Strategy guided Alberta voters, poll says
A post-mortem poll on the Alberta election suggests lastminute decisions and strategic voting were both key factors in Monday’s surprising Progressive Conservative victory over the Wildrose.
A Leger Marketing survey shows nearly four in 10 voters didn’t make up their minds about which party to support until the last days of the campaign — when Wildrose policies and candidates were facing the greatest scrutiny.
The online survey of 481 voters conducted the day after the election also found more than a quarter of those who backed the PCS at the ballot box did so strategically “to block” another party.
“Albertans really faced a genuine conundrum,” said Ian Large, vice-president of Leger Marketing. “And in the end, they chose PC. They chose not to risk monumental change.”
Tory Leader Alison Redford’s big win surprised many Albertans, with the PCS capturing a 61-seat majority. Danielle Smith’s Wildrose, which led opinion polls for much of the four-week election campaign, won 17 seats.
Leger’s survey suggests Wildrose was close to doing much better.
Nearly one-third of all non-wildrose voters said they considered supporting the party during the course of the 28day campaign, according to the poll.
And when PC voters were asked if they’d looked at Wildrose, 35 per cent said they had.
Why did they vote for another party on Monday?
Twenty-seven per cent considered Wildrose and voted for another party because they didn’t agree with their platform, the poll suggests.
But nearly as many — 26 per cent — reported that it was some of the negative comments made by Wildrose candidates.
In the last week of a roughand-tumble contest, scrutiny of Wildrose’s stance on social issues was amplified when two of the party’s candidates came under fire for remarks about race and homosexuality.
And it was in the final week or later that many voters — 39 per cent — made up their minds on how they’d vote, according to the poll.
Looking deeper, it indicates 11 per cent of voters made a final decision over the past weekend, seven per cent on election day and seven per cent in the polling booth.
Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt said with so many people apparently making their final decision that late, it’s not surprising opinion polls didn’t catch the shift.
“That corresponds with the discussion that we’ve been having,” Bratt said. “The polls were not necessarily wrong. They were out of date.”
Forty-five per cent of PC voters made their final decision in the last week of the campaign or later, compared with 26 per cent of Wildrose supporters, the poll found.
But the key factor Monday may have been strategic voting, with 27 per cent of Conservative voters saying the main reason they backed the Tories was to block another party. “It’s huge,” Large said. “It would almost entirely account for the shift from the last polls that were out before the election.”
The survey results “validated what many of us thought actually happened in the last week,” with controversial comments from the Wildrose camp driving people to vote Tory, Large said.
“The question . . . over the last 48 hours has been, what happened?” said Large. “The headline number is people held their nose and voted PC even though that wasn’t what they were planning to do.”
Bratt said Wildrose could find positives in the poll results showing so many non-wildrose voters were willing to look at the party.
“That’s got to hearten them in some respects,” Bratt said. “But are they going to have that opportunity again, particularly if the economy picks up?
“If the budget is being balanced, and hospitals and schools are being built, they may look back on this as the Liberals did in 1993.”
Leger Marketing’s online sur-vey of 481 voters across Alberta was conducted on April 24. As a non-random Internet survey, the margin of error is not reported. However, a probability sample of this size would yield a maximum margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.