Here is last night's election results in historical context since the 1985 defeat of 42 years of PC rule. To give an idea of how few people are voting, Ontario's population grew from 9.3 million to 15 million between 1985 and 2022. It has grown by nearly 4 million people since the millenium.
Some conclusions...
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1. The single biggest vote loser was the NDP. It lost 820,000 votes, or 42% of its 2018 vote. I have scoured the data, and this is the biggest setback suffered by the Official Opposition in Ontario history.
2. Ontario PC support dropped by 410,000 but it still remains high. In the last election, the PC vote went up by an astonishing 820,000 - essentially all new votes went to Ford in 2018. The decline in PC support blows up any claims that the PCs made significant inroads with union voters or Ontario's working majority.
3. The Liberals suffered a massive defeat because of high expectations based on polls showing the party pushing towards 30 percent. Nevertheless, they maintained the same number of votes as 2018.
4. The common Green strategy of focusing on one or two ridings to expand their caucus proved unsuccessful this time around, but the party gained votes.
5. The combined NDP-Liberal-Green vote was almost identical between 2014 and 2018, rising from 3.24 million to 3.32 million. Then it collapsed to 2.51 million in 2022 - a collapse attributable to the NDP alone.
6. With reports of the lowest turnout in Ontario history - 43% - turnout collapsed by 13 points from 2018. Two thirds of those losses are attributable to the opposition, a third to the ruling PCs.