Ontario election polls show a see-sawing battle between the PCs and the NDP in the lead-up to the June 7 vote, but experts say Andrea Horwath is at a disadvantage. Her support, they argue, is in the wrong places.

The NDP faces a strategic disadvantage when it comes to winning elections, political pundits agree, due to so-called voter “inefficiency.”

But it’s a disadvantage that can be overcome if the party can get out the youth vote.

The PCs tend to win great swaths of rural ridings in southern and eastern Ontario, where fewer votes are required to capture a seat. Despite the close race, the Tories are “playing in more seats,” competitive in about 79, whereas the NDP are competitive in 67, said pollster David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

The inefficiency of the NDP vote is compounded by the relative youth of the party’s supporters. The PCs rely on older, male voters who typically turn out to cast their ballots in larger numbers than the NDP’s young base.

“If millenials wake up and get out to vote collectively for one party that could be a game changer for the New Democrats,” said pollster David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were able to motivate young people to head to the polls in the 2015 federal election, and that had a real impact, said Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research Associates.

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In this election, millennials are once again “the wild card,” he said.

In the days leading up to the election, the NDP should focus on “too close to call” ridings like those in Mississauga, Markham, Pickering, and Chatham and urban centres outside the GTA like St. Catharines, Guelph and Cambridge, said Barry Kay, a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who publishes riding projections.

“If there’s an orange wave that’s fairly consistent across the province, there’s a chance the NDP will do better than we think,” said Coletto.

The Tories, for their part, need to hang on to the Toronto ridings where party leader Doug Ford is popular — Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York — as well as in their strongholds, such as certain ridings in Ottawa, Coletto said.

They need to continue to prevent voters from thinking, “Oh my god, I can’t imagine Doug Ford as premier,” he said. “They’ve kept people from fearing him. I think that’s helping hold their vote together.”

Several recent polls show a very close race between the the PCs and the NDP, with Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in a distant third.

Pollsters are skeptical of the prospect of a Liberal come-back. According to Graves, the governing party will likely be hard-pressed to win more than a handful of seats.

“I don’t see anything producing such a profound shift in the electorate,” he said. “The public has made up their minds and wants a new government.”

Now the parties should be highlighting how they’ll address hot-button issues in specific ridings they have the best chance of winning, said Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, an advocacy group that pushes for democratic reform.

“You’re trying to get voters from other parties to stay home or switch, and you’re trying to get your voters to turn out at the polls and stick with you,” Conacher said. “But everyone’s guessing how to do it.”

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For the NDP, because of the distribution of their support, the challenge appears more difficult — an accident of electoral mapping.

Unlike in the U.S. where political parties create riding boundaries, Canada and its provinces have non-partisan organizations (in Ontario’s case, Elections Ontario) that set the boundaries based on population.

“Our system is as fair and democratic as any in the world,” Conacher said, who is also an adjunct law professor at the University of Ottawa. And if one party benefits more than the others from riding boundaries, that’s just the “luck of the vote split.”

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