It's September 14th, Do You Know Where Your Government Is?
Also Known As: Polling Sucks. Election is tomorrow.
CORRECTION:
A Previous Version of this had the date of the Canadian election as September 15th, when the election is actually the 20th. I make no excuses, I have no idea why I thought that, but I really did. Apologies if this created any confusion, I’ll do better next time.
As I mentioned in my last post, Canada is currently undergoing one of the most low-key elections in history, and the 20th is election day. Which means that I, like all Canadians, get to walk into our polling stations, show our government issued photo ID, get a ballot, mark the ballot with a pen, and those ballots will get hand counted by a person later that night. Those counts go through a verification process, and I’ll know by the end of the night who my new Prime Minister is. (My MP isn’t in contention, the PC’s could run a fire hydrant in my district and win. (In fact, I’m not convinced they haven’t.))
I’m not sure that it’s safe to say that Canadians are generally aware that an election is happening. I watched a CFL game on the weekend (My Bombers are doing awesome this year, nyah-hah Riders fans.) and fully a third of the commercials were political messages of one stripe or another, but previous to that, the only inkling I had that an election was on were the lawn signs. I’d like to say that’s a function of my non-traditional media consumption, but even political Twitter seems a little bit subdued compared to normal, and really… We’re in an election. I think. The ads themselves were kind of par for the course; The conservatives attacked the Liberals on Financial issues, the NDP attacked the Liberals on Social issues (anyone else remember when they were a labour party?), and the Liberals attacked the Conservatives on abortion and gun control while doing their damndest to ignore that the NDP exists.
There are a couple things that are different about this election though; Going into the 2019 election, the Liberals were polling about 3-4% ahead of the Conservatives, and then the Conservatives ended up winning the plurality of the popular vote (no one ever wins the majority of the popular vote in Canada, we have 6 parties) by 1.2%. This basically tracks with what I’ve been saying for a very long time: Pollsters, for whatever reason, seem incapable of fully calculating conservative support. This transcends parties, national borders, and culture. It could be a function of political bias among pollsters, but “conservative pollsters” exist, and even notoriously conservative polls tend to slightly undercut conservative support. I have theories on why this is (outdated polling methods, a variation of The Bradley Effect, a disparity in voter excitement) but the fact is that over the last two decades, this has generally gotten worse, not better.
And that’s important because The Conservatives are basically neck and neck right now. As opposed to closing a 4 point gap to +1, if the polls are as off as they’ve historically been, and we go from basically even to +5, I think it’s going to be a pretty nice day for conservatives. Add to that that the conservative heat map is a whole lot more healthy this time around: In 2019, The conservatives got 69% of the vote in Alberta, and won all the seats. Now, they merely poll around 52%. They’re still going to win all the seats in Alberta (maybe not one or two in Calgary), Remember: first past the post 6 party system. It doesn’t matter how much you win by, what matters is that you get the most votes. Most of that 17% went to the PPC, so the Liberals/NDP didn’t make any inroads. But that means that the Conservative support elsewhere is offsetting the losses in the deeply blue prairie provinces. How does that track compared to 2019? The Conservatives are still behind in most of these (except BC), but they’re yards ahead of where they were in 2019: BC: +1%, ON: +4%, QC: +6% Atlantic +5% BEFORE considering polling issues.
Normally, that would have me very excited, but the other thing I’ve noticed is that while on my travels, mostly through Southern Manitoba, I’ve been looking for signs. They’re out there… PPC guys… Up your game, half your lawn litter doesn’t even have your candidate’s name on it. But what really stuck me was the relative lack of them. Perhaps I’m reading too much into that. To be fair: This is a first. It could be that candidates were loathe to knock on doors and distribute materiel during a pandemic. But my suspicion is that generally, voter engagement is probably low, and I have no idea how that translates into turnout for the general.
Which means… I have no idea how this goes.
Educated guess? Liberal Minority, probably with less seats than they started with. Greens might hold their seat in BC, PPC might pick up a seat in Quebec, but probably not anywhere else. The Bloc might pick up seats, which is always a shame, and seeing as Trudeau is from Quebec, probably indicative of how well he’s liked at home. NDP currently have 24 seats, it wouldn’t surprise me if they picked up as many as 10. Conservatives currently have 119… flat-ish +-5. I’d love to be wrong, but I gotta go with what’s most likely.
Stay tuned.