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Thanks, adma.
I meant to look up the official Elections Canada results a few weeks ago.
It will also be interesting when we see the maps with colours showing which parts of the ridings each party won.
Eg. I notice that Justin Trudeau won most of the polls in Papineau this time. It would be interesting to see how that looks on a Poll Map.
Because I have heard some of the NDP MP's talking about how well they did on Vancouver Island and therefore Mulcair is not so bad I crunched some numbers. Since the ridings went from 6 to 7 it is impossible to compare the result riding by riding so I looked at the Island as a whole.
In 2011 the NDP got 38.37% of the vote on the Island and won 3 of the 6 seats while the Cons won 2 and the Greens 1. In 2015 they got 33.37% of the vote and won 6 out of 7 ridings with May being the lone non-NDP winner. A lose of 5% points in popular vote in the best area of the country for the NDP is hardly something to cheer about. It is clear that winning under Mulcair looks a lot like a Conservative collapse and even here the largest beneficiaries of that collapse were the Liberals.
What about the raw vote total? If the raw vote total stayed the same but non-voters turned out for the Liberals, the NDP percentage would be less.
That said, I do agree, and I think the Greens may have done better and eaten into NDP support if it wasn't for the burning desire people had to stop Harper.
The NDP got 146,878 votes in 2011 and 157,817 votes in 2015 however the number of votes cast increased by 93,000. The Liberals surged on the Island like everywhere else but they started from between 5% and 10% of the vote so getting to 20% to 25% didn't win them anything.
In BC around half the voters will never vote for the NDP and provincially they are all in the BC Liberal/Socred party so they win every election. The NDP has only won government provincially in BC when the right wing vote is split. Federally the NDP does well when those votes split between the Cons and Libs which is what happened on Vancouver Island in 2015. If the Liberal/Conservative switch voters go back to the Cons next election the NDP likely loses a few of their seats on the Island.