“The Liberals, no matter what the poll is, are still leading among older voters. The Conservatives have banked on these older voters, where law and order and economic stability are the most important issues, but in recent polls we’ve seen that the Liberal lead is just as strong among 30 year olds as it is among 60 year olds,” Eric Grénier, a polling expert who blogs at ThreeHundredEight.com, told The Hill Times. “That’s great for the Liberals because those are the people who turn out.”
According to Mr. Grénier’s aggregate of recent federal polls, the Liberal Party currently has 36 per cent support across the country, while the Tories and NDP sit at 30 and 23 per cent, respectively. Last week the site pegged support for the Liberals at 39.4 per cent in Ontario—five points ahead of the Conservatives and nearly 20 points ahead of the NDP.
Mr. Grénier said that the Tories “would need to win back all of those votes that they seem to have lost in Ontario for now,” or make up for lost support in Quebec, where the party currently holds only five of the province’s 75 seats and is currently polling in the mid-teens.
“Ontario is what gave them their majority, so that’s definitely where they need to make some more gains,” he said.
The Liberals are leading in Ontario, and nationally among voters between the ages of 35 and 65, according to an interactive voice response poll by Forum Research conducted Aug. 23 with 1,189 respondents.
The Forum Research poll, accurate to within three percentage points, shows that in Ontario, where the Conservatives took 44 per cent of the popular vote and 73 of the province’s 106 seats in 2011, the federal Liberals are now polling at 43 per cent support, while the Conservatives are at 34 per cent and the NDP is a distant third at 17 per cent.
The Liberals also beat out the Conservatives and the NDP among voters aged 35 to 44, 45 to 54, and 55 to 64 by double-digit margins in the recent Forum survey. Among voters older than 65, the Conservatives were the party of choice with 36 per cent support, with the Liberals trailing by two percentage points.
The Conservatives are also losing support among ethnic Canadians who helped the party win 32 of 47 seats in the GTA in 2011, the Forum Research poll shows. Exit polls from 2011 put support for the Tories at 42 per cent among ethnic voters, but the recent Forum Poll put the party’s support among ethnic Canadians at 38 per cent, while ethnic support for the Liberals was at 36 per cent. Support for the NDP among ethnic Canadians was at 15 per cent.
Overall, the Forum poll put national support for the Liberals at 38 per cent, with the Conservatives and NDP polling at 29 and 22 per cent, respectively. Another poll conducted by Nanos Research Aug. 12 to 19 with 2,000 Canadians had the Liberals and Conservatives closer at 35.3 per cent and 31.9 per cent, respectively, with the NDP polling at 22.8 per cent. The Nanos poll is accurate to within 2.2 percentage points.
Forum Research president and CEO Lorne Bozinoff told The Hill Times that the current polls resemble the national support that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) father Pierre Trudeau enjoyed when he first became prime minister in 1968.
“If we look at the results now in the latest horse race poll, they’re starting to look a lot like the old Pierre Trudeau-type coalition for the Liberals—that included suburban Ontario, and that’s where the Tories are starting to lose their support, and it’s starting to drift away towards the Liberals,” Mr. Bozinoff said.
“The NDP are back where they were in Pierre Trudeau’s day at 22 per cent. It’s not just the Tories—all three parties are all sort of back to where they typically were 40 years ago.”
Ipsos Public Affairs pollster Darrell Bricker, co-author of The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business and Culture and What It Means For Our Future, recently told The Hill Times that it was “crucial” for the Tories to hang on to their support in suburban Ontario, particularly among ethnic Canadians.
In The Big Shift, Mr. Bricker and Globe and Mail national affairs columnist John Ibbitson argue that the 2011 election result was part of a westward shift in political power away from Quebec and towards an increasingly conservative, multicultural alliance between Ontario and Western Canada.
“If they weren’t able to sweep the 905 [area code] like they did in some of the inner suburb ridings that they did in Toronto, they would have lost—at least they wouldn’t have won a majority,” Mr. Bricker said of the Conservatives’ 2011 election victory.
A potential boost for the Conservatives will be the 30 new seats being added to the electoral map for the fall 2015 election. Half of the seats will go to Ontario, mostly in the suburbs around Toronto. Alberta, a Conservative stronghold, will get six seats. British Columbia will also get six seats and Quebec will get three.
At the support levels parties received in 2011, the Conservatives would win 25 of the 30 new seats, according to an analysis by voting and demographics expert Mitch Wexler, who was less convinced that the Tories were in trouble with voters.
“I think it’s really going to take until the next election to really see the truth about that question,” he said. “[V]oters haven’t needed to ask that question of themselves, so polls are looking at current moods and attitudes about personalities but it’s not really the hard decision of choosing a government and so it’s really hard to read anything into these polls.”
A true idea of how parties will fare in the new ridings will come in a year’s time when they start to get organized locally, said Pundit’s Guide’s Alice Funke.
“We won’t really know where the parties are strong until we watch them get organized in those new ridings for a year. Candidates who know the local terrain vote with their feet. Where you see a lot of interest in the party nominations, you’ll know they think winning them is a prize,” she said in an email to The Hill Times.
How long Mr. Trudeau’s popularity holds remains to be seen, but the Liberals have led the Conservatives in the polls since he was elected leader in April, and has already rebounded from a drop in poll numbers in July, when the party was polling in the low 30s.
Mr. Bozinoff said that voters may be starting to lean in favour of a change in federal leadership.
“It’s not at this point a huge collapse [for the Conservatives], but you just see the first signs of the old Liberal coalition starting to take hold,” he said. “The Prime Minister’s been around for a long time, going back to opposition. Voters may say it’s time for the next generation of leader. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that divide.”
Canadians are just starting to get to know Mr. Trudeau and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair (Outremont, Que.), who has been in the post since March 2012 and is currently touring the country, said Ms. Funke.
“These are summer polls conducted two years before the election. People don’t really know either of the new opposition leaders well, though in Trudeau’s case they think they do. The only leader they really know is the Prime Minister,” she said.
The Green Party had 10 per cent support in British Columbia, according to the recent Forum poll. Mr. Grénier projected that the Greens would have a shot at winning a second federal seat in B.C. with its current level of support, but the party is unlikely to play spoiler in many ridings in 2015 like it did in the 2012 Calgary Centre, Alta., byelection. Conservative MP Joan Crockatt retained the seat with 36 per cent support, beating out the Liberals by a mere four percentage points. The Greens came in third with nearly 26 per cent support.
“The next election for them won’t be about re-electing Elizabeth May, it will be about electing a second MP, but I don’t think they’re in a position to really be a huge spoiler. Outside of those few ridings in British Columbia, they’re pretty much where they were in 2011,” Mr. Grénier said.
Mr. Bozinoff noted the Green Party continues to poll well between elections, but often drops when voters make a strategic decision in the ballot box on election day.
“If the Greens in B.C. can make a good argument that they can win [another] riding … they may be a factor, but in a lot of B.C. ridings where they’re not perceived to have a chance of winning, I don’t think the Green supporters in those ridings will stick with the party,” he said.
Two years away from the election, Ms. Funke cautioned against taking the polls too seriously.
“I think all political polls should be plotted in terms of the number of days they’re taken before the election, and compare their predictive power to polls taken that many days before previous elections,” she said. “If we did that, we’d have to look at the polls in May of 2009 and see how well they predicted May 2011. The answer is not very well at all.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: CHRIS PLECASH, JESSICA BRUNO
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