per cent three years ago.

Liberals take two Toronto ridings, Tories hang on to Macleod in Alberta - The Globe and Mail
 
T

tay

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mentalfloss

mentalfloss

Prickly Curmudgeon Smiter
Jun 28, 2010
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NP might finally be waking up.

Byelections undeniably show a shift in Justin Trudeau’s favour

No sooner had the federal Liberals begun putting up better-than-decent numbers Monday evening, a momentum shift not dissimilar to the one they managed in the four-byelection round last November, but the counter-spin kicked in. Turnout abysmal. Byelections meaningless. An election, Canada Day Eve? Pshaw. And on, and on.

That reaction of course, was to be expected. But the numbers don’t lie. No byelection is more than it is; one by itself doesn’t predict the outcome of a general election, nor do four, nor do eight. But they do tell us something about sentiment now. Low turnout notwithstanding, they mean something. The result Monday, as last November, was good for the Justin Trudeau Liberals, bad for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, and quite dreadful for Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats.

Let’s examine first the Toronto-area riding of Scarborough-Agincourt. In 2011, Liberal Jim Karygiannis, a constituency politician if ever there was one, took 18,498 votes, or 45.4% of the popular vote. His nearest challenger, Conservative Harry Tsai, garnered 34.2%. Monday Liberal Arnold Chan drew 12,829 votes – or 59.3% of ballots cast. The second-place Tory challenger, meantime, garnered 6,344 votes, or 29.3%.

The departure of “Jimmy K,” punctuated as it was by the now former MP’s public objections to Trudeau’s abortion policy, could have proven a thorn in his side. Instead, the opposite occurred. The NDP, in 2011, won 18 per cent of the vote. On Monday the party’s challenger, Elizabeth Ying Long, won 1,844 votes, or 8.5%.

Trinity-Spadina, a swing riding that is considered a bellwether of sorts because Liberal success there has historically presaged broader gains, proved to be an easy win for well-known municipal politician Adam Vaughan. The contest between him and New Democrat Joe Cressy, in an echo of the neighbouring one last fall between Liberal Chrystia Freeland and New Democrat Linda McQuaig, saw Vaughan win 53.4% of the popular vote, and Cressy just 34.3%. That’s 18,434 votes, to 11,823; a decisive Grit win, despite the very low turnout.

Cressy made his party’s opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline a key issue, as McQuaig had last year. It doesn’t seem to be taking. The swing was substantial; in 2011, Olivia Chow won 54.5% of the vote in the riding, while Liberal Christine Innes came second with 23.4%.

In Macleod, near Calgary, the result was a very solid Conservative win Monday, as expected. Conservative John Barlow garnered 12,394 votes, or 68.8% of ballots cast. Second-place Grit candidate Dustin Fuller ended well back at 3,062 votes, or a mere 17%. But here too, compared with previous results, the shift favoured the Red Team. On May 2, 2011, Tory Ted Menzies, now retired, garnered 40,007 votes, or 77.5%. The Grits, meantime, won just 3.7 per cent. As occurred broadly last November, the NDP vote in this riding has slipped sharply, from 10.3% in 2011, to less than five per cent Monday.

But perhaps the most telling shift was the upswing in Liberal fortunes in Fort McMurray-Athabasca, even though the party’s candidate, Kyle Harrietha, still lost out by more than 10 percentage points. In 2011, the Liberals came third, at 10.4 per cent, behind the NDP who managed 13.3 per cent. Tory Brian Jean, meantime, walked away with 71.8%.

Monday, the Conservative vote was trimmed to 46.8%, while Harrietha managed 35.3%. The NDP, meantime, saw their vote share slip slightly to 11.4%. Liberal gains were virtually all at the expense of the Conservatives – a sign, like the results in Provencher and Brandon-Souris in Manitoba last fall, that there is unrest in the Conservative heartland.

Is it a disaster for Harper and Mulcair, and a harbinger of certain victory for Trudeau next year? Not by a long shot. But it is, undeniably, another set of numbers that confirm the recent trend, which is also reflected in opinion polling. It indicates, yet again, that Trudeau and his team are doing something right, while Harper and Mulcair and their teams need to adjust their strategies, if they hope to slow the Liberals’ momentum.

The curious thing is that, as these little Liberal victories pile up, there is no apparent change in approach either in the Prime Minister’s Office, or on Mulcair’s part. Harper is as he has long been, his government as it has long been. The opposition leader’s strategy has not budged since he became leader of his party. Do they see the trend, and dismiss it? Or are they locked into positions they can’t now change, because of internal party dynamics?

Either way, the time for altering the playing field is limited. It looks increasingly as if the game plan for both Conservatives and Dippers is to wait for a cataclysmic mistake, or a series of stumbles, or a botched debate performance, by Trudeau. None of which explains how they intend to manage if he doesn’t do those things.

Michael Den Tandt: Byelections undeniably show a shift in Justin Trudeau’s favour
 
mentalfloss

mentalfloss

Prickly Curmudgeon Smiter
Jun 28, 2010
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Other way around.

Liberals have moved left since Harper's majority.



Pollster Nik Nanos, chairman of Nanos Research, said earlier a drop in support could spell trouble for the Conservatives.

"It would suggest a significant proportion are not happy and want to send a message to Harper," Nanos told CBC's Power & Politics host Rosemary Barton. If the ballot results don't show a significant vote split, Nanos added, "the Conservatives have to be nervous."

CBCNews.ca Mobile
 
mentalfloss

mentalfloss

Prickly Curmudgeon Smiter
Jun 28, 2010
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captain morgan said:
Why the pundits are already wrong about 2015
Click to expand...

That article is punditry.


Here are some real figures that go beyond talking game:

..you might imagine this as another mini-election. Across the four ridings contested—Trinity-Spadina, Macleod, Fort McMurray—Athabasca and Scarborough-Agincourt—the Liberals finished a distant third in 2011, taking just 20.9 percent of the vote. Three years later, with a few stray polls still to report, the numbers suggest a resounding swing in favour of the red team.

Liberals 45.6 (+14.7)
Conservatives 31.4 (-15.4)
NDP 18.7 (-9.5)
Greens 4.4 (+0.3)

Another good night for Justin Trudeau - Macleans.ca
 
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