Crunching Numbers

Now that the shock of Lise St-Denis' floor crossing has worn off, it's worth looking ahead to whether Jean Chretien's old riding will stay Liberal red in the next election. Eric Grenier at 308 likes her chances:

If Lise St-Denis, the MP for Saint-Maurice–Champlain who defected to the Liberals from the NDP last week, decides to run for re-election under her new party’s banner, history suggests that, despite the wide margin between the two parties in the last election, she would have a good chance of winning the seat again.

[...]

Of those 34 floor-crossers who have stood for re-election, 22 were successful – including Richard John Cartwright. The success rate of floor crossers stands at 65 per cent.

[...]

More than half of floor crossers lose support when they run for re-election with their new party, with their average drop in vote share being eight points from one election to the next. However, the parties that welcome the new MPs almost always do better when the floor crosser runs for re-election. Fully 86 per cent of floor crossers have increased the vote share of their new parties in their riding, increasing their party’s support by an average of 11 points.

Ms. St-Denis received 39 per cent of the vote in Saint-Maurice–Champlain in May 2011, while the Liberals took 12 per cent. Applying these numbers to the average change in support when an MP has crossed the floor indicates she might expect to receive somewhere between 23 and 31 per cent of the vote in the next election, perhaps only enough to win a narrow victory.

There are a lot of ways to crunch the numbers, but before we try to draw conclusions based on 34 incredibly different data points from the past hundred plus years, we should probably look at the numbers that matter most - the votes in St. Maurice Champlain last election:

NDP 39%
BQ 29%
CPC 18%
Lib 12%

In terms of vote percentage, the riding ranked 33rd for the Liberals in Quebec (a sign of just how awful they did in La Belle Province last election). Maybe their electoral chances are better than that though - the 27 points the Liberals lost by makes it their 24th "best" riding in Quebec.

That's not to say the Liberals can't ride a 20 to 30 point red wave and win the seat next election, but it's preposterous to argue St-Denis herself will have anything to do with that. Well known and well liked incumbents tend to be worth about 5 percentage points at the ballot box, and I wouldn't use either of those terms to describe St-Denis. After all, she herself admits to being a no-name MP who was elected on Jack Layton's coat tails.

The problem with looking at the historical numbers is that there's little historical precedent for what St-Denis did. When Belinda Stronach moved from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 2005, she was jumping between parties which had been within 700 votes of each other in the previous election. In comparison, St-Denis just "gave up" 13,000 votes with her move. The more apt analogy might be kamikaze PC MP Jack Horner who won the bluest of blue ridings in Canada, Crowfoot, by 61 percentage points over the Liberals in 1974. He crossed the floor to take a position in Pierre Trudeau's Cabinet and in the next election...lost by 59 percentage points. Yes, Jean Chretien's old riding isn't as hostile to the grits as rural Alberta during the Trudeau years, but Horner was a PC leadership candidate and had represented the riding for 20 years. All that was worth a few votes at the ballot box.

Let's have some fun with numbers and create a single variable to measure just how much of an impact floor crossers have. I'll take a page from baseball stat geeks and call it VORC - Value Over Replacement Candidate. Taking the Belinda Stronach example, the Liberal vote in the ridings around Newmarket Aurora fell 4 points between the 2004 and 2006 elections. So the fact that the Liberal vote actually went up by 5 points in Newmarket Aurora with her name on the ballot means she may have been worth 9 points. Of course, there are a gazillion other factors to consider, but it's the best quick and dirty estimator of a candidate's value we have.

So Belinda may have been worth 9 points at the ballot box, but using the same math, Garth Turner was worth a big "0" points to the Liberals in Halton in 2008, while Wajid Khan actually cost the Tories 3 points in Mississauga-Streetsville (KHAAAAAAAN!). So there's no hard and fast rule.

Which, after that mathematical detour, is the point I'm trying to make with this post. When it comes to unique political events like by elections or floor crossings, it's futile to look at past trends and averages to predict the future. Regardless of what may have happened to Jack Horner or Belinda Stronach or 1869 floor crosser Richard John Cartwright, Lise St-Denis' situation is wholly unique - there aren't many cases of first time MPs jumping to the party which finished fourth in their home riding.

So without precedent, all we can go on is political instinct and my political instincts tell me St-Denis' value in the next election (should she even run, which seems unlikely) is negligible. That's not to say her jump to the Liberals won't help the party create a more favourable narrative province-wide, but on the ground in St. Maurice it won't make a lick of difference come the 2015 election.

Moment of the Decade: #6 Confidence Vote Mayhem

If you missed it, I asked readers to nominate, then vote, on Canada's top political moment of the decade. Over the first two two weeks of the new decade, I'm counting down the top 10 vote getters. Next week, the top 5 (in alphabetical order) - Adscam, Coalition, Iraq, Merger, and Same Sex Marriage.



It had everything you could possibly want in a political thrill ride. Scandal! Backroom deals! A long time government fighting for survival! Sex! Tape recordings! A dying man with the fate of the country in his hands! A tie confidence vote!

When I first asked for nominations to this contest, Globe blogger Andrew Steele wrote the following to me:

Belinda crossing the floor and that confidence vote perfectly summarizes the knifes-edge reality of minority government that has become the dominant storyline of aughts political coverage. Process over result. Personality over policy. The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff dancing on a speaker at the after party.

And the knife’s edge had never been narrower. As soon as a media blackout on Gomery Inquiry testimony was lifted, what had been tantalizingly described as “explosive” allegations were made public, and the opposition parties made it fairly clear they’d had enough.

Now, this was before people realized you could just prorogue the House if you were chickenshit scared of a confidence vote, so the Liberals postponed opposition days and Paul Martin went on TV and talked about his father. Paul cut a deal with Jack Layton who was in one of his “results for people” moods, thinking “Yeah, corruption is awful, and they wasted taxpayer dollars, but for a billion dollars, I’ll keep them alive. It’s what Ed Broadbent would want.”.

With a "too close to call" vote looming, Scott Brison stood up in the House every day saying “let Judge Gomery do his work” while the opposition heckled and screamed. The government lost a confidence vote, but it wasn’t really a confidence vote. Parliament was shut down. Either way, a vote was inevitable and everyone started doing the math and quickly realized that, holy crap, the fate of the government was in the hands of a few independents, among them Carolyn Parrish and David Kilgour. Ouch.

Then, in what may have been the single biggest jaw dropper of the decade, Belinda Stronach became a Liberal. Remember, this was before David Emerson and Wajid Khan (KHAAAAAAAAAN!) – it was a big deal. This was a woman who had helped bring about the Conservative Party merger just 18 months earlier. She was seen as a future Tory leader (by herself). And, oh yeah, she was dating Peter MacKay. Talk about a bad breakup.

So this changed the math, and it soon became fairly obvious that the fate of the government would come down to a maverick MP who was dying of cancer. The media pestered him. The Conservatives did some stuff which I won’t go into because, well, everyone who has gone into it has wound up getting sued.

So on May 19th, 2005, Chuck Cadman stood up, wearing jeans and chewing gum, and calmly forced a tie. Peter Miliken then, in a moment all young boys who hope to one day grow up and become speaker of the House of Commons dream of, got to cast a tie-breaking vote, to save the government.

It didn’t end there, because that set off the whole Gurmant Grewal fiasco which, if nothing else, allowed Tim Murphy to utter what is probably the quote of the decade, calling the Liberal Party “a warm and comfy mat with lots of fur on it”.

So, in he end, the Liberals survived. But, as Paul Wells’ book made clear, that survival likely gave the Conservatives the time they needed to ensure victory 8 months later.

So this moment left its mark. And when it comes to sheer popcorn politics, it was about as good as it gets.

It's a Very Complex Decision

A lot of people will no doubt try and spin Belinda Stronach's decision to quit politics as a blow to the Liberal Party. But I think we should take a moment of silence for the people this retirement will affect most - the blogging Tories. When you think of the hundreds of jokes at her expense they've posted over the past two years and the thousands of insightful comments those posts have generated ("you're sexist!", "no I'm not!"), this is clearly the biggest loss to the blogosphere since Jean Lapierre resigned his seat.


UPDATE: As many have pointed out, the highlight of the CBC wire story:

Lower-profile MPs who are not running again are Jean Lapierre from the Quebec riding of Outremont and Bill Matthews from the Newfoundland riding of Random-Burin-St. George.