Stephen Taylor

How many memberships did Pierre Poilievre sell?

The second half of the Conservative Party leadership race is now underway. Midnight on June 4th represented the cut-off for new memberships sold for party members to be eligible to vote for the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

What’s the Pierre Poilievre news? Have Jean Charest and Patrick Brown merged campaigns yet? How’s Leslyn Lewis released her platform yet? Who is Roman Baber and what does he believe? Will Scott Aitchison end up endorsing anyone?

A source insider the Conservative Party told the CBC that the party expects to process over 600,000 new or renewed memberships sold by the leadership campaigns of Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, Patrick Brown, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber, and Scott Aitchison. A few of those membership will have been sold generally via the Conservative Party website during this period.

At $15 per membership, this means the party expects to rake in over $9,000,000 in revenue from this leadership race. This is a welcome winfall after spending tens of millions establishing abandoned branding exercises of Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole.

Campaigns will boast (and inflate) their numbers for various reasons. Some will try to establish themselves as the front-runner of the race and the candidate-to-beat. Psychologically, people like voting for the winner, so it helps to project this sort of confidence early-on. This will be Pierre Poilievre’s strategy as he’s been running a bit of a scorched-earth campaign with Jean Charest. In a ranked ballot contest, winning down-ballot support is critically important. That is, unless you are looking to win over 50% on the first ballot, making everyone’s second choice a moot point.

Poilievre’s campaign has been focused on exciting new members who have never before been active within a political party. His support of the trucker rally and position against vaccine mandates has attracted new people who have felt like they’ve been outside of the political process, while overtures to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin enthusiasts have inspired younger support. Pierre Poilievre’s principle campaign proxy Jenni Byrne has claimed that the campaign has sold 311,958 memberships. Byrne, perhaps knowing that campaigns inflate their numbers also called for transparency from the party on the process.

The softer side of Pierre. The candidate and his family. (via Pierre Poilievre)

Jean Charest for his part will be looking to rally the anybody-but-Pierre vote. For the former Quebec Premier, that number may be large or small, but will exist given Pierre is the perceived front-runner. Charest will be banking on Poilievre to be running at under 45% on the first ballot and will hope to gather second choice support. Boasting strong second-place numbers will rally support for this purpose behind Charest. At this time, Charest’s campaign has not released their numbers.

Jean Charest cracks a smile during a recent leadership debate (via Jean Charest)

For his part, former PC Party of Ontario leader and current Brampton mayor Patrick Brown boasted early on June 3rd, a total of 150,000 memberships were sold by his campaign with a day-long push later in the day to nudge this total higher. Brown has shown himself to be a formidable organizer in the past, shocking the Christine Elliott campaign during the 2015 PCPO leadership race – a campaign whose success was seen to be inevitable at the time. Brown has been selling memberships to new Canadian communities and hopes to diversify the party base by adding new membership to its rolls. We shall see how many of those new memberships from Brown were added versus renewed.

Patrick Brown and his wife Genevieve Gualtieri vote in Ontario’s 2022 election (via Patrick Brown)

Leslyn Lewis is the only candidate in the 2022 Conservative Party leadership race who ran in the previous contest versus Erin O’Toole. Lewis stunned the O’Toole and McKay campaigns with a stronger-than-expected showing on the first ballot, showing exceptional strength in the prairies. She has also positioned herself as the standard-bearer of the small but disproportionately active contingent of social conservatives in the party’s base – all other candidates declared themselves to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. Lewis’ position against vaccine mandates suggest that her down-ballot support will eventually go to Poilievre. Her campaign has not yet released their numbers.

Leslyn Lewis and Peter MacKay (via Leslyn Lewis)

Roman has yet to release his numerals. Roman Baber – the former PC MPP who was kicked out of Doug Ford’s governing caucus in Ontario for standing against lockdowns – will likely be a long-shot for leadership as he is not very well-known in the federal party or in the rest of Canada. Rising to national prominance on a single issue has its own shelf-life as well. However, Baber has since taken strong conservative-pleasing stances against communism and against leftwing authority, so he may surprise if he has a good ground game to sell memberships.

Roman Baber campaigns in Vancouver, British Columbia. (via Roman Baber)

Finally, Scott Aitchison, has been congenial-as-a-brand during this leadership race. Hope is an emotion that spurs people to act politically, though fear and anger are stronger. And potential for change is the glue that holds it all together. Will Aitchison’s strategy help him? If he’s running #2 or #3 in this race, down-ballot support has the potential to crown him victorious. However, running at the end of the pack, as many suspect he is, may show a missed opportunity to grab more attention by taking more contentious takes on hot-button issues and personalities.

Scott Aitchison showing that Conservatives can be nice. (via Scott Aitchison)

But yet for the front-runners, this post-cutoff period of the leadership race will likely see more congenial behaviour. Such a shift in tone from Poilievre may indicate less confidence on the first ballot. Candidates will also downplay their more woolly and outlandish appeals to members as they’re not able to chase any new sign-ups. The rest of this game will be about projecting a perceived position in candidate rank, and gathering that all-important down-ballot support from others; appealing to voting blocs banked with other candidates becomes all-too-important.

Mapping the results of the 2018 Ontario provincial election

Some of you may be up to more interesting things on the Victoria Day long weekend, but given that we’re into the most important period of a provincial election in Ontario at the moment – I thought I’d take some time and mash-up, clean-up, and mark-up data from Elections Ontario of the last provincial election to give us some important historical context for the vote coming up on June 2nd.

Jump in and explore the mapping tool I built.

The results of the 2018 Ontario provincial election

As with my previous mapping efforts, I’m sharing these as a non-partisan resource for all political volunteers who find a lot of use for political maps in campaign offices. If you appreciate that effort, write a nice tweet about the project, or better yet blog about it – if you still do that kind of thing.

The 2018 provincial election saw the end of the 19-year Ontario Liberal dynasty with the election of the newly-minted Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford after the dramatic ouster of Patrick Brown from the job just months earlier. Ford won a majority government in 2018 and is now looking to increase his seat total in this year’s contest.

Patrick Brown’s former riding of Simcoe North was easily retained by the PCs in 2018

Ford struggled – as all government leaders did – with administration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve just seen Alberta Premier Jason Kenney fall to populist discontent within his own party due to his own balancing of individual liberties versus public health during the crisis. Ford has faced similar criticism but looks to have wealthered the storm. Calling an election during a downtime in COVID cycles – and as Ontarians are off to the cottage – will likely see Ford return to the Premier’s Office when all of the votes are counted. We’re also expecting lower-than-usual voter turnout which usually favours incumbents.

Premier Doug Ford won the riding of Etobicoke North

As I’ve mentioned, the Ontario Liberals were wiped-out in 2018, being reduced to 7 seats. Putting the results on the map shows us their Toronto and Ottawa urban strongholds and where they may seek to increase their totals this year with their new leader Steven Del Duca.

The Liberal electoral map in Toronto looked quite different in 2018

Over on team-orange, this is NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s fourth election as head of her party. With falling Liberal fortunes in 2018, the Ontario NDP more than doubled their seats to 40. The riding distribution shows NDP strength in Toronto, Kingston, London, Niagara region, and Windsor.

The NDP won every poll in London–Fanshawe in 2018. Seeing the NDP win every poll in a riding is a rare sight.

Organized labour could also be a factor in redrawing the map. Labour Minister Monte McNaughton’s work in his portfolio has split up Progressives and the dreaded Working Families Coalition. Many of the founding members of the coalition – including the Ontario Pipe Trades Council, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – have endorsed the re-election of Progressive Conservatives and a refreshed mandate for Ford as Premier.

Monte McNaughton’s won the riding of Lambton—Kent—Middlesex. The NDP won one poll on the western edge of the riding

By most accounts, Green Party leader Mike Schreiner impressed the province during the Ontario Leaders debate. His opposition to highway 413 and greenbelt issues may translate into additional seats for the Greens. With a split on the left between Liberal and NDP support, we could see Ontario progressives rally with strong green representation in some ridings. However, it’s more likely that this will clear the way for additional Progressive Conservative gains.

Green Party leader Mike Schreiner won Guelph in 2018. Here, his strength in the riding is mapped by poll from maximum (green) to minimum strength (red)

I’ve mapped out areas of strength in each riding for each candidate that ran in 2018. Whether your party was successful or not in your local riding, you can see where it’s strength is growing or declining and these maps can help you focus on neighbourhoods where you can get out the vote. Whether you’re actively campaigning or not, you can also use these maps to see the distribution of party strength geographically within a riding using these strength/weakness settings for the poll-by-poll maps. How did your neighbours vote? Find out!

The NDP carried the riding of Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas in 2018. You can see their urban vs rural strength mapped here.

There’s a search bar at the top of the app as well so you can easily zoom around the province if you know the riding you want to look at but can’t exactly remember its geospatial position. Future updates will include a method to jump around to neighbouring ridings and to look at the results of previous Ontario elections in context. I’ve already added these features to my federal maps, so do check those out as well if you believe that the 2021 federal election provides some helpful context for this current provicial election.

The many minds of Kingston and the Islands. CFB Kingston is to the east, Queen’s University and the Prisons are to the West and the Liberal cottages are on the nicer part of Wolfe Island

Hopefully you find this to be a useful resource if you’re colouring in maps in a campaign office, or if you just can’t get enough of Canadian politics. If you are neither, I hope you’ll still find the visualization of Ontario electoral politics to give you some bearings on the priorities of your community.

So give the map database a try and geolocate your vote!

Mapped Results of the 2021 Canadian Federal Election

Elections Canada has just released the official results of 2021 Canadian federal election.

The official voting results present the results of the election in much greater detail than the validated results that were shared immediately after the election. While the results themselves do not change, the official voting results provide more context by combining multiple data sources—including updated data on the number of registered electors, demographic information on candidates and poll-by-poll results—and presenting the data as a complete package, shared in multiple formats.
Elections Canada

This detailed CSV files of these results were released on April 7th and include the poll-by-poll tallies of the 338 ridings. Those polls are neighbourhood-sized slices of Canada of under 1000 electors (some neighbourhoods are bigger depending on the geography, of course). There are, by my count, 69997 polling divisions in Canada.

As I do, I stayed up all night to crunch through the data and plot it in map format. This, because I know you prefer not to consume your elections data via spreadsheet.

You can dive in by starting at the national map and clicking on any riding of your choosing.

Kitchener Centre was picked up by the Green Party

It’s still early so I haven’t done too much analysis on these maps yet (please tell me what you discover!)

As we all know, Justin Trudeau was held to a minority government with no significant change in the seats between the Liberals and Conservative parties.

The Liberals chipped away at a few urban centres with the Conservatives picking up strength in eastern Canada.

Edmonton Centre votes in 2021. Liberal strength is plotted from green (strong) to red (weak) polls.

Coast of Bays–Central–Notre Dame was a pickup for the Conservatives in 2021. Scott Simms, the Liberal incumbent was retired after 17 years in office. Conservative strength plotted from green (strong) to red (weak).

There were some peculiarities of note. Take Saint Boniface–Saint Vital in Manitoba, for example. I believe they have the distinction of running the most candidates for office in 2021.

Since the last election, I’ve added a couple of features that make the mapping tool more interactive. You can search for riding in the search bar above any map. Clicking the “✨ Related content” button at the top right of the screen will show you ridings near the local map you’re looking at, and you can also view the history of the riding at a glance and navigate through last 8 elections. Even if the riding didn’t exist during a previous election, those nearest to the current mapped view will show up along the timeline.

As always, you can size up a map how you like it and click the download image button. Share these maps on Twitter and Instagram. Print them on a t-shirt and wear them proudly to your next family reunion. You’ll be glad you did!

You’ll be the coolest person on twitter when you download these maps to share.

I hope you enjoy this project as much I as enjoyed making it. If you have any feature requests, just let me know on twitter @stephen_taylor.

If you want to use the maps on your website, I’d appreciate a link back to my site so that more people can discover the project.

Thanks, and happy exploring!

Related:

The Stephen Taylor Data Project

CPC leadership race mapped out. Where will 2022’s hopefuls look to dominate membership sales?

Original mapping project announcement