Results show domination of byelection by Liberals

Neighbourhood voting results released for Kelowna West

The loneliest NDP voters in the Kelowna West riding live around Shannon Lake Golf Course.

Only three people in the neighbourhood north of the golf course voted for NDP candidate Shelley Cook in last month’s provincial byelection.

It was as close to zero as the NDP came in any of the 90 neighbourhood voting areas that encompass all of West Kelowna and much of downtown Kelowna.

Liberal Ben Stewart won the byelection with 56.3 per cent of all votes cast. Cook won 23.5 per cent, and Green candidate Robert Stupka earned 12.7 per cent.

Although the NDP and the Greens now govern the province in a tactical alliance, each of the two parties actually received a slightly smaller share of the vote in the Kelowna West byelection than they did in the same riding during the general election last May.

This week, Elections BC released neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood voting results of the byelection, and there are some intriguing nuggets in the tranche of data.

— Along with a slight drop in their overall support from last year’s election, the New Democrats should be concerned about the way their votes thinned out across the riding.

In the 2013 Kelowna West byelection won by Liberal leader Christy Clark, the NDP still managed to win 18 of the riding’s neighbourhood voting areas. Last month, however, Cook won only eight voting areas, most being in downtown Kelowna.

— If orange support is petering out in Kelowna West, support for the Greens, on the other hand, is widening. Last May, the Greens placed second to the Liberals in only three of the riding’s voting areas. Last month, they were second in 13 neighbourhood voting areas.

— Even more dramatically, the Greens actually won one of the 90 voting areas, beating both the Liberals and the NDP in an eight-block downtown Kelowna neighbourhood centred around the corner of Wilson Avenue and Graham Street.

— While Green support may be spreading in Kelowna West, it is not deepening, and the Liberals will have little reason to lose sleep over the neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood voting results.

The party won all but nine of the voting areas in Kelowna and West Kelowna, and by some margins that are simply staggering. In the Shannon Lake neighbourhood where there were only three NDP voters, for example, 81 per cent of all votes cast went to the Liberals.