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Monday Sept.
28
2009 BACK NEXT
Jack Layton's dilema
By
Angelo
Persichilli
THE HILL
TIMES
Political
public opinion polls remind me of the train schedules in Italy a few
decades ago. Even if you couldn't count on the trains to arrive and
depart on time, the schedules were very useful for calculating
delays. They were an honest guess.
The same goes with
political polls. They are very useful if you read them in the
context of the last few months' results to try to understand the
trends.
With this in mind, the last poll of Ekos for CBC is
very informative, mainly for the NDP.
If you look at the
results over the last four months, you clearly see the support for
the NDP is closely connected to support for the Liberals. When the
support for the Grits goes up, the numbers for the NDP go down and
vice versa.
Putting aside the support of a certain number of
voters who vote for their own political party, no matter the news of
the day, all others are up for grabs and the news of the day is very
important.
There are no specific numbers, but looking at
past electoral results, and excluding Quebec where the dynamic is
different, the core support for the Conservatives varies from 20 per
cent to 24 per cent, while the Liberal support is a bit higher, but
more volatile, and varies between 24 to 28 per cent. The NDP
fluctuates between eight to 10 per cent and the Green Party between
four to six per cent. The numbers of those who most likely will not
change political affiliation in every election fluctuate around 56
per cent to 68 per cent.
That leaves a total of 32 per cent
to 44 per cent of people whose vote is up for grabs.
Considering that in the 2008 election, 13,929,093 out of
23,677,639 voters actually cast ballots (58.8 per cent), it means
that the number of voters that will help to decide who is going to
win or lose an election varies between four and six million. Of
course, this will go up or down according to the percentage of voter
turnout on election day.
The ability of political parties to
win is closely tied to their ability to identify and win the support
of those people.
People who belong to this group can be
divided in two parts: the most consistent is fluctuating between the
Conservatives and the Liberals, the other between the Liberals and
the NDP. There is also a wild card involving the Green Party, which
receives support mainly from the second group, but also from the
centre-right voters.
Of course the Liberal Party can win
support from both sides but, at the same time, lose on both.
These considerations are not based on any scientific polls,
but are the result of thorough examinations of past election results
and some new polls.
Back to last week's poll by Ekos for the
CBC.
After the Liberals decided to withdraw support from the
minority Conservative government, there was a shift of preferences
in the two undecided groups. A number of potential Liberal voters
moved towards the Conservatives who increased their support from
35.1 per cent to 37 per cent.
Those are votes that the
Conservatives took directly from the Liberals.
Nonetheless,
the support for Michael Ignatieff's party remained unchanged for an
obvious reason: the centre-left undecided that during the summer
parked their vote with the NDP moved to the Liberals to try to stop
the Conservatives. In fact, the Liberal support remained unchanged,
29.9 per cent, as unchanged was the support for the Green Party and
the Bloc Québécois, while support for the NDP, went down from 16.5
per cent to 13.8 per cent.
This confirms what I wrote last
week: in a fight between Harper and Ignatieff, Layton loses if he
doesn't choose his targets well or, most of all, decides the role
the NDP wants to play in the House of
Commons.
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