Forecasts for the May 2nd Canadian Federal Election. Click here to see a larger version.
Probability Distributions for each Party's Seat Count
Stochastic Democracy's Bayesian Canadian Election Model forecasts a 30% chance of a Conservative majority, and forecasts that the NDP are now just as likely as the Liberals to form the second largest party in Parliament.
Forecasts for the May 2nd Canadian Federal Election. Click here to see a larger version.
Probability Distributions for each Party's Seat Count
Opinion over time with 70% confidence intervals. Click here for a larger version.
Canadian Seat and Vote counts by region
These forecasts were made with Stochastic Democracy's Bayesian Canadian Election Model. It works by first estimating Public Opinion in each of Canada's provinces based off of regional polls, and then applying proportional swing on a region basis. The model takes into account all polls that were released before yesterday. Individual district-level vote predictions are available here, while probability estimates are available here.
This is very similar to what has been done by ThreeHundredEight, who has generously provided his extensive Canadian poll dataset. The advantage here is that this model is fully probabilistic, which allows rigorous answers to questions like "What's the probability that the Conservatives will win a majority of seats?" (30%), or "What's the probability that the NDP will end up with more seats than the Liberals?" (51%).
As a quick primer for American Readers, Canada has five major political parties: The Conservatives, The Liberals, The NDP (Can be loosely thought of as a Social Democratic party to the Liberals left), The Bloc Québécois (Quebec Separatists), and the Greens.
Because Canada elects it's Parliament based on Plurality voting in Geographical districts, Conservatives have been able to control government with less than 40% of the vote due to a fractured left-wing. Meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois have been able to obtain a disproportionate number of seats due to their concentrated support in...Quebec. The Greens tends to receive six to ten percent of the vote nationally, but has consistently failed to concentrate their vote to win and hold a single seat.
The campaign was mostly uneventful until about a week ago, when the NDP unexpectedly started to surge around the country. Our model now predicts that the NDP is now a very slight favorite to overtake the Liberals as the second largest party in Canada and to overtake the Bloc Québécois as the largest party in Quebec.
The big question mark is whether this surge will persist into the election next week, and to what extent left-wing voters will vote tactically, and if they do, who they will vote tactically for.