Third Party

Well, now.

The worst-kept secret in Newfoundland and Labrador politics was finally revealed over the weekend, when CBC's On Point published the latest MQO party support figures that were handed around from person to person last week like a Soviet-era underground newspaper.

One @JeffMarshallNL helpfully tweeted an old-school screen-photo of the horse-race slide:

Despite the brave faces that will be in evidence on VOCM and social media in the coming days, even the most pollyanna-ish yellow-dog Tory knows the dire implication of numbers like those... especially when viewed in the context of the recent trends.

Here’s the notional district-by-district results map.* For the opposition parties, dark colours indicate holds and pale colours are pickups. For the incumbent PCs, dark blue is a hold**, while paler blue is a hold by less than a notional 10% margin of victory. Light grey indicates a district where two projection models are in disagreement about the notional winner.

Of the eleven grey tossup seats, the Tories would have a notional chance of winning just five, all on the Avalon: Topsail, Conception Bay South, Harbour Main, Carbonear–Harbour Grace, and Ferryland. The rest of the notional tossups, including tranches of seats in eastern Newfoundland, urban Labrador, and Virginia Waters, would be battles between the two current opposition parties.

In neither forecast model do the Tories end up with a caucus larger than six members. None of the notional PC victories would be by a margin of more than 10%. Most of them would be nail-biters with a 5% margin or less.

It's not all bad news for the current PC caucus: at least Steve Kent would be a step closer to his life-long dream of leading the Third Party.

Say, is it floor-crossing season yet?

* To be taken with a grain of salt – the overall seat totals in swing models are more accurate than district-by-district projects, as the errors in the latter tend to cancel one another out.

 

** Boilerplate language from previous map posts. There is no dark blue.