[LINK] "Conservatives stand to suffer most from lack of incumbents"

[rfmcdonald]

Éric Grenier of CBC writes about a weakness of the Conservative Party entering into the elections.

The penalty for lacking an incumbent can be significant. All else being equal, parties without an incumbent have suffered a hit worth about seven per cent of what the party might have otherwise been expected to get in the riding. This is in consideration of how the wider region swung from the previous vote, and based on an analysis of more than 250 cases in recent elections.

Depending on the level of support an incumbent previously had in a given riding, that can represent anything from two to five points — seemingly aligning with the conventional wisdom concerning the value of a local candidate. And this is just the average performance. There are many individual cases where the loss of an incumbent had a much more profound impact (and, though fewer, some where the impact was negligible).

Though the Tories have been hit particularly hard by the loss of some well-known incumbents like James Moore in British Columbia, John Baird in Ontario and Peter MacKay in Nova Scotia, the number of Conservative incumbents who have chosen not to run for re-election is not abnormally high. In fact, it is roughly proportional to the number of seats they won in 2011.

But the locations of those Conservatives not running for re-election could be problematic.