Why the Liberals are ahead in seats, despite being behind in votes
Within the next two weeks, the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa will be dissolved, and the 2019 federal election campaign will officially kick off. Of course, a lot can change in a five-week campaign (at this point four years ago, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were in third place), but we’re still seeing some interesting figures coming out of the polls already.
Not least of which being this interesting phenomenon. An aggregate of polls from the last week and a half puts the Conservatives slightly ahead in the popular vote. However, when we translate this into seats, it shows the Liberals with a comfortable, if not solid, lead in that respect. It’s rather unusual to see these two disagreeing.
To understand why this is, we need to look at two things: where are the battlegrounds going to be in 2019, and how does the swing vary from province to province?
The Conservatives finished 85 seats behind the Liberals in 2015, which suggests that they would need to take 43 of their seats to finish ahead. If the Conservatives were to take those seats on a uniform swing across the country, they would take 26 in Ontario, seven in British Columbia, four in Alberta, three in New Brunswick, two in Québec, and one in Manitoba. In other words, Ontario is where the Conservatives really need to do well in order to get into government.
The 43rd seat on that list, Pickering — Uxbridge, requires a swing of 6.1% for the Conservatives to win, which is already well ahead of the 3.8% swing that would win them the popular vote nation-wide, and the 4.5% swing that they’re currently sitting on in the polls. But the polls are also showing that the swing is very much not uniform across the country, and not in a way that does the Conservatives any favours.
In Ontario, where most of the Conservatives’ battleground seats can be found (as well as a controversial Conservative Premier), the polls are showing a swing of only 0.9%, which is enough to get them only a single Liberal seat in that province. Meanwhile, they are outperforming their swing in the prairie provinces (9.5%), which is not of much use to them because there are only 18 seats in those provinces the Conservatives didn’t win in 2015. Atlantic Canada, the region where they’re outperforming the most on a 20.7% swing, has a rather limited number of seats up for grabs as well (though it’s worth noting that this large swing is really a reversal of what happened in 2015, when the Liberals won all 32 seats in the region).
If the swing across Canada were more uniform, then we would see the two parties a lot closer in terms of seats than they currently are. But if the Conservatives underperform in their battlegrounds, and outperform in the areas where they have few seats to gain, then they will find it very difficult to get into government in two months’ time.
