Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Blog Central, Capital Read, Inkless Wells

Prodigal sons and daughters

by Paul Wells on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 1:50pm - 45 Comments

From our friend Paul Adams, who seems to be everywhere this autumn and who is blogging on these Ekos robo-polls for — well, for his employer, Ekos, I’ve brazenly swiped this damned interesting chart. In return for my larceny, I ask you to follow the link to Paul’s explanation. My own explanation comes below, after the chart…

Voter Retention

	Reported Vote – 2006
Vote Intention – 2008	CPC	LPC	NDP	BQ	Green	Did not vote
Conservative	84	18	5	9	11	35
Liberal	6	62	13	5	13	18
NDP	5	11	74	11	6	30
Bloc Québécois	1	1	1	71	2	1
Green	4	8	7	4	68	16

This chart collates some of what pollsters call “cross-tabs” from the latest Ekos Cylon Terminator robo-poll. Stated party support from the 2006 election is cross-indexed with stated party preference in this election right here now. So if you look down from “CPC,” you see that 84% of people who seem to recall voting for the Harper Conservatives in 2006 are now planning to vote for the Harper Conservatives again. Similarly, the NDP seems likely to keep 74% of its 2006 voters, the Bloc 71% of their voters, the Greens 68%, and… the Dion Liberals are on track to keep 62% of those who voted for the Paul Martin Liberals.

Where are those leaking Liberals leaking to? One in five of them plan to vote for the Harper Conservatives. In contrast, only 6% of 2006 Harper Conservative voters are angry enough to plan to switch to the Liberals.

Anyway, Paul Adams has more.

Tags: crack pipe goood, Ekos, Election Watch, Paul Adams, Polls

More by Paul Wells

http://www.macleans.ca Kady O’Malley

Am I reading this wrong, or is the Bloc keeping an enviable 71% of 2006 voters, with only 9% going to the Tories? Isn’t that — not what’s supposed to be happening?
anon

More accurately, Kady, it would seem that the Bloc has lost some 29% of their voters to a bunch of other parties, and the Conservatives, finishing a competitive second in a number of their ridings, don’t need the full 30% to win them this time.
http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

I was wondering the same thing, Kady, maybe Lib supporters in Que are moving to Cons more than BQ voters? BQ voters seem to be going NDP.
Paul Wells

As Adams was pointing out before I stole his graphic, the further you dig into the numbers the more shimmy you get from sample-size considerations. But even the more CPC-friendly Quebec polling shows swings of less than 10 points…
http://tigerinexile.wordpress.com Ben

What’s going on in Quebec then? Are lots of apolitical Quebecois so inspired by Harpermania that they’re voting for the first time in years, or will the Tories’ performance there underwhelm in a bit less than a month?
Wayne

curiouser and curiouser. I had no idea the LPC was bleeding as bad as it is hmmm.
stewacide

The Conservatives already took a large chunk of the right-of-centre Bloc vote last election. According to this poll they’re set to take a good chunk more, with almost no back-leakage.

However this election the Conservatives are clearly targeting the right-of-centre Liberal vote in Quebec. They do that best, confusingly, by attacking the Bloc.
http://arandomprocess.blogspot.com/ Andrew E

Note that the off-diagonal numbers in the BQ row are all 1 or 2. The 29% is pure bleed, as they’re not poaching from anyone else.
T. Thwim

I dunno, something strikes me as really bizarre about those numbers. The people who voted for Paul Martin’s liberals, in the wake of Adscam and the NDP’s smear investigation of Ralph Goodale, are now moving to the Conservatives in the wake of Cadscam and In-And-Ou.. oh wait.. I think I get it now. Some people just like corruption in their politics.
http://demosthenes.blogspot.com Demosthenes

The important question is what the Liberals do about it. They could try to pull back the conservatives they’ve bled, or hit the “Harper majority/strategic voting” buttons to try to scoop up wavering NDPers and Greens.

(Which actually makes things complicated in Quebec and the West, since there are seats there that the NDP could conceivably win that the Liberals probably have no shot at.)
Elizabeth

Just a small quibble with your post – it is not quite autumn. Those of us clinging to the last few days of summer would prefer a correction.
Paul Wells

So there’s a real niche potential for Bloc Guité.
http://aaronleewudrick.blogspot.com ALW

Very interesting. So it would seem Harper hasn’t disappointed those who have backed him all along, and the outrage is really just coming from those who never supported him in the first place?

The most interesting number here to me was the fact that 35% of people who didn’t vote last time are going Tory. So Harper has won over more former non-voters than any other party – whilst the Grits are barely ahead of the Greens on that count.

So how do the Liberals reverse this? Is it too late? They will have to do something huge to shake it up.
http://economics.about.com Mike Moffatt

You get some really bizarre results if you put these into the UBC ESM forecasting tool:

CON: 186 seats (38.3%)
LIB: 46! seats (24.4%)
NDP: 30 seats (19.6%)
BQ: 45 seats (8.4%)
OTR: 1 seat (9.3%)
http://economics.about.com Mike Moffatt

Also, you get the Bloc winning 1% of the vote in ROC.
T. Thwim

On the bright side, should the Liberals manage to squeak in to power this time, they’ve got a strong incentive to push for proportional representation now.
stewacide

And the Blocs newfound concern with the NDP suddenly makes sense: that’s where most of their disaffected voters are going!

This is far-and-away the most illuminating poll I’ve seen so far this election.
Paul Wells

ALW, small point: surely non-voters from last time are likeliest to not-vote next time?
John.K

One wonders how many of the didn’t-vote-last-time crowd will become didn’t-vote-this-time-either on election day?
Sean S.

Paul Wells,

Are the parties generally comparable in their abilities to “get the vote out”, or is there evidence that some are better organized than others in this respect?
Paul Wells

Sean S., that sort of thing varies over time, but I think you’d get pretty broad agreement that Conservatives are lately good at GOTV, to the tune of a couple points’ advantage over rivals, and that the Bloc has consistently had difficulty translating vote intentions into votes.
anon

As for the didn’t-vote-last-time crowd, haven’t the Tories spent all kinds of money to try to identify who they are, whether they would lean their way, and how to get them to the polls on election day if they do? Like, in a way more sophisticated fashion than everyone else?
JK

Thank-you for this Link Wells, interesting.

I still think we will have a minority government.
http://aaronleewudrick.blogspot.com ALW

Paul, it’s not clear from the chart whether the people in the last column are (a) people who didn’t vote last time but had a preference then or (b) people who didn’t vote last time and also had no preference. It seems logical that people with a preference would be more likely to vote than people with no preference.
Brad

Paul,

Do you have any insight into how much of an impact Martin’s rise, reign and relapse had on the on-the-ground organization of the Liberals? GOTV can be vital in swing ridings.