GETTING OUT THE VOTE KEY TO ELECTION RESULTS
Number of those in under-34 group who go to polls will sway outcome
When British Columbians voted in the 2015 federal election, they did so in larger numbers than ever before, boosting turnout to 70 per cent, a 10-point gain over the federal election just four years earlier.
Eligible British Columbians also voted in significantly larger numbers than they had in the previous provincial election.
About 1.813 million voters cast ballots in the May 2013 election that returned Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals to power. In October 2015, federal returning officers tallied 2.374 million ballots in B.C., a gain of 561,000 in people voting in a little over two years.
With B.C. headed for another provincial election on May 9, speculation abounds about whether there might be a repeat of the surge in turnout and, if so, to what effect.
Warranting particular attention is the huge increase in turnout among younger voters in the election that brought Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals to power.
Elections Canada estimates a 20 percentage point jump in voting by eligible Canadians aged 18-24 and a 15-point increase in the 25-34 age bracket.
Turnout increased for older age groups as well, but those folks were already voting in relatively large numbers. Those in the 18-34 range have tended not to participate all that heavily in the past, but last time they turned out in the 60 per cent range.
Looking back to the 2013 provincial election, turnout was below 50 per cent for 18-24s and below 40 per cent in the 25-34 bracket. The low turnout was a factor in why the opinion polls wrongly predicted a B.C. NDP win.
Veteran pollster Angus Reid blamed oversampling of younger voters — who leaned to the NDP but didn’t vote — for an election eve poll that put the NDP ahead by nine points when they would go on to lose by five.
If voters under the age of 34 had turned out in the same numbers in the 2013 provincial election as they would do across Canada in the subsequent federal election, they would have cast 125,000 more votes here in B.C.
They could have thereby affected the results in dozens of ridings, depending on where those votes were distributed and to which parties.
Looking now to this year’s provincial election, the 18-34s have potential significance for another reason. For most of their lives the only government they’ve known is B.C. Liberal. Only those at the top of the age bracket were even eligible to vote in the 2001 election that brought the Liberals to power.
For the fifth election in a row, the Liberals are striving to remind the electorate of the record of the NDP government in the 1990s. But younger voters will have few if any memories of that era or know why, at the end of it, the New Democrats were dealt one of the most humiliating electoral defeats in provincial history.
The question remains whether younger voters, having turned out in record numbers in the last federal election, will do the same in B.C. this time.
One has to be careful making too much of any federal result in the provincial arena.
B.C. voters inhabit “two political worlds” in federal and provincial elections, to quote the title of a landmark book by University of B.C. political scientist Donald Blake. The parties, the issues, the alignments are different, and recognized as such by the electorate.
The 2015 federal turnout was a departure from recent trends in national elections as well, fuelled as it was by the determination among many voters to defeat Stephen Harper and by the youthful presence of Justin Trudeau.
The New Democrats have tried to brand Christy Clark as a female Harper, with about as much success as some Liberals in framing her as a homegrown Margaret Thatcher. Nor can any of the three provincial party leaders lay plausible claim to the Trudeau charisma.
Still, one of the commonplaces of turnout is that a person is more likely to vote this time if they voted before. So having embraced the habit of voting in 2015, some of those younger voters may well be more inclined to do it again.
Particularly if they are stirred up by the affordability crisis in housing, the need for more transit, shortfalls in funding for education and training, environmental threats and other issues where the deck would appear to be stacked against them by older generations.
All three parties have tried to address those and other concerns of the younger voter: the Liberals by stressing the opportunities from economic growth, the New Democrats by touting increased program funding and better-paying and unionized jobs, the Greens by challenging the status quo on both sides of the political spectrum.
The Greens, in particular, have targeted the non-voter, whose numbers exceeded the vote tally for any of the parties.
“The party that won the last election was not the B.C. Liberals,” as leader Andrew Weaver noted in the second debate. “It was the non-voter; 45 per cent — that’s almost one in two — didn’t bother to vote because they were not inspired to vote.”
It remains to be seen whether any of the current leaders are sufficiently inspirational to generate a game-changing turnout at the polls. But the possibility adds to the uncertainties in a campaign that seems wide open with only a week to go before election day.
The party that won the last election was not the B.C. Liberals. It was the non-voter; 45 per cent — that’s almost one in two — didn’t bother to vote because they were not inspired to vote. ANDREW WEAVER, Green party leader