Mayor of all Toronto except part of it

In yesterday's post I came up with some hypotheses about the vote in the recent Toronto mayoral election. Since then I've refined them a bit and tested them.

I simplified them by reducing the independent variables to two – section of the city and household income, and by hypothesizing only about the vote for the winner, Rob Ford. Hypothesizing about all three major candidates just complicates analysis, and examination of the effects of the independent variables on their votes could be done post hoc to elucidate the effects on Mr. Ford's vote.

I had originally planned to analyze the results by subdivision, but that increased the power of the statistical test so much that almost any difference would have been statistically significant. So I analyzed the results by ward; that decision gave me a nice little sample of 44.

Income was defined as the quartile in which median household income in the ward fell. The sections of the city were the outer suburbs (those wards for whom the city limits were part of their land boundaries), the inner suburbs (other wards outside the old City of Toronto as it was before amalgamation in 1998), east Toronto (roughly the old City of Toronto east of Yonge St.), and west Toronto (roughly the old City of Toronto west of Yonge St.).

So my new null hypotheses were that Mr. Ford's vote would be affected by neither of the independent variables. I was hoping, though, that they'd be affected the section of the city but not by income. Specifically, I was hoping his vote would be highest in the outer suburbs,

Mr. Ford's vote was not correlated with the total vote in a ward (r = .25; p > .05), so I didn't correct for differences in the number of votes (if they had been correlated, I would have removed the effect of total votes with regression analysis and analyzed the residual vote).

My hopes were dashed. A two-way analysis found that Mr. Ford did do best in the outer suburbs, but not significantly better than in the inner suburbs. The big difference was between the pre-1998 City of Toronto and the rest of the current city. Mr. Ford won 31% of the vote in the old City of Toronto, and 59% elsewhere.

This analysis also found a weak effect of income, but further analysis suggested this was an artefact of random variation in the number of votes cast. Analysis of the residual vote I described earlier found no differences related to median household income.

Analysis of Mr. Smitherman's and Mr. Pantalone's votes confirmed they were the candidates of the pre-1998 City of Toronto. They did better there (and Mr. Smitherman did better only in east Toronto). Ward income was not related to the votes they received.

In general, then, different sections of the city voted differently but income had little if anything to do with the results. Mr. Smitherman, the chief competitor for Mr. Ford, failed to appeal outside the oldest part of the city. Perhaps another popular explanation of the results is correct – Mr. Ford just ran by far the best campaign.