More fun with numbers

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Last week I blogged about the parties’ different retention rates from the 2006 election, illustrating the Conservatives’ advantage in grabbing half the straying Liberal flock, with the rest of the former Liberal supporters being spread among the other parties.

The Conservatives have another advantage, which is that their support at the moment is more solid than that of the other parties. There’s evidence that the race is now “gelling”, at least up front with the Tory lead, even if there is room for more jockeying behind among the current opposition parties.

Look at the table below, and you can see that 82% of Tory voters say that they are unlikely to change their preference before voting day. The Tory vote, in other words, is the most solid of all the parties. Just 18% of Tory supporters say they are likely or somewhat likely to switch before election day. At the other extreme, the Green Party, whose support has grown the most in the last week, has the most tenuous grip on its support. Almost a fifth (18%) of Green supporters say it is likely they will switch before election day, and another 12% say they are somewhat likely to do so. A total of 30% of Green supporters are still not settled, in other words.

In fact, if you look at the last two bottom rows of this table, you’ll see almost a quarter of Liberal and NDP voters also say they are likely or somewhat likely to change their vote before election day. So that’s a lot of the non-Tory vote still potentially sloshing around. (The numbers are taken from EKOS’s weekend sample of more than 3000 respondents.)

So, if those voters were to start moving, where would they go? We know that in past elections, as voting day approached, many Canadians have taken a look at the polls and decided to “vote tactically”, that is to go with their second choice party thinking that it is better placed to win. In both 2004 and 2006, this enabled the Liberals to grab some NDP support in the last days of the campaign, though their weakness in this election so far might make that a harder sell. And then, we have those wavering Green supporters. Will they hold, or will they bolt as they close in on their final decision?

Here’s where the second table tells a bit of the story. First of all, look down the first column. If the Tories slumped, that would help the Liberals the most, but since significant numbers would also go to the other parties, it might not actually turbo-charge the Liberal campaign. Anyway, we don’t need to concern ourselves so much with where the Tories might go, because as we saw above, they are less likely to move anyway.

More interesting is the second column. If the Liberals slumped further, where would their vote go? Last week, we saw that to this point, about half the Liberal defectors have gone to the Conservatives; the other half have been dissipated among the other opposition parties. What the table below shows us is that if Liberals continue to stray, the pattern will likely be different. Only about a fifth of Liberal voters (18%) say their second choice is the Tories. The rest go mainly to the NDP and the Greens. Another way of thinking about this is that the Liberal Party has already lost a big chunk of its traditional centre-right support, and it is down to its centre-left core.

On the other hand, if the Liberals were to begin climbing out of the hole they are in, it looks like they do have potentially fertile ground to their left. A third of NDPers and a quarter of Green Party supporters see the Liberals as their second choice. The Liberals’ best hope in this election remains becoming the most viable champion of the anyone-but-Conservative (ABC, as Danny Williams calls it) vote, which was important to the party in both the 2004 and 2006 elections.

The NDP, meanwhile, still have potential themselves to become that ABC champion since they are the second choice for many Liberal and Green supporters. However, they probably need to close or eliminate the gap with the Liberals in their overall party support before they can benefit from this kind of tactical vote nationally, and at this point they don’t show any sign of getting closer that 7 or 8 percentage points of the Liberals. Still, in some regions, notably British Columbia and the West, they are clearly the Tories’ main opponent at the moment.

The Greens now have two tasks. They have some potential to continue growing, as they have done since the campaign began. But more important to their success may be their ability to consolidate the support they already have. They have the wobbliest support of all the parties and although they are now neck and neck with the Conservatives for the lead among voters 25 and under, this is a notoriously hard group to turn out on election day.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Fear, greed and other economic fundamentals

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Karim H. Karim

“The market is never wrong,” a student insisted in one of my classes several years ago. His statement came to mind frequently during the course of the last week’s roller coaster ride in the stock exchanges.

It exemplified the almost unquestioned faith that some have in the workings of the markets.

Industrial societies have made them integral to our economies. Traders’ daily choices determine the monetary value of the materials that are vital to our well-being.

Whether it is speculation about the price of petroleum or about financial stocks, we seem to leave it to a relatively small percentage of the population to decide what turns and twists our collective fortunes will take. The best we can hope is that the traders’ decisions are guided by rationality.

But CBC TV’s morning show business reporter, Marivel Taruc, appeared to think otherwise. She commented that bear markets are driven by fear and bull markets by greed.

Are the stock exchanges, and by extension the economy, primarily driven by raw emotions? It would seem that we are leaving too much to how a few unelected individuals may feel on a particular day.

So far in the election campaign, none of the political parties has presented much of an economic strategy responding to the current financial upheaval. They appear to act as if we are going to be sheltered from the havoc taking place south of the border.

The parallel drops and rises in the New York and Toronto exchanges last week were clear indications that we are not immune to the financial blowouts in our largest trading partner.

It may be too much to ask if anyone is thinking about how to protect the economy from the whims of stock traders, but does anyone at least have a made-in-Canada plan to minimize the ill-effects of the widely-expected downturn?

Perhaps the idea is to react with rescue packages worth billions of dollars after the damage has already occurred, just like Washington is doing now.

Add sloth to the list of economic fundamentals.

Karim H. Karim is the director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He formerly was a Canadian correspondent for Compass News Features (Luxembourg) and Inter Press Service (Rome).

Where have all the Liberals gone?

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Liberal votes are clearly scattering to the winds as the party retreats from its historic levels of support. But where are all those wayward Liberals landing? The chart below is taken from EKOS Research’s latest sounding and addresses that question.

It is a bit tricky to read, but bear with me. The banner at the top shows people who say they voted for the various parties in 2006. The columns underneath indicate where those people say they are now in terms of current voting intention.

Voter Retention

Look first at the CPC column. I said column, not row – that’s how you get confused. Among declared 2006 Conservative voters, 84% say they intend to vote Conservative again this time – the highest vote retention of any of the parties. So the Tories are holding their ’06 voters for the most part. The leakage goes in various directions: 6% to the Liberals, 5% to the NDP; and 4% to the Greens.

Note: when the Conservatives lose voters, therefore, it does not affect their opponents differentially – each of the other national parties gets a bit of the honey, meaning none of them (and certainly not the Liberal Party) emerges  from the pack on the basis of this shift. Note also: there are virtually no respondents claiming they voted Tory last time, who now plan to vote for the Bloc.

Now look at the LPC column. The Liberals aren’t doing well at all. Only 62% of those who say they voted Liberal last time are planning to repeat – the lowest retention rate of any of the parties, which is perhaps not surprising given that they are the ones whose support has eroded most since ’06.

Where have all the Liberals gone? The other parties have picked them, every one. (Apologies to post-boomers). Interestingly the wayward Liberal voters have split almost equally right and left. Eighteen percent have gone to the Conservatives. So the Conservatives have been the single largest winner from Liberal weakness. However, the 19% who have vamoosed off to the left have gone to the New Democrats in sizeable numbers, but also to the Greens – meaning their impact is dissipated.

In other words, in sum these trends benefit the Conservatives. The Conservatives have the highest retention rate in terms of their ’06 voters; they are winning over about half the wayward Liberals from ’06; and they benefit also from the fact that the half of the straying Liberal flock they haven’t captured are splitting in two different directions once they leave the old Liberal pasture.

In the case of the other parties, the margins of error are getting a little high to read too much into them, but it looks like the NDP is holding onto a large number of its ’06 voters. Surprisingly, perhaps, those who have moved seem to be heading to the Liberals. But the New Democrats, Liberals and Greens all seem to be picking up voters straying from the Bloc — in total more than twice as many heading to the Conservatives. (This fits with a thesis I first heard enunciated by Chantal Hébert, that the Bloc already had its right-leaning voters leak in 2006, and the low-hanging fruit is now the left-leaning Bloc voters.)

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Two interesting pieces

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

Keith Boag had an interesting piece last night on The National in which he argued two things:

1. That despite the very real economic issues in the Canadian economy  and turmoil in the financial markets, unemployment remains low in historical terms and that the two elections in recent decades that have turned on economic issues — 1984 and 1993 — both occurred in periods of high unemployment; and
2. The Canadian government actually has relatively few levers to deal with the sources of economic instability at the moment — at least at a macro level. (Of course, it is possible to spend money on particular sectors — intervening at the micro level, as it were; and it is possible to act to alleviate the consequences of economic distress.) He doesn’t address this, but I think there is some evidence that voters increasingly understand that governments have fewer economic levers than they once did, which may be part of the explanation for the general fall in the salience of politics in the West.   

 In this morning’s Globe, Brian Laghi has an interesting piece arguing that the reason the the Liberals have lost their mojo may be in part because they have allowed their traditional appeal to the centre-right to atrophy, so that they have become just another party of the left. The old saw about the Liberals governing from the right and running campaigns from the left had something to it: of course the governing part is what gave them the bona fides with many voters and supporters to tilt left at election time.

[Conflict alert: both Keith and Brian are former colleagues and friends. But you know what, that shouldn’t be held against them.]

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

OK, now it’s clear…clearer maybe

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

Now that the Harris/Decima polls has fallen into the line with the other polls, it is clear that those who proclaimed, as some did on the front pages of Saturday’s papers, that the Tories won the first week of the campaign, were wrong.

In the week before the election call, the Tories had an excellent run. In the week after the call they had a gentle decline. Most of the pollsters now agree that this happened though they differ somewhat on the pace and the extent of the change. From my perspective, this is also a more satisfying conclusion because it fits better with events as we all experienced them. The Tories had at best a mixed week, and they looked better than they otherwise might because the Liberals have not yet emerged as the inevitable alternative.

This is a huge problem for the Liberals, who can normally expect to be treated by the media as the principle alternative when the Conservatives are in power. For the most part the media so far have tended to view the election as the Tories against everyone else rather than as mainly a two-way fight, with other parties snapping at the heels of the real protagonists. (The only recent exception was the run-up to 1988, when the NDP led the polls going in.)

This time, the NDP is faring quite well, especially among women, but has not yet closed the gap on the Liberals sufficiently to convince the media to treat them as potentially the new alternative party of power.

In fact, the Liberals do seem to be tumbling out of contention in some parts of the country — notably B.C., Manitoba and Saskatchewan — where they have traditionally been competitive. In much of the West, Layton and Harper are the lone gunslingers, just as both of them would probably prefer.

However, I think there is actually some sign that former Liberal supporters in Ontario have reacted to the possibility of their very own regional party — yes, the former natural governing party of Canada —  being displaced, by moving back to them, saving the Liberals from collapse at the national level.

My personal hunch on the Greens is that they may not yet have seen the benefits of last week’s debate-on-the debate and the attendant attention it drew to their leader, Elizabath May. Deciding to vote Green is a bigger jump that moving to one of the familiar parties, so the Greens may have attracted a lot of tire-kickers, who will soon drift away. On the other hand, there are a lot more people on the lot now, and some of them may still just need a little more convincing before they buy. In other words, it is worth watching to see whether the Greens get a bump this week, even though last week was their big one.

What’s going on in Quebec? Reading the papers, you’d think Duceppe was having a terrible campaign. Talk about friendly fire. But so far he’s doing better in the polls than he is in the papers.

Is this a “Seinfeld election” — about nothing. That’s what people were saying at this stage in the ’05-’06 campaign. A betting person would definitely put money on the Tories to win.  But if we really do end up where we started, there will nonetheless be a couple of parties who have had the scare of their lives, and a couple of others who will feel they had a historic opportunity that they failed to seize.

I, for one, will be seriously surprised if that happens.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

It depends who is talking . . .

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

The front-page election stories in today’s Globe and Mail and National Post offer contradictory perspectives on the week ahead in the campaign.

The Globe says:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper will sharpen his attacks on Stephane Dion stating today, as new polls show the Liberal Leader is failing to connect with voters or talk about the issues that mean the most to them.

Meanwhile over at the National Post:

The Conservatives said yesterday that they are refocusing their primary aim on the NDP and the Green party, citing them as a bigger threat to their re-election that the Liberals.

Worth checking back later in the week to see who was right.

In the meantime score one for those nameless senior strategists who know all and are only too willing to tell, providing of course they are given anonymity so no one can hold them to account.  

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

Campaign confusion?

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

There is a fascinating story in today’s New York Times by reporter Adam Nagourney that looks at the impact the fractured media landscape is having on the Presidential campaign – to the point of campaign managers no longer being confident about what strategies and tactics work and don’t work. Some of it at least seems transferrable to the campaign here as well so it is worth reading. 

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

Where there’s agreement/where there’s not

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

There continues to be a disparity among the three polling companies who are gathering nightly numbers: EKOS (where I am involved in the polling), Nanos, and Harris/Decima.

The disagreement is about how strongly the Tories are running. H/D has them in majority territory, Nanos a bit shy of that, and EKOS continues to have them tracking well away from where they would likely win a majority. EKOS will release new numbers tonight (Sunday) at about 9:0O p.m. ET.

Where there is agreement, however, is that the Conservatives are well ahead of the Liberals. It seems like it would take a considerable change in the dynamics of the campaign to erase this. The Liberals, meanwhile, in all the polls, continue to chart ahead of the New Democrats — not by a huge margin, but clearly ahead nonetheless. It is certainly too early to say whether this will hold.

And the Greens, for their part, continue to show well. The question for them is whether they can hold their vote as we get closer to election day. They are still well short of winning any significant number of seats because their support is broad, but thinly spread across the country. Will the newbie Green supporters drift back to the Liberals or the NDP to stop the Conservatives on election day? Or will the Greens start pushing into contention at the seat level and hold their vote? There is also a generational story here with young voters much more intensely attracted to the Green. They have tended not to vote in large numbers in the past, but maybe the Greens can create new dynamic, playing to a degree on the Gen-X and Gen-Y resentment of us baby-boomers.

Canada continues to be in a period of structural change in the party system, a change that began with the Liberal loss of Quebec in 1984, and has progressed in larger or smaller steps in almost every election since. This one probably won’t be any different.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Mr. Ordinary

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

For the second day running, the Ottawa Citizen has a fine political feature on its front page, this one by Don Butler about the political cult of the “ordinary guy”, which dictates that our political leaders, who practically by definition are extraordinary people, need to be made over as the schmoes  next door. Witness Harper the sweatered family man and Dion the cross-country skier and fisherman.

In fact both the leaders of our two major parties could be properly qualified as “intellectuals”, which nowadays seems everywhere to be a dirty word politically, perhaps with the exception of France.

In addition, Harper is that rarest of animals in political life, an introvert. Extroversion is so nearly universal a characteristic of political leaders that the media and the public hardly know how to handle it when one comes along who is not an extrovert.

I first met Stephen Harper when he was a Reform M.P., “class of ’93”. What was quite striking about him at the time was that unlike most of the new Reformers, many of whom came from the know-nothing school of populist politics (though I do not include Preston Manning in this), Harper knew and understood the ideas of his political opponents and the prevailing political orthodoxy. It was just that he disagreed with it.

It could be a thrill listening to him explain his viewpoints in precise counterpoint to conventional political wisdom. He was just so smart and, one might even say, learned.

But he was also quite obviously an introvert, and I would say quite shy. He could be awkward if the wall between journalist and politician were even briefly pierced. I remember walking across from Parliament Hill one day and congratulating him on either getting engaged or getting married — I forget which it was. What would have been an easy, relaxed moment with most politicians, turned out to be rather uncomfortable, as if I did not have the standing to intrude on his private life that way.

Most politicians make it easy for those of us on the journalistic side who sometimes are a little socially awkward ourselves. They are extroverts, and besides, because they love talking about themselves, and the role of politicians and journalists permits and encourages this, they do all the work that needs doing socially during our encounters. Not so Harper.

In later years, after Harper left Parliament for a time, I used to call him up fairly frequently to talk about political events. It was always stimulating; always an intellectual workout. In fact, I soon discovered that I preferred talking with him on the phone, because it spared us the uncomfortable moments of greeting and parting that accompanied an in-person interview, when you are supposed to just chit-chat affably.

Then, there was a hiatus of several years when we did not have any contact while I was in the Middle East with the Globe and Mail. By the time I came back he had become leader of the opposition. Unbeknownst to me, my son was enrolled in the same school his kids attended. As I was standing in the school yard on the first day of school, I had a tap on the shoulder, and there was Stephen Harper all dressed up in the sober blue suit appropriate to his position in life.

In an almost bewilderingly short time, we had each obviously run out of things to say. We could hardly launch into taxes or Canadian unity there in the schoolyard, and I found myself briefly considering “so I hear you are leader of the opposition now” as a conversational gambit. We stared at the tops of our shoes — something I remember well from my years as a student in England, but which actually doesn’t happen much over here, at least literally. 

I, for one, have no doubt that when he talked on the day of the election call about what being a father meant to him, he was sincere. I also have no doubt that it has been a difficult thing for him personally to serve all this up to us as political fodder, though the politician in him understands this needs to be done. And most of all, I wonder why the rest of us should care — why we demand this of our political leaders?

I can tell you, as many others in the Press Gallery can, that this is a very intelligent, thoughtful man. Of course we have also seen other sides of his personality during his years as prime minister — politically relevant sides of his personality, including his instincts for secrecy and control.

All these are worth considering as we go to vote.

But hasn’t history shown often enough that some great parents prove to be poor leaders and some great leaders are disappointments as parents? So what difference does it make as we consider how to vote?

After all, unlike me, most Canadians won’t even run into him at the PTA.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Majority/minority watch

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

The excellent Democratic Space website, which will launch its ’08 election site tomorrow, already has a set of seat projections up based on a poll of polls from the first half of the week. They give the Tories 146, Liberals 92, NDP 30, BQ 38, Others 2, and Greens a goose egg. A majority is 155.

Of course, the confusing thing is that since mid-week, one well-publicized poll from Harris/Decima suggested the Tories have been trending upward, while the EKOS poll, also released yesterday, had the trend going the other way.

As more polls are published in the coming days, which trend, if either, is correct should become more certain. So-called “rolling polls” blend results for several days, so if there is a trend, it takes a few days to become evident.

Every pollster will defend his or her own numbers as being correct. From a journalistic perspective, it is a good idea to understand something about sample size, methodology, and so on in order to evaluate competing claims. It is also a good idea, when the information seems to be conflicting, to reserve judgment, rather than throw great weight to one poll or another — even when, as sometimes happens, the storyline of one poll is much more interesting than the storyline of another.  

But from the Conservative perspective, as long as the question of majority or minority continues to be a matter of media speculation, it is not a good thing. In the last election, true, the Tories apparently benefitted a little from a “bandwagon” effect in Quebec as their numbers rose and they started to look viable there. However, there is an even more well-established pattern of at least some voters in English Canada pulling back from the Tories when they think they are closing in on a majority. Judging from the Bloc’s campaign, it seems they think that some Quebec voters may be susceptible to the same reflex this time.

P.S. Also take a look at Calgary Grit who explains how he does his “probabalistic” seat projections. 

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.