Surprising Canadian Election Results

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won re-election last night, winning an election he had no business being close to winning given all of his scandals (not to mention his glaring, drama teacher phoniness).  But the polls between the Liberals and Conservative Party of Canada were within fractions of a percentage point of each other, and it could have gone either way.  So the result is not a shock, but there are some very interesting takeaways nonetheless.

It's worth noting that the Liberals won a minority government.  That means a snap election could be called at any time if a non-confidence motion is agreed to by the other parties.  Typically minority governments last less than two years.

But the results are interesting for two specific reasons. Here are the results as of this morning:

The first reason that this is unusual is clear: the Conservative party won the largest vote share but not the most seats in parliament.  People in the United States who are familiar with the popular vote versus the electoral college results will be familiar with the phenomenon.  There are groups in Canada, mainly far-left-leaning who will take the opportunity to point out that our voting system is not fair.  It's not in the Conservative Party's interest to join this fight.  Parties in Canada rarely garner 40% of the popular vote.  The Liberals (socialist lite) and New Democrats (socialist) would form coalition governments in Canada forever if there was some form of proportional representation.

Besides which, these results are rare:

It marks only the second time in Canada’s history that a governing party will take power with such a low share of the vote. David Moscrop, a political theorist at the University of Ottawa, tweeted that “the last and only time a party has formed government with less than 35 percent of the national popular vote was John A. Macdonald in 1867—with 34.8 percent.”

...Even more unusual in Monday night’s vote, it appeared the Liberals were not even the first place party in terms of absolute number of votes.

Elections Canada official website pointed out how rare this is:

...A party forming a government may receive a smaller share of the popular vote but still win more seats than its principal competing party. This has happened three times since Confederation: in 1957, 1962, and 1979. In 1925, the Liberal government continued in office although it won both fewer seats and fewer votes than the Conservatives.

There's another interesting result.  Party support is highly regionalized.  The Atlantic provinces are predominantly Liberal (though less so than in the last election).  Quebec is predominantly  Bloc Quebecois (a regional party focused mostly on provincial issues).  Ontario, the most populous and central geographically province,  is typically split between conservative (suburban and rural) and liberal (urban) voters and is the real battleground.  It's also where the socialist NDP find support.

The West is predominantly very conservative except right on the coast where there is socialist and liberal support.  The far north has very little representation in parliament but it is split between liberal and socialist support.

The regionalization has been a growing trend over the last decades and it might have reached the point where Ontario becomes the battleground province and the focus of elections going forward.  Again this is similar to typical U.S. elections where battleground states garner the majority of election efforts to the detriment of other areas.

The short term takeaways are obvious for the Conservative Party of Canada - it has grown voter share but not efficiently.  It needs to focus on growing support in suburban Ontario. It can take some comfort in the fact that it won a plurality of the vote, beating the liberals in that regard.  It must look for openings to work with other parties to force another election sooner rather than later (the caveat being it's got to build it's regional support smartly in the meantime).

More Trudeau is not a good thing for Canada, but it looks like we will have to deal with it for a while.

5 lessons from the Alabama & Mississippi primaries

Five lessons from the Alabama and Mississippi primary results:

1. Mitt Romney's biggest ally is the multitude of his enemies:  Alabama and Mississippi prove that the not Romney votes can continue to be split while Santorum and Gingrich remain in the race. What matters more is that Romney's delegate advantage is maintained by those votes being split between Gingrich and Santorum.

2. Santorum and Gingrich are not coordinating states among themselves and they probably should be doing so. The most effective use of the combined resources of Gingrich and Santorum in fighting Romney, in isolation from each other, rather than fighting each other as well.  That keeps that vote splitting to a minimum - split up states among each candidate and focus your limited resources in smaller, focused, controlled bursts.  In essence they can make Romney fight a two front war rather than benefiting from a free-for-all.

3. Mitt Romney's strategy of picking off easy delegates is slowly working - Hawaii, Samoa, Guam add to his total.  His third place delegates in Alabama and Mississippi aren't inconsequential either.  They aren't high profile, but the numbers still count, and they are counting in his favor.

4. Gingrich is a regional candidate. Paul is a nomad candidate.  Santorum and Romney can both claim with some validity that they have won in a broad spectrum of regions.  Gingrich cannot claim the same.  His success has been all deep south success, and even there, it's limited. Paul is becoming a non-factor and he will not have enough momentum to get a prime time slot at the GOP convention.  He may end up being given one in an attempt to buy his allegiance, but he will not have proportionally earned it.  He's fading to the status of footnote or afterthought.

5.  The night was more of a loss for Romney than anything else.  Yes Santorum gets momentum and in the long run that may be the big story.  But Mitt Romney did not close off the race and wins in those southern states would have been bold victories that could have given him the air of inevitability and sealed the nomination for him.  Instead, by playing the long game, he allowed both Santorum and Gingrich to survive.  It was a timid play.  He could have tried to end it in those southern states but he didn't.  What is striking to me is that his timidity doesn't speak favorably about how he would do as president.  No bold solutions, he would just tinker around the edges. That's not exactly what the country needs, nor what he has promised.

And after all of that, I'm still re-thinking things.