Two months before public opinion polls showed an NDP “surge” in the Ontario election, Cheri DiNovo was already predicting big things for her former party.

On March 10, after Doug Ford won the rushed leadership contest to replace Patrick Brown at the helm of the Progressive Conservative party, the former NDP MPP tweeted: “Wow! Looks like an #ondp gov!”

For DiNovo, who left politics to become minister of Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts, the combination of Ford’s divisiveness and widespread frustration with Kathleen Wynne’s government created an unprecedented opening for the NDP, particularly in urban centres. Today, her forecast doesn’t seem so far fetched, with polls showing the NDP and PCs in a statistical dead heat heading into the campaign’s home stretch.

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Whether or not her old party wins enough seats to form government, DiNovo — who represented the riding of Parkdale-High Park for more than a decade — predicts the NDP will sweep all of downtown Toronto, even in what she calls “bastions of Liberal power.”

Pollsters and other election watchers are less certain, but they agree the prospect of an orange wave downtown is possible, even in ridings that have been in Liberal hands for a generation or longer.

“It doesn’t look like there are any safe Liberal seats any more,” said Barry Kay, an associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

With the third-place party in the legislature consistently running a solid second in polls, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is fending off both the leading Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in the run-up to the June 7 election. But is Horwath ready for prime time?

Kay, a veteran elections analyst, developed a projection system that aggregates polling data and combines it with other information to project how many seats each party is likely to win. Kay’s latest projection, released May 30, suggests the NDP have a firm grip on five of the eight ridings downtown: Parkdale-High Park, where DiNovo’s former executive assistant Bhutila Karpoche is running; Davenport, where the NDP lost by six percentage points in 2014; Spadina-Fort York, an amalgamated riding that includes part of the former NDP stronghold of Trinity-Spadina; Toronto-Danforth, where veteran NDP MPP Peter Tabuns is favoured to win a fifth term; and Beaches-East York, which the NDP lost by fewer than 500 votes in 2014.

The Liberals are considered only marginal favourites in the three other downtown ridings — Toronto-St. Paul’s, Toronto Centre and the newly created University-Rosedale — where they have historically been almost unbeatable. Both Toronto-St. Paul’s and Toronto Centre have been held by the Liberals continuously since the ridings were created in 1999, and the Liberals won the ridings with overwhelming majorities in the last provincial election.

But the Liberal incumbents in those ridings — Eric Hoskins and Glen Murray, respectively — have both resigned, giving up the usual advantage afforded those seeking re-election.

“I just think the Liberals are in trouble everywhere,” Kay said, adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if those three ridings move in the NDP’s direction in his next projection, slated to be released Monday or Tuesday. “Things are going south for the Liberals.”

Ironically, strategic voting, which usually hurts the NDP, appears to be working in their favour this time around, Kay said, driven in part by a strong anti-Ford sentiment in urban ridings. People who may have voted Liberal in the past are “increasingly concerned about a Ford majority or a Ford government,” Kay said, so they’re moving to the NDP.

Although the Progessive Conservatives finished ahead of the NDP in Toronto Centre and Toronto-St. Paul’s in the last election, they are unlikely to be competitive in this election because of Ford, said Earl Washburn, a senior analyst at EKOS Politics, a polling company. “His kind of populism doesn’t translate very well to downtown Toronto.”

Washburn referenced the 2014 mayoral election, in which Ford garnered very little support in the parts of the city that make up the Toronto Centre and Toronto-St. Paul’s ridings. In fact, he fared worse than former NDP MP Olivia Chow, who finished third in the race overall.

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The ridings include a lot of progressive voters who tend to vote Liberal, Washburn said. “In this election the chances of them voting NDP are quite a bit higher.”

The fact Toronto Centre no longer includes wealthy Rosedale is another factor in the NDP’s favour, Washburn said. At the same time, Rosedale’s overall influence could be dulled by its inclusion in the new riding of University-Rosedale, which is made up largely of what Washburn calls “prime NDP territory.”

Former Liberal MPP George Smitherman, who represented Toronto Centre at Queen’s Park from 1999 to 2010, said he has noticed the NDP’s “obvious momentum” in this election. “They have signs of real life in places where they don’t always have it,” he said.

But that’s not particularly surprising to the 54-year-old, who last month announced he is running for city council. His old riding may be a Liberal stronghold, but it has always included a large number of progressively inclined voters. Smitherman, who won Toronto Centre by a 27-point margin in 2007, said he often tried to be “almost NDP-light” to earn broad-based support. “So it’s not a surprise to me that the stop-Doug-Ford issue trumps a lot of the other important distinctions between the Liberals and NDP.”

At the same time, Smitherman — who has canvassed in his old riding for the current Liberal candidate — said he has still felt a strong sense of Liberal loyalty when knocking on doors. “People have told me, ‘This is still a Liberal riding.’ ”

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