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.)

		CPC	LPC	NDP	GP	BQ
Not Likely		82%	77%	74%	71%	80%
Somewhat		7%	10%	8%	12%	6%
Likely		11%	13%	18%	18%	14%

 

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.

		Federal Vote Intention
		CPC	LPC	NDP	GP	BQ
Second Choice
CPC		0%	18%	16%	14%	15%
LPC		21%	0%	33%	26%	12%
NDP		17%	30%	0%	24%	29%
GP		11%	22%	22%	0%	14%
BQ		4%	6%	8%	6%	0%
No Second Choice		47%	25%	21%	30%	30%

 

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.