Strategic voting most benefited Liberals
Many waited until last minute to choose, cast their ballots ‘defensively’
Strategic voters helped the Liberals more than any other party, according to an Angus Reid poll published Friday. The research confirms suspicions that many Canadians begrudgingly voted Liberal in order to prevent an alternative party from winning.
“This wasn’t an election where people were feeling particularly inspired to vote for something,” says Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute. “They were voting defensively.”
After polling potential voters throughout the election, Angus Reid went back and interviewed participants who had been undecided three weeks before election day. Between Oct. 21 and 22, the pollsters conducted an online survey of more than 1,500 late-deciding voters.
Policy platforms were less important to these voters than was strategy, which benefited the Liberals most, the survey found.
Just one-third of Liberal voters and 42 per cent of Conservative voters in the survey were primarily motivated by the party’s policies, while 45 per cent of Liberal voters and one-quarter of Tory voters were primarily motivated by a desire to vote strategically.
Although most Green and NDP voters were motivated by admiration for their chosen parties, 61 per cent of Liberal voters and 65 per cent of Conservative voters said they merely disliked the alternatives more.
“The data confirms basically a suspicion that the political chattering classes had been bandying about and speculating about on election night and in the run-up to election night,” says Kurl, “which was the extent to which strategic voting — and certainly a desire in part to either help a candidate win or to block another party from being elected — ended up playing a role in vote dynamics.”
Votes were volatile, the poll found. Nearly one-quarter of late-deciding voters said they made their decisions on the day they voted, and 12 per cent said they settled on their decisions in the last couple of days.
THIS WASN’T AN ELECTION WHERE PEOPLE WERE FEELING PARTICULARLY INSPIRED TO VOTE FOR SOMETHING.
The research also shows that the Liberals benefited from backtracking on their electoral-reform agenda. During the 2015 campaign,
Justin Trudeau promised it would be the last election with a first-past-the-post voting system — “we will make every vote count,” his platform read.
Yet, two years later, he said he couldn’t get other parties to agree to transition to a ranked-ballot voting system, with the NDP adamant to introduce proportional representation.
On Monday, the broken promise paid off, as the Liberals won approximately 5.9 million votes compared to the Conservatives 6.2 million votes but still secured a minority government thanks to winning more seats.
“If we had had proportional representation in the House of Commons, you’d be looking at the Conservatives holding the advantage in the House and perhaps being the party asked to form government,” says Kurl.
“For all parties, they’re probably having a think about the could’ve-would’ve-should’ve-beens around electoral reform.”
The online survey was conducted with a representative randomized sample of 1,587 Canadian adult members of Angus Reid Forum. For comparison purposes, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error plus or minus 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.