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In addition to winning 184 seats, moreover, they finished second in 118 more, giving them a “footprint” of 302 out of 338 seats where they are competitive. That’s significantly broader than the 256 seats in which the Conservatives finished first or second last time (or would have: for comparability, I will throughout this piece use Elections Canada’s reconstruction of the 2011 data using 2015 electoral boundaries).

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And yet the Liberals cannot rest easy. The average Conservative winning margin in 2011 was 28 per cent; for the Liberals in 2015, just 20 per cent. One Liberal seat in six was won by less than five per cent; in only 44 per cent did their margin exceed 20 per cent. And the Conservatives, while beaten — only the sixth majority government to be defeated in the last 80 years — did not suffer the kind of debacle that their predecessors did.

It’s true that their popular vote declined eight points, from nearly 40 per cent to just under 32 per cent. That’s real enough, and should not be discounted. Some Tory partisans are seeking comfort in the fact that, in raw numbers, the party’s total vote “only” declined by 230,000. But that does not mean all is well.

Turnout was up 2.8 million in this election. Suppose the Conservatives took a quarter of it (on the assumption that new voters were more likely to be looking for “change” than “more of the same”), adding 700,000 to their total. That would mean a decline of 930,000 votes — nearly one in six — among those who voted for them last time.