NDP on track to flip Surrey-Guildford, maybe Kelowna Centre too

Surrey-Guildford looks on track to flip from Conservative to NDP based on Election BC's first batch of final count results.

And the NDP is doing so well in the late-counted ballots that Kelowna Centre might be in play, too — which would give the NDP just enough seats for a majority and speaker (48) without the support of the Greens.

In contrast, the Conservatives look unlikely to take any seats from the NDP. In the three seats with the narrowest NDP wins, the NDP has widened their margin in all of them.

The final column in the Google Spreadsheet is the most important one to pay attention to. In Surrey-Guildford, with more than 60% of the uncounted votes now counted, the NDP is winning the late counted votes by a margin of 23.2 percent points, well above the 16.4 point margin they need to win the seat. Even though, at the moment, they're still technically behind the Conservatives by 14 votes: 8,810 to 8,796.

There are virtually no new results from either Kelowna Centre or Courtenay-Comox in this first update. But if the NDP did as well in Kelowna Centre as it did in Surrey-Guildford (or as it's doing in Surrey City Centre or Juan de Fuca - Malaht), they could take that seat too.

Here's a reminder of how election night votes compared to mail-in ballots in every general election since 2005.

Somewhat surprisingly, the NDP's gains so far in late-counted votes  are so substantial they might end up being larger than the pandemic election of 2020, which was seen as an outlier in terms of how many people voted by mail and how partisan the skew of mail-in voters was.

For example, in 2020 the NDP increased their margins over the BC Liberals by about 13 percentage points, from a 10-point lead in the election-night count (45%-35%) to a 23-points lead in the mail-in ballots (53%=30%).

Of the four close ridings shown above, the average NDP gain is more like 20 percentage points.

We may never know why the NDP did so well in late-counted votes in 2024. But it may give credence to two theories I floated earlier:

• While 2020 was an unusual year for mail-in voting, it may have sold a lot of B.C. voters on the convenience of voting by mail. And because so many mail-in voters in 2020 were NDP voters, the cohort of mail-in voters may now have a partisan lean.

• Because at least half of mail-in ballots were counted early, and included in the election night count, what's being counted now are the votes of procrastinators — precisely those mail-in voters who voted too late to be counted already. Maybe procrastinators (or those who are undecided until the very end) are more likely to be left-leaning.

It will be interesting to see if either or both of these trends continue in future elections. If they do, we might have to start expecting a little left-leaning shift in the election results once the final count is in.