I still think the Cons are going to lose, but this is absolutely a disaster for the LIbs, and dismissing it as a protest vote or a warning shot is underestimating it a lot, I think. This had been a Liberal riding for over 30 years and they always won rather healthily. The Cons haven't even had a decent vote count there since the 80s.
76 people on the ballot were as part of a protest looking for electoral reform.
Sure, the vote-splitting helped the Cons, but there's no guarantee those people wouldn't have voted Con - or voted at all. The NDP had 4000 votes, the Greens just over 1000, and the only other one over 100 had 234. All the other candidates other than the main 4, only got 1334 votes or so between them.
|