The Green Vote and Strategic Voting in the 2013 BC Election

The May 14, 2013 BC Election created an unusual circumstance that allows us to make an assessment of the potential of strategic voting.  The circumstance was the universal perception that the NDP was going to win - the consequence of the inaccurate polling and punditry (see TC's three previous posts). This post will analyze the Green vote in this election and look at the strategic implications.

Even if Green voters thought that the NDP was preferable to continued governance by the Liberals (a majority of New Democrats and a plurality of Green supporters made the other party their second choice in this poll) this unique context meant Greens had no reason not to support their first choice given the expectation that the NDP would win without any help. There was nothing to hold back Green performance in this election with the exception that the party did not run a full slate of candidates, something they did do in 2009.

On its face the Green performance in BC was little different in 2013 from 2009.  The Green share of the popular vote actually declined slightly from 8.21 % in 2009 to 8.13 % in 2013. Nevertheless, the Greens and most observers saw the election result as a triumph because they elected their first member to the legislature, Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay-Gordon Head.

Andrew Weaver - Oak Bay-Gordon Head

In fact, the Greens performed better in the popular vote than might seem to be the case at first glance. If we look only at the Green share of the vote in the ridings they did contest, we find the party capturing 11.2 % of the popular vote, a significant improvement from 2009, when the Greens won 8.5% of the vote in the same list of constituencies. This showing is second only to the 12.4% of the popular vote overall the Greens garnered in the 2001 election in the context of collapsing support for the NDP.

The question arises then: what impact did the absence of strategic voting on the part of Green voters potentially have on the election outcome.  I ran a number of scenarios to analyze this. Scenario one: if we absolutely take away all Green votes and give them to the NDP while leaving Conservative votes in place the NDP would have won 46 seats to the Liberals 38 (the actual result was Liberal 49/ NDP 35). This suggests a purely hypothetical maximum for the NDP in 2013 but is not realistic.

A more realistic way of looking at the potential of strategic voting is Scenario two: take one third of Green votes and deliver them to the NDP, as it is highly likely that only a minority of partisans would vote strategically.  In this scenario the Liberals would have led the NDP 45 seats to 39 compared to the actual (in this scenario the Green seat goes NDP). If we add as a parallel shift one third of Conservative votes to the Liberals the margin increases to 47-37.  These are hypothetical projections, but it is clear that Green voting combined with the flawed polling did not cost the NDP the election. The failures of their campaign accomplished that.

There was some evidence of strategic voting by BC Conservative voters.  Early in the campaign, the party was at 11 to 13 % in the polls (without forgetting their doubtful accuracy) and had been over 20% during part of 2012.  The attack ads aimed at the NDP by the BC Liberals no doubt had an impact in bringing these voters home (most were previous BC Liberal voters). The Conservatives ended up with just 4.8% overall (they averaged 7.3% in ridings where they had a candidate).

Strategic voting potential, however, was there. TC heard anecdotal evidence of a willingness on the part of some Green supporters to switch to the NDP. Would the Greens have finished closer to 8% if there was a context to motivate strategic voting? The question will remain unanswered.

Perhaps better described as tactical voting, this type of second choice voting is a fact of life in Canada and likely to be of increasing consequence in future elections, providing polling companies can do a better job of measuring vote intentions.

SMALL ADDENDUM: One observation I made in looking at Green voting is that in general Green and NDP support overlap geographically: both parties are strongest on the coast, Vancouver Island and the lower mainland.

In my next post, I will comment on the Ontario by-elections. I have come to some conclusions about the results, some of which may seem counter intuitive.

More on the B.C. polls

The invaluable Pundit's Guide points us to an interesting and revealing polling experiment that compared telephone IVR (interactive voice response) polls to online polls.  The conclusion according to a release from Campaign Research, which conducted the experiment, is that IVR beats online:

“I question the reliability of voter intentions derived through web based on-line panels” said Campaign Research Principal, Greg Dunlop. Further he said “We believe that IVR polls conducted properly are much more representative of the voting population.”

One notable finding was that an IVR poll conducted on May 13 just prior to election day had the Liberals ahead by 41.6 to 38.0 whereas an IVR poll conducted May 10-12 had the NDP ahead 41 to 38.6.  The online poll reported an NDP lead of over 5 points. This suggests that there was some last minute movement to the Liberals.  Most polls conducted during the campaign, however, were online polls.

Another commentary from Ekos President Frank Graves`s, whose poll projected the NDP vote accurately but underestimated the Liberal vote, has written a comprehensive self-critical assessment, noted among other things that turnout is a critical factor in explaining the difference between polls and results:

The pollster sweepstakes that surrounded the nearness of final poll to election outcome once made a lot of sense. In the past, most people voted and the relatively small minority of those who did not vote were not systematically different. So the yardstick made sense. Neither of those conditions applies today.

In British Columbia, the electorate can be divided into two roughly equally sized groups – those who voted and those who did not. This is fairly typical of recent provincial elections. If the non-voters are very different than the voters, then a poll can be an accurate measure of the population of all eligible voters but a flawed predictor of the election outcome.

We have now seen significant differences between polls and election results in B.C. in 2013, Alberta in 2012 and in final polls before the 2011 federal election.  In particular, on average the polls underestimated the Conservative vote by about six percentage points in Ontario in the 2011 federal election, which by itself accounted for the difference between minority government and a Conservative majority.

The Campaign Research study, which provides a reasonably full accounting of its methodology nonetheless does not say how large the online panel was from which its sample was drawn either nationally or in B.C. However, it does say: "Web-based polls are not probability samples as the population that the survey sample is drawn from is, in itself, a non-random sub-sample derived through panel recruiting."

In the U.S. Gallup, the traditional gold standard in polling, is undergoing a critical review of its failures in the 2012 U.S. election.  There is clearly a broad trend here.

The B.C. election and polling fiasco

In August 1972 a hamburger poll at the Pacific National Exhibition accurately predicted Dave Barrett and the NDP would win the B.C. Election held August 30th of that year. TC has long had great faith in the capacity of polls, even hamburger polls, to capture public sentiment in election campaigns in a way that correctly, if not precisely, anticipates the election result.

The polls on the whole have delivered. Using Pollster.com's capacity to create one's own prediction map  and based on their aggregation of polls TC was able to accurately predict the outcome in 49 of 50 states in last year's U.S. Presidential election. The fiftieth, Florida, I had as too close to call. Most polls got the 2012 U.S. election right.

However, in B.C. in 2013 the polls were wrong and the errors were extreme (something similar happened in Alberta last year and there were significant regional errors in the 2011 Canadian federal election).  For the two leading parties (the minor parties should be ignored for the purpose of this analysis) only three polls out of the final seven had a result inside the margin of error for the NDP and all were outside the margin for the Liberals.

If we rank the pollsters by methodology we see that while all the polling was weak, the online polls were generally weaker than the phone polls (IVR or interactive voice response polls are still phone polls conducted using automated computer equipment rather than human operators). In the table below you can see that on the whole the phone was a bit more accurate.

Telephone polls do have two problems today that were not present in the not too distant past. First, many people either don't answer the phone or use call display to filter out unwanted telemarketing or polling calls. Partly because of this response rates have fallen dramatically. In addition phone polls to be valid need to call cell phones, which have become so widespread especially among the young that you can't capture an adequately representative sample without them but not all do. The low response rates mean the potential for capturing an accurate representation of the population must be declining.

Online polls are surveys conducted among panels recruited by the company to answer surveys on a variety of topics mostly market research (TC was formerly part of an online panel and has answered many such surveys).

The most important point about this methodology is there are no established standards or methods for what is a recently developed technique for polling.  Some good results have been obtained (there have been some bad results too) but considerable uncertainty about the method remains.

But here is something the public doesn't know and something journalists should be demanding from the online companies.  While companies such as Ipsos say their national samples are large, as large as 200,000, we don't know the exact size of the B.C. part of its national panel (is it about 26,000 representing roughly BC's share of Canada's population) nor do we know fully what methods were employed. Almost by definition, members of online panels are more interested participating in survey research than is typical of the population. Is this not likely to be an important factor in determining outcomes?

The UK firm YouGov has a decent reputation (Nate Silver who generally likes phone polls said in evaluating polls in 2010 "A firm that conducts surveys by Internet, YouGov, also performed relatively well.") YouGov provides a detailed description of its methods on its web site. For example, YouGov notes "restrictions are put in place to ensure that only the people contacted are allowed to participate". Online polls are going to be part of our future, but the industry should establish some minimum standards about how such polls are to be conducted, and should be much more transparent about their methods than they have been to date.

BC may be a more difficult place to poll than other provinces. Reflecting its diverse geography BC is a province of micro-climates both meteorological and political. Pollsters should have a tougher time capturing its variety and likely do. Polls also have a hard time with turnout, which was low in this election. For example the weighting of results demographically by age has a critical impact (older voters are much more likely to vote than younger voters). No doubt some of the error was rooted here.

Paradoxically, at the same time that publicly available media polls are getting weaker we are entering an era where, in private, well-funded sophisticated campaigns such as the 2012 Obama campaign spend massive sums of money to give themselves an extensive almost-census like knowledge of political preferences.  This quote describes the Obama's campaign's activity in battleground states:

For each battleground state every week, the campaign’s call centers conducted 5,000 to 10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voter’s preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts.

The failures of polling matter  Our knowledge of politics depends on them in a way that was not the case many years ago. It clearly affected the perceptions of the campaign from beginning to end on the part of the parties, the media and the public. Watching election night coverage it was clear that the Liberals were just as surprised as the NDP. I am distrustful of all claims by those who now say they had foreknowledge.

In hindsight it is clear now that the NDP lost in no small part because it was receiving misleading signals from the polls.  It ran an unfocused weak campaign that took victory for granted (somewhat like that of Lyn Macleod and the Ontario Liberals in 1995 when a big lead at the outset became a Mike Harris government on election day) when they should have been looking over their shoulder.

The whole story is complex but let me discuss two factors:

Adrian Dix made a disastrous decision to forgo attack ads and insisted on a positive campaign.  It seems pundits and politicians confuse negative politics with unfair dirty politics. Negative political discourse whether it is question period, a TV debate or an ad critical of an opponent represents the normal content of political debate.  There is a key distinction to be made, however, between negative campaigning and dirty politics.  It is the latter that should be denounced at every opportunity, especially by journalists and political scientists. Those who have difficulty with this should read Kathleen Hall Jamieson's classic work, Dirty Politics, Deception, Distraction and Democracy.  The BC NDP could have run ads critical of the many twists and turns in Christy Clark's style of governing and the Campbell government's handling of the HST fiasco, which could have been tough but fair, without being the equivalent of the Willie Horton ad (for context see analysis here).

Whether deserved or not, the NDP suffers from a longer term reputation as a party that is weak on economic growth and fiscal management. The Clark campaign ads (they strike TC as quite effective) took advantage of the fact that Adrian Dix was associated with an NDP government in the 1990s that has been portrayed as playing into this NDP stereotype. His mid-campaign shift on the pipeline issue fed into this. This was always going to be a potential weakness the NDP needed to address not just through the proposals it made as a party, but through tough attacks on the record of its opponents as well. It is not something that can be ignored.

There is always a next election. This year's Liberal campaign talked about "getting rid of BC's debt".  Perhaps the BC NDP should make careful note of that pledge.

BC Election - Final Poll Average

I have averaged the final polls from BC including all those released as of the morning of election day.

The results are:

	BC Liberal	NDP	BC Cons.	Green	Other	Sample	Margin of Error
Closing average	35.7	43.2	7.1	10.9	3.0	5,928	1.3

In seats this yields 50 NDP, 34 BC Liberals and one other.  However, although my estimate model doesn't show it, I would not be surprised if the Greens picked up one or two.  The ridings they would be most likely to win would come from the BC Liberals.

My seat projection also shows six very close races including Premier Clark's seat of Vancouver-Point Grey.

BC Election - Efficiency of the Vote

I heard on the radio this morning yet another reference to efficiency of the vote in the B.C. election.  The generally accepted assumption is that the NDP has the more efficient vote.

This is something that I can use my projection model to measure.  Using a projection based on the 2009 election, TC calculates that the BC Liberal vote is very slightly more efficient but the difference is negligible.  It is too small to be worth thinking about.

British Columbia's Election

B.C.'s election is drawing to a close and in TC's view it will be a comfortable majority for the NDP and Adrian Dix. Despite all the excitement about a Liberal comeback, the shift in the polls from big NDP leads in the early going to an apparently closer race now looks like a reversion to the mean: in other words we are seeing a return to something closer to the longer run average of political support for the two major parties in BC politics. Most polls except for a Forum Poll conducted on May 8 can be found here on the Tyee's Election Hook website.

There is little doubt the early polls captured something.  However, most of the movement appears to have been disaffected BC Liberal voters returning home, voters who were anti-NDP to begin with but undecided due to antipathy to the Clark government. The Liberal party's attacks on the NDP paid dividends here.  However, almost every poll has had the NDP above 40 per cent and the BC Liberals below (the two exceptions to this are both Forum polls).  The average of the polls conducted this week is:

BC Liberal - 37.2%
NDP - 43%
Green - 10.2%
BC Conservatives - 6.6%

TC expects to see about 50 New Democrats and about 35 BC Liberals win, possibly one Green although that is probably getting less likely.  Perceptions of a close race will drive some voters, who view both the Greens and the NDP favourably, towards the NDP in order to avoid re-electing the BC Liberals to a fourth term.

One or two points about the polling.  Forum research commits a sin that I think needs to be noted: they conduct their polls on a single day.  Their polling is conducted using Interactive Voice Response, a valid methodology where respondents answer a short phone survey where the questions are played back from a computer and the responses digitally recorded by punching phone keys. However, it means they can turn on their computers and just let them run until they have the sample they need (all firms weight their samples so that they resemble the population at large). In TC's view they should spread out the survey over a few days the way other firms do.

Consider Forum's description of its methodology of its April 30th poll:

The Forum Poll™ was conducted by Forum Research with the results based on an interactive voice response telephone survey of 1,055 randomly selected residents of British Columbia 18 years of age and older. The poll was conducted on April 30th, 2013.

Now compare that to an American IVR polling company with a good reputation, Survey USA, as they describe a poll they conducted recently on the Los Angeles Mayoralty race:

Cell-phone and home-phone respondents included in this research: SurveyUSA interviewed 1,000 city of Los Angeles adults 04/08/13 through 04/10/13. Of the adults, 840 were registered to vote. Of the registered, 478 were determined by SurveyUSA to be likely to vote in the 05/21/13 runoff. This research was conducted using blended sample, mixed mode. Respondents reachable on a home telephone (82% of likely voters) were interviewed on their home telephone in the recorded voice of a professional announcer. Respondents not reachable on a home telephone (18% of likely voters) were shown a questionnaire on their smartphone, tablet or other electronic device.

One approach is clearly more sophisticated than the other. In the 2011 federal election the polls did not cover themselves with glory in terms of accuracy.  However, according to my calculations, Forum was eighth out of nine in total error on its national poll numbers.

Most of the other polls used online panels to conduct their surveys, a methodology that keeps getting better and allows better targeting. For example, the last Angus Reid survey was able to ask respondents only about parties actually running candidates in their constituency. Online polls, however, still can't guarantee their sample is fully representative of the population.

Like father, like son…?

On a listserv that I read a political scientist returned from a few months abroad and watched Justin Trudeau’s speech to last weekend’s Liberal Showcase. Here in part is what he said:

I have been out of the country during the Liberal leadership campaign, and all I heard was that Justin Trudeau, about whom I knew only the basic facts, was a shoo-in. So being back in time for the Liberal showcase, I decided to find out more by watching his speech. It was quite an experience. While I realize that such speeches are primarily meant to charge up the crowd rather than offer policy solutions, this one, I think, was remarkable in its vacuity. Once one strips away the digs at the other parties…, one is left with essentially nothing but patriotic platitudes....

This jaded response to the speech was shared, remarkably enough, by some young Liberal supporters of Mr. Trudeau.  On the blog Calgary Grit, in the comments section after his post providing an appraisal of the Liberal Showcase, appears this series of comments:

Luke APRIL 7, 2013

Cast my ballot today. There was certainly the feeling of it being a little futile, given the apparently decided nature of the contest already.

Next step: Upgrade from supporter to proper member? Probably.

REPLY

jared APRIL 7, 2013

good analysis.

the best speech was Bob Rae’s though, by far. somehow he’s the guy who’s ended up articulating perfectly what liberalism and liberalism in Canada is all about, without all the artificial tones and gestures or sounding like a big sappy cliche.

i’ve come around to Justin being the next leader, and if the polls are any indication i’m glad liberals have a leader who inspires Canadians and just might be the lightning rod that anti-Harper sentiments have been feeling around for, but personally i still can’t stand listening to him. it hasn’t gotten better. i’ll be a loyal soldier as long as i never listen to his speeches.

the faux-profundity thing he does is just grating, imo. he should talk more like an ordinary person, not like he’s Martin Luther King Jr. or something.

REPLY

Luke APRIL 7, 2013

I rather agree with the ‘can’t stand listening to him’ sentiment, although I can just stand it. To me sounds like someone over-acting, and it comes across as wanker-ish. But I guess it’s working for a lot of people.

Other than his speaking style, I’ve also come around to the Justin Trudeau-as-leader concept. I think he’s probably the best choice.

Damned with faint praise. The Justin Trudeau phenomenon has produced favourable headlines but one should not forget that all candidates who win a convention enjoy a honeymoon in both press and polls.  Four years ago the person in a similar position was Michael Ignatieff.  Here was what blogger Éric Grenier of threehundredeight.com said on April 10, 2009 of the Liberal Party (the formal convention was later but the leadership was uncontested):

Since the October 2008 election, no political party has rebounded so strongly in the public opinion polls. The party had had one of their worst results in Canadian history, and now they are on the brink of re-forming government. A lot of this gain can be attributed to Ignatieff, who as a new leader is rewarded with new enthusiasm almost by default. But Ignatieff is also such a different style of leader than Stéphane Dion that the enthusiasm is genuine.

I think the Justin phenomenon goes further than an initial burst of enthusiasm. It has an Emperor’s New Clothes feel about it. I see the enthusiasm of press and pundits, but a disproportionate amount of this is the politics of reputation, which, as the comments above reveal, can disappear when there is a sober, candid appraisal of his actual performance. The residual popularity of Trudeau the father has made the son a celebrity, and has driven a circular self-reinforcing narrative that is predicated in large part simply on this popularity and celebrity. This has an impact on the polling, which then reinforces the media narrative, thus influencing future polls. This has happened before. It will happen again.

However, there is a limit to this cycle.  He must perform well as leader, especially in Parliament. We can judge him in part based on how well he has performed in the past. Justin Trudeau was first elected to the House of Commons on October 14, 2008. On that same day another rookie, slightly younger than Justin, was elected. New Democrat Megan Leslie was elected in Halifax to replace former NDP Leader Alexa McDonough. So of these two newcomers, who was named rookie of the year in 2009 by Maclean’s, or named in early 2011, along with Bob Rae, Gilles Duceppe, John Baird and Jack Layton as one of the five best members of Parliament? Well, it wasn’t Justin.

The point of this is not to praise Megan Leslie, much though that is merited.  It is to ask the question: what has Justin Trudeau, done to distinguish himself in parliamentary or public life? He apparently has some conventional political skills, can work a room like an old pol. Seems more the descendant of his grandfather on this mother's side (a St. Laurent cabinet minister) than his father's son. In any case leadership requires more than that. There have been numerous media references to whether or not he has substance. And for good reason. The appearance of being vacuous is not accidental. Justin Trudeau appears to be at his core, hollow. There is no there there. One of the new Conservative attack ads on Youtube seems to play into this perception of Justin as inexperienced lightweight. The ad is no doubt based on research so there is already some perception that this is a Trudeau characteristic.

Justin's first and larger problem, however, is that he will be compared in his new role to Bob Rae, who has been receiving well-justified plaudits from his party for his performance as interim leader. In 2006, 2009 and again in 2013, the Liberals might have selected Bob Rae, who lost in 2006, was pushed aside for Ignatieff in 2009, and finally found Justin Trudeau standing in his way in 2013.

Trudeau does appear to be the best choice among the field of candidates, which was extremely weak (reflecting the state of the party?), but Rae might have been pressured to run. The Liberal Party has been in decline. Is it partly because the shrewd political instincts that led the Liberal party to take a chance on Trudeau the father have been recklessly abandoned in selecting Trudeau the son? Is this the third such misjudgment in a row?