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.