As I watched those first Atlantic returns come in on Monday night — not just Liberal wins, but Liberal annihilations of established, locally popular incumbents — I realized two things very quickly. The first was that unless this Liberal surge petered out somewhere along Atlantic Canada’s border with Quebec, we’d be looking at a Liberal majority. And the second was that books were going to be written about this election.

They’ll no doubt make interesting reading. One set of numbers that already jumps out, though, are the vote hauls for each party. Each party’s numbers tell a different story. Each is fascinating.

Let’s first look at the Liberals. They clearly had a good night on Monday, with their comfortable majority government and all. But their vote haul is what’s intriguing — up more than four million since 2011. The electorate is bigger since we last got together to do this, by some 1.4 million eligible voters. And there were roughly 1.3 million votes up for grabs that shook loose from either the Conservatives or New Democrats, as I’ll discuss more fully below. Bloc Québécois and Green vote tallies were generally stable in 2011 and 2015, so just for simplicity’s sake, I’ve excluded them from my rough math here.

So 1.4 million new voters, and 1.3 voters abandoning Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair. That’s still well over a million votes shy of the Liberal gain on Monday night. The explanation isn’t mysterious — turnout was up, from about 62 per cent last time to almost 69 per cent this time. It will be fascinating to see where these new voters came from. Did prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau finally find a way to get generally apathetic young voters to vote, and vote for him? Did old-guard Liberals, who didn’t bother showing up for former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, rally to Trudeau’s cause? Too soon to say — but I suspect a few of he upcoming books I’ve predicated above will seek to answer exactly that question.

Now, onto second place. The numbers here, too, are interesting. In 2011, the Tories won a majority government with 5,835,270 votes. This time, they came in roughly 238,000 below that — assuming no recounts or late adjustments, 5,597,565 Canadians voted for the Conservatives in this year’s campaign. That relatively small number of lost votes, the equivalent of the population of Longueuil, Que., deciding they’d had enough of Harper, busted the Tories down from a majority government to a distant second-place.

There’s a couple of issues that flow out of that. The first, of course, is that this will be held up by many as yet more proof that our voting system is an anti-democratic abomination that doesn’t produce governments that accurately reflect the will of the people. I’m not convinced that first-past-the-post has to go, personally, but sure, point acknowledged. Spencer McKay breaks down some of the practical and political implications of that, elsewhere on this site, with intriguing emphasis on how inclined the Liberals will be, despite their promises, to ditch a system that just so richly favoured them.

The next thing to note is that this election isn’t really a major Tory defeat — not really. Yes, they lost almost 60 seats and their government. There’s no denying that. But when you look at the seat totals, ballots cast and popular vote percentages, the real story of defeat here is the NDP’s.

Again, you can’t do much to gussy up the reality of the night for the Tories — they’re out of power and their leader has stepped down. But despite all the anger and venom directed their way, they basically held their own in terms of actual votes cast. Who’d have guessed that?

If there’s an explanation for this out there other than strategic voting, I don’t see it

The truly unmitigated bad news belongs to Mulcair and the NDP. They lost a million votes. That’s astonishing. A party that we all thought was going to form the next government in that long-ago era of three-weeks-or-so ago, lost as many voters as there are people in Calgary. The NDP campaign wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t quite that bad. If there’s an explanation for this out there other than strategic voting, I don’t see it. The results were devastating, not just to the NDP, but for the Tories, as well. Harper was always counting on vote splitting, especially in Ontario. He didn’t get them.

One more observation jumped out. The Tories spent millions and millions of dollars on ad campaigns slamming Justin Trudeau: he wasn’t ready, he was just a nice head of hair, he’d ruin the economy, etc. Obviously, it didn’t work. Looking at these tallies, I’m forced to wonder — yes, with tongue somewhat in cheek — if the Conservatives ought not to have spent less money attacking Trudeau and a bit more talking up Mulcair.

“Justin Trudeau’s just not ready. But this Mulcair guy … he might be OK, if you’re into that sort of thing. Brought to you by the Conservative Party of Canada.” An odd pitch to make for the public, I grant. But it may have been the better bet.

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Matt Gurney is a member of the National Post editorial board. He hosts National Post Radio every weekday morning from six until nine Eastern on SiriusXM’s Canada Talks, channel 167.