Charts and Graphs and Polls, Oh My.

Well, it's almost time for the federal election, thank god.

Two reasons for relief:

1. Holy hell, this election has been a long one.
2. The sooner it's over, the sooner we see the back-end of Steve Harper.

The polls have been interesting, with lots of movement. I have some numbers from Three Hundred Eight from late August to now, and boy-howdy, there have been some changes. Since I like pictures, we're gonna have some pictures. And, because Ontario is the only province that matters (heh), that's what we're looking at.

The big thing you'll see first is the surge in Liberal support, both in the popular vote and in the number of seats. Most of this appears to be coming from the NDP, as the Conservative numbers are roughly steady... however, even though the popular vote for the Cons is up a tick, their seat count goes down by 9. More on this later.

But... wow, that NDP. Amazing. They were flying high back in the summer, but now? Huge drop in support. Astonishing.

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I figured a finer-grained analysis would be in order, so I classified each riding as being either (a.) in a major city such as Toronto, Hamilton or Ottawa; (b.) in a suburb of those cities; (c.) in a smaller city such as London, Windsor or North Bay; or (d.) largely rural. Let's take a look, shall we?

As expected, in big cities there's not a lot of Conservative support (and the seats reflect that). Liberal and NDP trends mirror each other, so that's probably the major change we're seeing here.

In the summer, it was a fairly tight three-way race, with the Cons and Libs roughly equal and the NDP scooping a few seats. Now, though? Liberals absolutely dominate the seats, despite only picking up a dozen points in the polls. To me, that means there were a lot of close races that could've tipped any way, but now the Libs have picked up just enough to go ahead in those individual races.

There's not a whole lot of movement here in seats, despite the Liberals picking up a dozen points (and the NDP losing 13). My guess is that there are mostly fairly clearly-cut races, but the gaps are tightening. The NDP have to hope to not slide down far enough to lose any more of those potential seats; for them, the election can't come soon enough.

Rural Ontario had, for me, a surprising amount of NDP support early on; a lot of this was in the north. But now, yikes -- the 13 points they lost went almost entirely to the Liberals. Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives were going to take a lot of these ridings, and it doesn't look like that's going to change between now and Monday.

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How about different parts of the province, though? Similarly, I broke ridings into five big categories: (a.) the Golden Horseshoe, (b.) northern Ontario, (c.) southeastern Ontario, (d.) southwestern Ontario, and (e.) the central bits in-between all those other places. Naturally, there's a lot of overlap between groups: the GTHA is mostly urban and surbuban, and the southwest is mostly rural and small-city.

Wow, wow, wow. If you'd have told me that the NDP were going to get a countable-on-one-hand number of seats in all the big cities in Ontario, I'd have thought you were nuts. But, things are looking that way -- and the Liberals are there to scoop 'em all up, and steal some from the Cons for good measure.

In the north, the NDP still dominate the seat count, despite losing a whopping 16 points in popular vote. A lot of that support went to the Libs, and even the Cons look to pick up a seat (in Kenora, but they're leading by 0.1%, so it could go either way, really).

The NDP didn't start off with anything other than Ottawa Centre, and that's where they're staying. Their support in other ridings has evaporated, and the Liberals have picked up enough potential votes to edge ahead of the Cons in four ridings.

If my grandfather was still alive, he'd have voted Conservative if the devil himself was the candidate -- and that's true of the rest of the southwest. Despite the popular vote being somewhat close-ish, these ridings are very polarized: places like Lambton-Kent-Middlesex are incredibly Conservative, Windsor is a sea of solid orange, and places like London North Centre and Guelph are insanely Liberal. People were fairly well decided a while ago here.

...as is the case in central Ontario, too. The Cons are going to get a lot of seats here, and the Libs and NDP are fighting for a couple of scraps.

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So, there you have it. Two days to go, and things have been changing... not so well for the NDP, and incredibly well for the Liberals. Eric Grenier, the guy behind 308 and a guest on The House this morning on the CBC, described Conservative support as having a fairly low ceiling but a high floor; the numbers in Ontario bear this out.

The moral of the story is, Fuck you, Steve.