How we did: High-level results

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The day after an historic landslide electoral victory for the Liberal Party of Canada, we’ve compared our predictions (and those of other organizations who provide riding-level predictions) to the actual results in Toronto.

Before getting to the details, we thought it important to highlight that while the methodologies of the other organizations differ, they are all based on tracking sentiments as the campaign unfolds. So, most columns in the table below will differ slightly from the one in our previous post as such sentiments change day to day.

This is fundamentally different from our modelling approach, which utilizes voter and candidate characteristics, and therefore could be applied to predict the results of any campaign before it even begins. (The primary assumption here is that individual voters behave in a consistent way but vote differently from election to election as they are presented with different inputs to their decision-making calculus.) We hope the value of this is obvious.

Now, on to the results! The final predictions of all organizations and the actual results were as follows:

To start with, our predictions included many more close races than the others: while we predicted average margins of victory of about 10 points, the others were predicting averages well above that (ranging from around 25 to 30 points). The actual results fell in between at around 20 points.

Looking at specific races, we did better than the others at predicting close races in York Centre and Parkdale-High Park, where the majority predicted strong Liberal wins. Further, while everyone was wrong in Toronto-Danforth (which went Liberal by only around 1,000 votes), we predicted the smallest margin of victory for the NDP. On top of that, we were as good as the others in six ridings, meaning that we were at least as good as poll tracking in 9 out of 25 ridings (and would have been 79 days ago, before the campaign started, despite the polls changing up until the day before the election).

But that means we did worse in the others ridings, particularly Toronto Centre (where our model was way off), and a handful of races that the model said would be close but ended up being strong Liberal wins. While we need to undertake much more detailed analysis (once Elections Canada releases such details), the “surprise” in many of these cases was the extent to which voters, who might normally vote NDP, chose to vote Liberal this time around (likely a coalescence of “anti-Harper” sentiment).

Overall, we are pleased with how the model stood up, and know that we have more work to do to improve our accuracy. This will include more data and more variables that influence voters’ decisions. Thankfully, we now have a few years before the next election…

Final riding-level predictions

Friday, October 16, 2015

Well, it is now only days until the 42nd Canadian election, and we have come a long way since this long campaign started. Based on our analyses to date of voter and candidate characteristics, we can now provide riding-level predictions. As we keep saying, we have avoided the use of polls, so these present more of an experiment than anything else. Nonetheless, we’ve put them beside the predictions of five other organizations (as of the afternoon of 15 October 2015), specifically:

• ThreeHundredEight.com
• Vox Pop Labs
• Election Atlas
• Too Close to Call
• Election Prediction Project

(We’ll note that the last doesn’t provide the likelihood of a win, so isn’t colour-coded below, but does provide additional information for our purposes here.)

You’ll see that we’re predicting more close races than all the others combined, and more “leaning” races. In fact, the average margin of victory from 308, Vox Pop, and Too Close to Call are 23%/26%/23% respectively, which sounds high. Nonetheless, the two truly notable differences we’re predicting are in Eglinton-Lawrence, where the consensus is that finance minister Joe Oliver will lose badly (we predict he might win) and Toronto Centre, where Bill Munro is predicted to easily beat Linda McQuaig (we predict the opposite).

Anyway, we’re excited to see how these predictions look come Monday, and we’ll come back after the election with an analysis of our performance.

Now, get out and vote!

A natural cycle in Canadian federal elections?

Thursday, October 15, 2015

We’ve started looking into what might be a natural cycle between governing parties, which may account for some of our differences to the polls that we’ve seen. The terminology often heard is “time for a change” – and this sentiment, while very difficult to include in voter characteristics, is possible to model as a high level risk to governing parties.

To start, we reran our predictions with an incumbent-year interaction, to see if the incumbency bonus changed over time. Turns out it does – incumbency effect declines over time. But it is difficult to determine, from only a few years of data, whether we’re simply seeing a reversion to the mean. So we need more data – and likely at a higher level.

Let’s start with the proportion of votes received by each of today’s three major parties (or their predecessors – whose names we’ll simply substitute with modern party names), with trend lines, in every federal election since Confederation:

This chart shows that the Liberal & Conservative trend lines are essentially the same, and that the two parties effectively cycle as the governing party over this line.

Prior to a noticeable 3rd party (i.e., the NDP starting in the 1962 election and its predecessor Co-operative Commonwealth Federation starting in the 1935 election) the Liberals and Conservatives effectively flipped back and forth in terms of governing (6 times over 68 years), averaging around 48% of the vote each. Since then, the flip has continued (10 more times over the following 80 years), and the median proportion of votes for Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP has been 41%/35%/16% respectively.

Further, since 1962, the Liberals have been very slowly losing support (about 0.25 points per election), while the other two parties have been very slowly gaining it (about 0.05 points per election), though there has been considerable variation across each election, making this slightly harder to use in predictions. (We’ll look into including this in our risk modeling).

Next, we looked at some stats about governing:

• In the 148.4 years since Sir John A. Macdonald was first sworn in, there have been 27 PM-ships (though only 22 PMs), for an average length of 5.5 years (though 4.3 years for Conservatives and 6.9 years for Liberals).
• Parties often string a couple PMs together - so the PM-ship has only switched parties 16 times with an average length of 8.7 years (or 7.2 Cons vs. 10.4 Libs).
• Only two PMs have won four consecutive elections (Macdonald and Laurier), with four more having won three (Mackensie King, Diefenbaker, Trudeau, and Crétien) prior to Harper.

All of these stats would suggest that Harper is due for a loss: he has been the sole PM for his party for 9.7 years, which is over twice his party’s average length for a PM-ship. He’s also second all-time behind Macdonald in a consecutive Conservative PM role (having past Mulroney and Borden last year). From a risk-model perspective, Harper is likely about to become hit hard by the “time for a change” narrative.

But how much will this actually affect Conservative results? And how much will their opponents benefit? These are critical questions to our predictions.

In any election where the governing party lost (averaging once every 9 years; though 7 years for Conservatives, and 11 years for Liberals), that party saw a median drop of 6.1 points from the preceding election (average of 8.1 points). Since 1962 (first election with the NDP), that loss has been 5.5 points. But do any of those votes go to the NDP? Turns out, not really: those 5.5 points appear to (at least on average) switch back to the new governing party.

Given the risk to the current governing party, we would forecast a 5.5%-6.1% shift from the Conservatives to the Liberals, on top of all our other estimates (which would not overlap with any of this analysis), assuming that Toronto would feel the same about change as the rest of the country has historically.

That would mean our comparisons to recent Toronto-specific polls would look like this:

Remember – our analysis has avoided the use of polls, so these results (assuming the polls are right) are quite impressive.

Next up (and last before the election on Monday) will be our riding-level predictions.