Steven Del Duca at risk of losing his own riding, while Doug Ford headed for a second majority, polls show

There might be more movement in a stationary bike.

With just a few days until Thursday’s Ontario election, Doug Ford’s PCs appear to be headed for a second straight majority, and Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca is likely to lose his own riding, according to the latest update from The Signal, a poll aggregator created for the Star by Vox Pop Labs.

If the vote were held today, the PCs would end up with 36.9 per cent of the popular vote, ahead of the Liberals’ 27.2 per cent and the NDP’s 22.7, with 6.9 going to the Greens. That would translate into 75 seats for the PCs, 28 for the NDP, 20 for the Liberals and one seat for Mike Schreiner’s Green Party.

And that’s roughly where it’s been for most of the campaign.

“Really the interesting trend is how little volatility there has been in the polling through this campaign,” said Vox Pop CEO Clifton van der Linden, adding that he can’t recall ever having seen a campaign with such little movement in this province.

“Not in Ontario. It’s really quite surprising given how animated political competition has been at the federal level,” van der Linden said.

In the 2018 election, the PCs won 76 seats. Andrea Horwath led the NDP to Official Opposition status with 40 seats, and then-Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were reduced to seven seats, losing official party status. Mike Schreiner won the riding of Guelph to give the Green Party its first seat in the Ontario legislature.

The Signal’s seat projection, which is based on publicly-released polls from the current campaign, as well as results from the 2018 election, has just six seats listed as toss-ups. Late last week, there were 10.

One riding which isn’t listed as a toss-up is Vaughan-Woodbridge, where Del Duca is widely seen as being in the fight of his political life against incumbent PC MPP Michael Tibollo. The Signal’s projection currently lists the riding as a “likely” PC win.

Ford, Horwath and Schreiner are all projected as “safe” in their ridings of Etobicoke North, Hamilton Center and Guelph, respectively.

While van der Linden is fairly confident that Horwath and the NDP will finish in second place in the seat count, he stresses that’s not set in stone.

“If present trends hold until election day, I think it would be a surprise if the NDP loses official opposition status in the next provincial government. But statistically speaking, it’s actually less certain that this will be the case than it was last week,” said van der Linden, who explained that the NDP vote is likely to translate into a higher seat count despite having a lower overall vote share than the Liberals. That, said van der Linden, is because the NDP votes are likely more concentrated in a smaller number of ridings.

“This is really a feature of our Westminster model. Vote distribution matters more than overall vote share,” van der Linden said.

COMPARTIR: