A closer look at the 2024 N.S. election results and what they tell us about the major parties and voters
Big wins for PCs, NDP made gains in Halifax but lost votes in some rural areas
There were some big wins and losses in the 2024 Nova Scotia election. But, there's more to the story beyond the number of seats each party won.
The Liberals suffered big losses under the "first-past-the-post" or winner-takes-all electoral system, where a candidate only needs to have the most votes to win a riding.
Despite receiving slightly more of the popular vote than the NDP, the Liberals ended up with fewer seats in the Nova Scotia legislature.
The Liberals were reduced from its 17 seats won in the 2021 election to just two.
Meanwhile, the NDP flipped three seats compared to 2021, increasing their total in the House of Assembly to nine.
It was a great election for Premier Tim Houston's party, with the PCs flipping 12 seats from the previous election in 2021.
The party made gains in vote share in every district. In many parts of the province, they gained at least 10 per cent of the vote.
With Nova Scotia being a mostly rural province, the PCs' strong results are a reflection of the largely positive outlook that people in rural areas have had recently, said Karen Foster, a Dalhousie associate professor of sociology who researches rural communities.
There's been population growth in a lot of those places, said Foster, whose research has included interviewing rural business owners.
"And while there are concerns about the capacity of ... hospitals and housing and schools to absorb growth, it's what people have been asking for for a long time."
Meanwhile for the NDP, it was a good election on the surface. The party grew its seat count, jumped to second place and Leader Claudia Chender will become the first elected woman leader of the Official Opposition.
But the party's big gains in vote share were largely concentrated in the HRM, where the party already had an existing base of support.
At the same time, in some rural ridings the party's vote share went down. In Glace Bay-Dominion for example, the NDP lost about 24 per cent of vote share from 2021.
And if you look at the ridings where the NDP came in second place — areas where they might be looking to pick up seats next election — the vast majority of those candidates lost by at least 10 per cent of the vote.
To gain seats in the next election, Foster said the NDP will need to invest more in local candidates who have strong standing in their communities.
"Listen to rural voters ... get out there between elections, and listen to what people are saying and try to figure out how can you create policy that is not blind to place," she said.
Finally, it was a devastating election for the Liberals, which saw its share of the vote collapse.
There was just a single riding where the party improved its vote share. That was in Timberlea-Prospect, where former premier Iain Rankin was re-elected with 54.9 per cent of the vote — a slight gain of 0.5 percentage points from in 2021.
Yarmouth and Annapolis were examples of ridings where every vote truly did count. Liberal Leader Zach Churchill narrowly lost his seat by just 14 votes in Yarmouth.
There will be judicial recounts held for Yarmouth and Annapolis on Monday and Tuesday respectively.
Of course, some of these results might have changed if more people voted. This was Nova Scotia's lowest voter turnout on record, with only 45 per cent of registered voters casting a ballot.
The ridings of Clare and Richmond had the highest turnout at 65.9 per cent and 61.9 per cent respectively. The lowest turnout ridings were Truro-Bible Hill-Millbrook-Salmon River at 35.3 per cent and Shelburne at 34.5 per cent.
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