FORGET ABOUT THE YOUTH VOTE,
At the Broadbent Summit here last weekend, a question was put to a panel I was moderating: How do we encourage more young people to vote?
Attendees at the left-leaning Broadbent Summit worry more about this kind of thing than those at its right-leaning mirror, the Manning Networking Conference. The Manning types worry about making sure everyone who is a conservative gets out to vote — age be damned. Broadbenters are more focused on getting higher turnout from all strata of society.
But while the “youth vote” is a perfectly suitable topic for a panel discussion at a conference of academics and activists, federal political parties with seven months until election day would do well instead to focus their energies on that group of voters that actually make a difference at the ballot box — namely, older people.
The facts are stark: Voter turnout rates in recent years for those 34-years-old and younger have been abysmal, much effort to the contrary.
The best Canada’s young people could do in the past four general elections was in 2006, when 47% showed up to vote. Their poorest performance was in 2004, when just 41% of those 34-and-under voted. In 2011, it wasn’t much better: a youth-vote turnout rate of 43%.
Meanwhile, those 35-andover have been doing much better at that most basic of civic duties. While 43% of young voters showed up in 2011, for example, 65% those 35-and-over did. In 2006, nearly 70% of older voters cast a ballot.
That’s the facts as measured by Elections Canada. Here are some facts as measured by the country’s pollsters: If only those under-35 voted, Thomas Mulcair would be prime minister.
A poll published by Ekos Research last week was typ- ical of any number of polls published in the past few years. The NDP, not the Liberals, are the favourite of young voters. Ekos, last week, found that, among voters 34-andunder, the results were: NDP 28%, Liberal 26% and Con- servative 23%. But it was a very different story for the 35-and-over crowd: Conservatives 37%, Liberals 31% and the NDP 21%.
The Conservatives figured this out long ago. Once, at a campaign stop on the leaders’ tour in the 2008 election, a large, noisy group of university students had assem- bled outside the hotel where Stephen Harper was holding a rally. I stood outside with a senior campaign official who seemed not bothered a bit by the commotion or the fact that the travelling press was busy gathering all sorts of indictments of the Conservative leader from this group. “They don’t matter,” shrugged the operative. “They don’ t vote.” It may have been brutally put but it was not wrong.
The tricky but vital strategic imperative for Mulcair’s NDP is to hold on to the “youth vote” while reaching out to older Canadians. The ridings with the highest proportion of under-35 voters — in downtown urban cores in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax — are already NDP or NDP-friendly. Can the NDP keep that traditional base in Canada’s urban core and win new seats in, say, rural B.C. or rural Nova Scotia, places with proportionately higher numbers of older voters?
We are seeing evidence of how Mulcair is attempting that balancing act. Last week, he vowed he’d close a loophole used by the wealthy to save tax paid on their stock options, using the extra $700 million in new revenues to increase transfers to poor families with children.
But even as Mulcair taxes stock options, he will slash taxes on small-business income, a measure that is less popular among the party’s hardcore — not a word of this proposal was mentioned at the Broadbent Summit — but one that wins some notoriety and, the NDP hopes, praise in places where it is not yet so popular. Places where older voters live.
Progressive Broadbenters, of course, are keen to see the NDP do better in 2015 than it did in 2011. If so, they should hope that Mulcair’s campaign brain trust will focus on attracting more older voters to their cause. They’ve already got the kids.
They don’t show up on election day, so left-wing parties should focus on older people