The Myth of Strategic Voting

There is a persistent myth amongst some political commentators that strategic voting actually plays a big role in the outcome of elections. There are some commentators that even state that strategic voting is the reason why the Liberals won the last election and the election before. The argument goes something like this: Progressive voters voted for the Liberals instead of the more progressive NDP because they wanted to prevent a Conservative government. That assertion is silly. Although strategic voting certainly does happen its impact on the overall result of elections is negligible.

There are three types of voters. Note that I am only including those voters who vote regularly and I am ignoring the approximately 35% of eligible voters who do not bother to vote on a regular basis.

The first type are the ones that vote for a given party out of habit (I have always voted for the NDP.) or out of tradition (My grandfather voted Conservative and my father voted Conservative. What's good enough for them is good enough for me.). These voters pay little attention to what their parties are doing in between elections or the direction their party would like to take the country. Many of these voters are unaware of the fact that the parties their parents and grandparents supported back in the day no longer exist. They are completely different but that does not concern them.

This is the largest block of voters. They make up the base of each of the political parties. They are not all partisans of those parties. Most do not think about politics in between elections but when it comes time to mark their X on the ballot paper, on election day, they will vote for the party they have always voted for, regardless of what happened in between elections and what happened during a given election campaign.

The base of each party is approximately:

• 30% for the Conservatives
• 30% for the Liberals
• 15% for the NDP
• 5% for the Greens
• 5% for other parties

The Bloc really does not have a base. It is a political fact that francophone Quebecers are the most fickle voters in Canada. You never know which way they will jump so you cannot depend on them to always support your party. Contrast that to anglophone Quebecers who are a dependable part of the Liberal base. It was anglophone Quebecers that prevented the Liberals from losing Official Party status in 2011.

So if you look at the base of each of the parties it adds up to around 85% of the electorate.

The next largest portion of the electorate are what I call the unaligned voters. They are the voters that will vote for a party during a given election or vote against a party during a given election and how they vote next time may be totally different. These voters are only slightly more informed than the base voters for each party. These voters will switch their vote but that switch is usually the result of feelings as opposed to logic and research of the platforms of each political party. These voters only trust the Conservative and the Liberals to govern the country and they will break for either party on election day in sufficient numbers to hand either one the victory. They broke for the Liberals in 2015 and for the Conservatives in 2011. That is not to say they will all vote for the winner but enough of them will vote for a party to push them over the top. There are exceptions, the 2019 election being one of them, where this non-aligned vote will split evenly making the election about vote efficiency for the parties over the number of votes they receive.

Of the 15% of the non-aligned vote probably around 14% of that will vote for the party they believe will be the best one to govern the country or against the party they do not want to govern.

That leaves about 1% who will decide to vote strategically. They will have a party they absolutely want to prevent from forming a government and they will attempt to find out which of the parties in their riding has the best shot at preventing a candidate from that party they do not want to form government from winning. Of course, this is a hit and miss proposition because most voters do not know which party is leading in their riding as riding polls are hopelessly unreliable. The result, in most cases, of strategic voting is failure in preventing the party you do not want to win from winning.

Strategic voting exists but it is not as prevalent as some would believe and its impact on elections is not as large as those same people would hope. 

You had one job Mr. Ford

And if you would have done it well you would have been able to skate to a comfortable majority government in 2022.

You will probably still win. I believe you still have the inside track but your decision making during the pandemic, particularly now that the 3rd wave has taken hold in the Province and is really taking off, is going to make you work alot harder for that victory.

If you would like to know when the wheels began to come off I would point to the Fall of 2020. The second wave was predicted and expected and many were saying it could be prevented or at least mitigated if certain actions were taken when cases began to climb. You did not take those actions and you let the 2nd wave take hold. You finally did act but in a half-assed way, which did cause the slope of the curve to turn downwards as hoped. However, that is when you made your next mistake. Instead of keeping the measures that were working in place you took the slight downward trend as a sign that you could reopen Ontario again. The result was predictable. The slope reverted to the upward angle and the new variants of concern caused that angle to increase until it was essentially a straight line going up. Now here we are with cases climbing at an extremely alarming rate and you have now been forced to take extraordinary measures to flatten that curve once again, measures that could have been prevented if you acted earlier. Incidentally, I am not saying this, doctors and scientists are saying this. And now even some of your allies in the media are not bothering to attempt to put lipstick on this particular porker.

Your attempts to shift blame for this situation to the Federal government is falling on deaf ears and they have been doing so for some time. There is one thing Canadians understand and that is how our health care system works. We all know that the provinces are the political jurisdictions that provide us with our health care. Hell, my health card has the Ontario government logo embossed on it in a most conspicuous way. Further, the message that your government has had over a million doses sitting in freezers for over a week is getting through. You have been stating that your government has been doing that because you are afraid of running out but no one is really buying that. I noticed today that you stated that Ontario had the capacity to vaccinate 300,000 people per day, which is double what you have been saying for months. That is convenient because instead of having almost a ten day supply in freezers you can now claim to have only a four day supply. The only problem Mr. Ford is people are wary of what politicians tell them. In order for them to actually believe you Ontario actually has to meet or come very close to that number. So far, the average has not reached a third of the 300,000. 

By the way, I realize the logistical challenges a mass vaccination program in Ontario presents to your government. You had almost a year to plan but still hiccups are to be expected. In that situation all we could ask of you and your government is to learn from the challenges, improve the vaccination effort and take the necessary public health measures to backstop the vaccination efforts until they are running smoothly. Unfortunately, you have done none of that.

The problems you have caused yourself are taking a toll. I can see it on your face when you have media availabilities. I am certain much of that concern is for the plight of the people of Ontario. I am not going claim that you are a sociopath who does not care about the welfare of the people of Ontario but I would also bet that a fair amount of that concern is the melting away of your support among the voters. I have always stated that if you want to see the state of politics in a given jurisdiction look at what the political parties are doing and what I see is a political party desperately grasping at anything they can think of to stem the political bleeding.

I have stated, in this space, many times that the pandemic has changed politics in this country. Any political party that does not realize that and continues to play pre-pandemic politics will only cause itself a great deal of trouble. You are one of those and I believe you are now seeing the results. There is still alot of time between now and the next election, for you to recover, but that is by no means certain and I doubt that you will recover enough in any case to make the next election anything but a crap shoot. 

The Conservative Party's Climate Change Plan

Go figure, after posting yesterday about how the Conservative Party of Canada voted not to believe in climate change the Leader of the party has actually introduced a climate change plan that can actually be called a plan. It is nice to see that they are at least making an effort.

Watching social media we can already see the policy wonks analyzing the merits and demerits of the plan but most of that will not go much farther than those policy wonks.

The Conservatives have two main problems for their plan. First, it is not a stand-alone document. It will be compared to the current policies of the Liberal government and there will be one issue that will make this plan dead on arrival as a result, namely the Conservative plan to take the revenues from a carbon levy and put it into green savings accounts. For the last few years the Conservatives and their apologists in the media have been attacking the "carbon tax" while completely ignoring the rebates that come along with it. Now that the Conservatives have introduced the idea of green savings accounts the tax rebates of the current system will be highlighted and in a head-to-head matchup between the two, among the non-aligned voters in the areas of the country where the Conservatives need to make gains, the current system will triumph. Really, for the average person the choice between receiving money that you can spend as you wish or having money put into an account, on your behalf, but for which you can only spend on certain things is no contest. They will take the money and run. And that is leaving aside the Conservative plan to have a private sector organization collect the funds and administer these green savings accounts instead of a government department or agency, which will raise alot a red flags among non-aligned Canadians. 

The second problem for the Conservatives is the majority of their membership voted against believing in climate change and the need to address it. That fact will provide Conservative opponents with what they need to question whether this new plan would ever be implemented if the Conservatives ever won an election. Would a Conservative PM actually defy the membership of his party? Will he break the promise to eliminate the "carbon tax" after all of these years or will he keep that promise and break the promises in this new Climate Change Plan? Again, looking at social media we are already seeing a bit of a backlash among conservatives to this plan and their opponents are claiming the Conservatives have flip-flopped. 

These two issues are going to make the Conservative plan difficult to sell to both audiences. Conservatives will not like the acceptance of a price on carbon after fighting against it for all of these years and non-Conservatives are going to have a hard time believing that a Conservative government would follow through on this plan, assuming non-Conservatives decided they liked it better than the current system.

Looking at the Conservative plan they have accepted the targets outlined in the current government policy. There are some differences on how the Conservatives would address large emitters of GHG but the differences are not earth shattering. The key difference is the amount of the carbon levy and how to handle returning those funds to Canadians. Their plan for those funds is a likely non-starter for those Canadians that they need to convince which would make this plan not worth the paper it is written on. Really, what the Conservatives should have done was state that they fought the good fight against the "carbon tax" but with the recent SCC decision they have concluded that there is no point continuing it further. They then could have stated that they would no longer move to repeal it if they won government. That would have neutralized the issue as something that could hurt them among urban and suburban Canadians without providing their opponents with something to snipe at. 

Some Random Observations

Just a few observations about things I have seen and heard about over the last few days and weeks.

Jake Tapper: I know that Liberals are up in arms about his piece on CNN the other night, claiming he is in bed with Conservatives but that is probably just BS. In actual fact that piece was just a case of lazy journalism and an example of why modern journalism and the organizations that peddle it are slowly dying. All he had to do was take a little extra time to educate himself on how our Federal system works and his story would have been much more meaningful. Instead he did not, further demonstrating that modern news organizations do not really care about reporting facts anymore and demonstrating why the consumption of news  by the traditional methods is being steadily reduced. Everywhere, news organizations have been losing money hand over fist, except for the four year gift of the Trump presidency, but the reactions of these organizations is to double down on what is not working instead of coming up with another business model. 

By the way, Mr. Tapper's comments will probably not have any impact on the Canadian political scene but if it does it will probably be to see a slight uptick in the popularity of Mr. Trudeau and his government. You see, although partisans from each party will point to that piece to reinforce their preconceived notions, non-partisan Canadians will either ignore it or they will get pissed at the United States media for interfering with our politics and react by supporting the Trudeau government for a time. We saw that during the first term of the Harper government. An American publication published a negative piece about them. The Liberals went "See, even Americans realize that the Harper government is bad for Canada.". Then, perversely, when the next set of polls came out Mr. Harper's personal popularity and the popularity of his government saw a bit of an uptick. 

Vaccine Rollout: It is upsetting that the vaccine rollout has become such a political football. What should have happened, from the very beginning, was the governments of this country and the various oppositions should have worked together towards putting this pandemic behind us. However, that has not happened and it has been politics as usual and that could have a very negative impact on those who are playing politics the most. I have stated in this space before that the pandemic has changed how people see politics in this country. The threat of the virus has made Canadians less receptive to petty partisan bickering. If we are to believe the public polls they seem to be showing us evidence of that. The political parties engaged in politics as usual are plummeting in those polls, with the O'Toole Conservatives averaging less than 30% and the personal approval ratings of Mr. Ford, Mr. Kenney and Mr. O'Toole heading towards the basement. Meanwhile, the personal and government approval for the Trudeau government is rising. If an election were held today the Liberals would probably win a comfortable majority government.

As an aside, just as the Trudeau Liberals could not be blamed for the slow acquisition of vaccines during the Winter the various provincial government cannot be completely blamed for the slow administration of them. The transport and storage requirements of the two main vaccines make it a logistical nightmare to get them where they need to be, in a timely fashion, so it is somewhat understandable that they are having some difficulties. Hopefully, they will be able to iron out the bugs in the coming weeks so that the administration of the vaccines becomes more robust.

The Third Wave: The second wave provided data on what worked and did not work in preventing it from getting out of hand. The fact that many of the Provincial governments did not learn those lessons, or just plain ignored them, is on them.

The United States is a failing state: I often wonder if the average Roman knew that Rome was declining and heading for a fall during those final decades before that Fall. Now I wonder if the average American realizes that the United States is rapidly declining and headed for a fall. Their society, their culture and their politics are sick and quite frankly I do not see a way for them to make the changes necessary to prevent the fall. The election of Joe Biden has slowed down the decline to a small extent but it has not reversed it and I believe that slowing of the decline will probably only last a few months before we see it accelerate again. It took decades for the Roman Empire to decline to the point where it could not prevent its fall. For the US I believe it will only take years. I am in my mid-50s and assuming I live a normal life-span (say to my late 70s to early 80s) I believe I will be around to witness the fall.

Political conventions: All three of the main Federal parties had political conventions this spring. For the Conservatives it was a disaster. My God, all they had to do was say they believed in climate change and things would be so much easier for them. Now Mr. O'Toole could present a stellar climate change plan (He won't) but no one would find it credible because he would never get the approval of his own party to implement it. Climate change is the issue of our time and saying you do not believe in it is just plain stupid, scientifically and for the Conservatives, politically.

The Liberals convention went off as they wanted. They came up with a bunch of new policies that may or may not make it into an election campaign platform but at least they can point to a bunch of issues that are generally popular among Canadians.

The NDP did their usual thing. They claimed that the Liberals have, yet again, stolen their ideas. The NDP has been saying that for as long as I have been observing Canadian politics (approaching 40 years) and I know that they were saying it long before I began observing it. So far all it has done was allow them to become the Official Opposition facing a majority government. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results then the NDP has been bonkers since it became a national party. Here is a little piece of advice for the NDP. Develop new material.