Election Writ 11/11: Where are the Trudeau-Houston voters?
Plus, where Nova Scotians will have more than three candidates on the ballot.
Welcome to the Election Writ, a special-edition newsletter to get you up-to-date on the ongoing campaign in Nova Scotia.
After Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford both won a majority of Ontario’s seats in provincial and federal elections between 2015 and 2022, there’s often been talk of the so-called Trudeau-Ford voters — voters who support the Trudeau Liberals at the federal level and the Ford PCs provincially. Many of them are found in the Greater Toronto Area, where the two parties hold nearly all of the seats.
So, are there Trudeau-Houston voters in Nova Scotia?
I asked David Coletto from Abacus Data about this. Looking at his most recent survey in Nova Scotia, he found that 9% of the electorate have a positive impression of both Tim Houston and Justin Trudeau. Among these voters, 50% intend to vote for the PCs in this campaign and 51% would vote for the Liberals in a federal election.
There were probably more of these voters back in 2021. Only a few months after Houston’s PCs won a majority of Nova Scotia’s seats in that year’s August provincial election, Trudeau’s Liberals won eight of 11 seats in the October federal election. The Liberals would struggle to win more than three ridings today.
But there were 21 provincial ridings won by the PCs in which the federal Liberals took the most votes in 2021, according to the Riding Builder tool by Election-Atlas.ca. They were largely concentrated on Cape Breton Island (outside of Sydney) and in Hants, Lunenburg and Pictou counties.
Pictou Centre is the riding where the most Trudeau-Houston voters probably exist. It’s the only riding in the province in which both the Nova Scotia PCs and the federal Liberals captured a majority of ballots cast in the 2021 elections. Unless there was a difference in turnout between the two groups, it is inevitable that at least some voters in the riding split their ticket between the two parties.
Other ridings where the most Trudeau-Houston voters exist are likely Antigonish, Cape Breton East, Inverness, Kings North and Richmond. In those five ridings, both the Houston PCs and the Trudeau Liberals took at least 45% of the vote in 2021.
Granted, the majority of PC voters stayed on the blue team in both elections and the majority of Liberal voters stuck with the red team. But there would have also been enough who crossed party lines to elect a PC provincially and a Liberal federally.
What these ridings have in common is that they are all rural or centred on small towns. Three of them are on Cape Breton. And, with the sole exception of Antigonish, they also voted for the Nova Scotia PCs in 2017 while they were represented by Liberal MPs. These are ridings filled with Red Tories and/or Blue Liberals.
This suggests these voters aren’t ones that Tim Houston has to worry about too much. They will almost certainly stick with his party this time. However, Justin Trudeau should have good reason to be concerned that these voters will be the Nova Scotians most likely to become Houston-Poilievre voters next time — if they haven’t made up their minds already.
Here is what is in this Remembrance Day instalment of the Election Writ:
News on the latest developments in the campaign, plus a look at the candidate slates now that they’ve been finalized.
Only one new poll this past week, but it helps us understand the differences between the two other polls that have been published since writ drop.
Who would win and who would form the official opposition if the election were held today.
This week in Nova Scotia election history.