Chad Skelton
Instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, Canada. Data journalist. Nerd for hire: charts, maps, Tableau training. Past: Vancouver Sun he/him cskeltondata@gmail.com chadskelton.com
- My latest AI video: How to Create a ChatGPT Tutor Bot (and Quiz Bot!) for your students using Custom GPTs. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nerO...
- I'm calling it a night but I see (at least) two possible scenarios in the final count: 1. The closest races are mainly ones where the Libs are leading. That means their seat count is more vulnerable. 2. If they count advance polls last and those tilt left, Libs could strengthen their position.
- As I explored exhaustively this past Fall, late counted votes in B.C. provincial elections historically favour the left-leaning party and did so again in 2024. www.chadskelton.com/2024/10/how-...
- Lib (165) + NDP (7) has a razor thin 172-seat majority at the moment. I'd guess there's a good chance that won't hold. Significantly more of the Liberal seat count is 'leading' rather than elected compared to Conservatives. A decent risk Liberal count will go down before the night is over.
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View full thread@kevinmilligan.bsky.social has a nice spreadsheet of the closest races, and it shows how some of the tightest ones are Lib-Con where the Libs are leading. That's a fragile place to be. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
- Now, having said all that, CBC's David Cochrane is saying on TV right now that they're pretty sure that straggling polls are mainly advance polls and special ballots which seem to tilt Liberal. And Lib (167) + NDP (7) margin has been inching up. So who knows...
- For the late-nighters, I made a google doc with the close outstanding races. docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Just hand updating it so it's already like 30 mins out of date... ...but a lot of ridings could still flip.
- Pro tip to a fellow nerd: If you have all results updating on a single webpage, =IMPORTHTML is your friend. (Though doesn't seem like Elections Canada has all ridings on a single page?) support.google.com/docs/answer/...
- And a couple of other razor-thin Liberal margins in Metro Vancouver with a few polls left to count.
- In fairness, Liberals still have a few shots at turning a few blue seats red.
- And there seem to be at least a few B.C. seats where the tide is shifting against the Liberals in late vote count. bsky.app/profile/chad...
- Wouldn't take much for the Liberals to lose their (razor thin) lead in Kelowna. Though only a handful of polls left to report.
- Been keeping an eye on Skeena-Bulkley Valley (BC). Amazing how much the NDP's margin of victory has narrowed from earlier in the night. Shows how poorly early results can predict final count.
- And just 7 minutes later, Conservative Ellis Ross has a strong lead. Early votes and late-counted votes must have come from very different areas.
- Overall, Liberals did worse than expected based on the polls. But this post of mine from earlier today on my own riding aged pretty well. 😀
- .@338canada.bsky.social has South Surrey-White Rock, my home riding, as a 60% chance of going Conservative. I think the Liberals' chances are a bit higher than that for a few reasons. A 🧵 338canada.com/59032e.htm
- CBC site now saying Liberal Ernie Klassen is elected in South Surrey-White Rock. A flip from Conservative to Liberal.
- Man, Kelowna really is a little red island in a sea of blue in the B.C. Interior.
- Pierre Polievre being behind in his own riding of Carleton seemed like a fluke with only a few polls reporting. But we're now at 50/266 polls and he's still in second. And the margin ain't all that close. Still hard to see him losing but this seems closer than people were expecting.
- Liberal Ernie Klassen has been consistently ahead in South Surrey-White Rock since counting began. But Conservative Kerry-Lynne Findlay just took the lead.
- And... Ernie's back in the lead.
- Interesting: Conservatives have pulled ahead in Fleetwood-Port Kells in Surrey, B.C. Liberal MP Ken Hardie, who stepped down, won the last three elections. In 2021 by a pretty big margin of 45%-30% (46%-28% redistributed) 70/187 polls reporting.
- Globe and Mail election results site is more reliable than the CBC's for sure. But it's map projection is driving me kind of bonkers. Not used to seeing Metro Vancouver on an angle like this. CBC's map 'feels' more right to me.
- I'm giving up on the CBC election results site. Keeps stagnating on me, telling me it's updating when it's not. Over to The Globe and Mail instead. www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/fed...
- Jagmeet Singh in 3rd place in his riding at the moment. Only 15/200 reporting.
- I don't know who decided to give the fourth seat beside CBC's At Issue panel to a rotating political hack spouting party lines, but it suuuuucks. We should hear from political parties on election night, obviously. But we get that enough from the riding-by-riding interviews.
- When NDP vote in a riding goes down and both Lib and Con vote goes up, TV commentators seem to assume the NDP support split between those two parties. Which... we have no way of knowing. Seems just as likely that a share of right-leaning Libs switched to Cons and NDP voters mainly went Lib.
- CBC election results page seems to be sputtering a bit, at least for me. Says it's updating but... it's not. Stuck at 9,142 polls reporting for the past 10 minutes and not showing some results they're showing on screen. Globe and Mail site more updated. www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/fed...
- Probably no easy way around this. But showing a running popular vote total throughout election night (which CBC keeps showing) seems misleading in a country that basically becomes more Conservative the further West you get and counts its results East to West. No way Libs get 50%+ of the final vote
- Has anyone found an election results site that (easily) compares results in a particular riding to the results in 2021 (with new boundaries)? I spend a lot of time loading up Wikipedia to figure out the vote shift in different places.
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- CBC still seems the best online. Though Globe and Mail is OK too. But no comparisons to previous elections on either.
- It's always kind of fun when there are ~100 votes counted in a riding. The numbers and percentages are the same!
- I know it makes it easier to read. But CBC’s bar-chart-but-not-quite-a-bar-chart drives me bananas.
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- Haha! Great minds! 😀 Was asking @jensvb.bsky.social the same thing: Have you found a better network or site? For online results, CBC's site feels a lot easier to use than other sites I've come across so far (CTV, Global).
- I really like the NYT's cartogram of Canadian election results, especially how they've highlighted Vancouver/Toronto/Montreal. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
- It pains me to say this, but CBC’s election coverage is embarrassingly bad. Graphs, map, and the talking heads all display a shocking lack of even basic understanding of what the early poll numbers mean.
- Have you found a network that's better? I do still like the At Issue panel when they get a chance to weigh in. TV broadcasts aside, I've always found the CBC website one of the easiest to navigate for results. And it shows %, which they annoyingly don't on TV.
- One year I should do an analysis of how (not) predictive results with one poll reporting are of what the final results in a riding are.
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- Now wondering how easy/hard that would be. Other than the election-night news results, I don't think Elections Canada flags in its datasets which polls reported first.
- Red=left-wing Blue=right-wing So says Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and probably others I can't think of right now. Like imperial vs. metric, it's the Americans who are weird. 😀
- Though this could be the election where the B.C. results really make a difference!* * claim made by B.C. politics junkies every federal election
- TV screens now showing NDP leading in two ridings. The other one is Leduc—Wetaskiwin (AB), another one it's really, really hard to imagine the NDP actually wins.
- And in Kenora, the NDP has already dropped to third. 🤣
- CBC flagging this as a “potential flip”. Uh, sure.
- And the one NDP leading on the TV screens right now is Kenora—Kiiwetinoong (ON) which the NDP has never won and which the Conservatives are projected to have a 99% chance of winning, with the NDP in a distant third.
- Conservatives are doing *quite* a lot better in some Atlantic Canadian ridings than the polls were projecting, based on @338canada.bsky.social Long Range Mountains in Newfoundland was projected as 48% Lib - 44% Con. Conservatives won it 52%-40%
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View full threadList of Atlantic Canada ridings on 338: 338canada.com/atl.htm
- That said, some ridings are pretty spot on to what was projected, like MIramichi-Grand Lake (NB)
- Terra Nova-The Peninsulas (NL) was projected by 388 as a pretty convincing 54%-43% win for the Liberals, a 92% chance of victory. Conservatives have a narrow lead 49%-47%.
- Central Nova (NS) was projected as almost a sure thing for the Liberals. 99% chance of victory. 54%-37% margin of victory. Actual results so far: 48%-45.7% for the Conservatives.
- Still *very* early in the night, but Conservatives seem to be slightly outperforming projections in Atlantic Canada so far. @338canada.bsky.social @ericgrenier.bsky.social
- .@338canada.bsky.social has South Surrey-White Rock, my home riding, as a 60% chance of going Conservative. I think the Liberals' chances are a bit higher than that for a few reasons. A 🧵 338canada.com/59032e.htm
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- Agreed. Also, in fairness to @338canada.bsky.social , his model does seem to include some demographics, including age. So his projections in South Surrey-White Rock may already account for the share of seniors here. 338canada.blogspot.com/2018/11/welc...
- It's striking how less partisan Canadians are compared to Americans. Hard to imagine ever seeing a vote swing this dramatic in the U.S., where the Republican/Democratic shift each election is usually in the low single digits. I think it's healthy for our democracy. Keeps leaders on their toes.
