The 2025 Ontario election is just under a week away. As an exercise, we thought we would try to identify which ridings might be the closest ridings. To do so, we pulled the results from the 2018 and 2022 election results and calculated the winner’s margin of victory as a percentage of the total number of votes that were cast. On average, winning candidates won by about 10% of the votes cast in 2018 and 8% of the votes cast in 2022.
| Election | Average | Standard Deviation |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 General Election | 0.10 | 0.07 |
| 2022 General Election | 0.08 | 0.05 |
And we can visualize the distributions of the margins of victory this way. There’s not a lot that stands out here except to say that the 2022 election appears to have had noticeably fewer landslides. There were about six districts in 2018 with margins of victory greater than 20% of the ballots cast, none in 2022.
But what we are really interested in are the specific districts. To select this, we just picked those districts with an margin of victory more than one standard deviation smaller than the average for each election. For each district, we also filtered extracted the first and second place parties. So, voila!
Now there are limitations here. This doesn’t take into account any information about whether there are incumbents who are running or not running or any new high-profile candidates. And lastly it doesn’t take into account the Greens who, by virtue of being the fourth party, are going to be vulnerable regardless and will be ridings to watch (Kitchener-Centre, I am looking at you!)
That said, it’s also not nothing. So, let’s dive in.
File from provided URL is empty.
One thing we can do also do is count the swing ridings by who the two leading parties were. In 2018, there were 20 PC-NDP races and 9 NDP-PC races. But in 2022, there were 11 PC-Liberal races.
Close Races by First and Second Place Party in 2018 and 2022
If we look at the specific ridings a few specific ridings stand out.
- Thunder Bay stands out as a city that has close districts in both elections. Let’s see what happens there.
- There were more than a few PC-Liberal races in the outer Greater Toronto area. Specifically,
- Milton
- Ajax
- Mississauga-Streetsville
- Willowdale and
- Etobicoke-Lakeshore
- Oshawa and Toronto St.Paul’s stand out as repeat swing ridings, both narrowly held by the NDP
- NDP-PC competition seems to emerge in outer centers like St. Catharine’s, Niagara-Centre and Thunder Bay.
Good luck to everyone on Thursday and make sure you vote!
