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

	Reported Vote – 2006
Vote Intention – 2008	CPC	LPC	NDP	BQ	Green	Did not vote
Conservative	84	18	5	9	11	35
Liberal	6	62	13	5	13	18
NDP	5	11	74	11	6	30
Bloc Québécois	1	1	1	71	2	1
Green	4	8	7	4	68	16

 

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.