Election Writ 4/4: What impact could turnout have on the results?
A dive into the age group crosstabs.
Every election campaign is an opportunity to remind ourselves one important thing about the polls: they reflect the voting intentions of the general population and not necessarily those of the actual voting population.
When there is little difference between the views of voters and non-voters, the impact on the polls is minimal. But when we do see big polling errors, this is often the source of the problem.
So, what impact could who actually turns out to vote have on the results?
Before we get into that, today’s update.
Not much change in the overall portrait of the race. And every day where the numbers don’t change is a good day for Mark Carney and a bad day for both Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh (as well as Yves-François Blanchet). The seat projection is still hovering around the 200-seat mark for the Liberals, with the Conservatives up to 120, the Bloc down to 18 and the NDP holding at four.
The trackers this morning from Liaison, Mainstreet and Nanos put the Liberals between 43% and 46%, the Conservatives between 36% and 40% and the NDP between 6% and 9%, with no consensus on a day-to-day trend. Compared to their last independent three-day samples, the one thing we could be seeing is a small softening of Conservative support.
Beyond that, it’s steady as she goes.
But there’s a lot of discussion about the enthusiasm in Conservative ranks and the firmness of their vote compared to that of the Liberals. Yes, the Poilievre rallies are big. But it isn’t as if the crowds are coming together organically — they aren’t controlled experiments where we can judge the ability of each campaign’s ability to attract crowds under the same circumstances. The Conservatives have an enthused base and are tapping into it to get these big crowds, but if their (far larger) base of non-rally-goers go out to vote in similar numbers to that of the Liberals than it won’t make a difference which ones attended rallies and which didn’t. You still only get to vote once, no matter how forcefully you stuff that ballot in the ballot box.
It’s always hard to predict whether someone will actually go out to vote. But the best predictor is a simple one: age. And the Liberals have a big advantage among the age group that historically votes in the biggest numbers.
Let’s dive into some of those numbers to get an idea of what impact turnout could have on the results.