Why the NDP is suddenly so popular.

Or: The long-form census takes its revenge.

Jack Davis, May 1, 2011

Voting starts in Canada in less than two days, polls are putting the NDP and leading, incumbent
Conservatives within as little as 4% in popular support of each other. It’s a reasonable scenario that the
next prime minister will be from a party other than the Liberals or the Conservatives. If you are familiar
with Canadian politics, this is surprising. If you are familiar with Canadian history, this is pants-on-head
insane. This has never happened before; even the Conservatives’ 90’s counterpart the Reform Party
never won even though they were much of the same function as the Conservatives are today. An NDP
win is like a less extreme version of a third-party win in the states. As little as a month ago it was
generally considered highly unlikely that the third-party NDP would form the official opposition, but
here they are with a shot at a win.

So what happened?

Here’s what I’m certain of.

In the last few elections, vote-splitting has been a major issue. The right-wing only has the Conservative
party representing them, while the left-wing has the Liberals (centre-left), New Democratic Party (left),
Green (left and environmental), and Bloc Quebecois (left and French). This means that even though
more people were voting for liberal-minded parties in total, the single conservative-minded party has
been earning more seats than any other party individually, and thus forming the government, albeit a
minority one which requires some degree of co-operation with other parties.

Here’s what I’m fairly certain of but can’t prove.

During this time, Canadians have been becoming more liberal-minded. In the last decade gay marriage
has gone from being illegal, to being referred to merely as ‘marriage’, nation-wide. Despite being taxed
on average much more than the states, taxes are routinely polled as the primary concern of fewer than
10% the population. We protested our own Olympics and our own G20 summit for the sake of human
rights. We refused to fight alongside the British in Iraq.

And for the last five of those years, the Conservative Party has been in power in part because of their
own popularity, but also because people have been drifting from the Liberals to parties even more
liberal than the Liberals.
What follows is measured conjecture.

Even though they were getting less popular, the Liberals were still much more popular than any of the
other left-wing parties. This established the Libs as a ‘safety vote’. If you wanted to vote AGAINST the
Conservatives and didn’t really care who you voted for beyond that, the safest vote was usually for a
liberal candidate, even if you preferred someone farther from the centre. Some people claimed that if
everybody voted for who they really voted for who they really felt like voting for that maybe the
situation were different. Like the people who say everyone should get along, this was generally agreed
with but ignored because it required a change the behaviour of a lot of people that weren’t themselves.
The Liberals continued to erode support, but to nobody in particular, and voter engagement and turnout
embedded itself in the toilet gunk.

Then, in April 2011, something happened. Or rather, it didn’t. There were no major earthquakes,
eruptions, or wars; there was nothing happening in the news but hockey and the election. The election
campaign was well under way but there were no new revelations by any of the party leaders, and the
debates had finished; there was nothing in election news but the polls.

But how do you fill the news with simple poll results? You make them less simple. Voters were
stratified and suddenly polling information about geography and age and second choices percolated the
media, especially second choices. It turns out that a LOT of people that were voting for other parties,
even the conservatives, were willing to accept the NDP as a second choice, 24% plus-or-minus (~4,
95%CI). There were more people with the NDP as a second choice than as their first choice. This was
especially true among Bloc supporters and Greens, both whom have similar philosophies to the NDP but
with different emphasis.

Support started bleeding from these other parties to the NDP, and the difference between the Libs and
NDP shrank to a margin that, during blips, was not statistically significant. The media, needing a story
badly, turned this fail-to-reject hypothesis of the two parties being the same and accepted it. Even
when writing for clarity, the message came out as “NDP/Liberal support equal”, even if the pollsters
were merely uncertain of the difference.

Reality followed perception.

With each party so close, the strength of a safety vote dissolved and NDP support rose again. This
caused new polls to confirm the tie that may have originally been the result of random error (as in
mathematical imprecision, not as in mistake). Then it became obvious that the NDP actually had more
support than the Liberals, and NDP support exploded. Their projected seats rose from 35 to 100 in less
than three weeks.

In short, the NDP is popular because... the NDP is popular.

This is the core of my thesis statement:

People wanted to vote for the NDP, but were more concerned about voting against the Conservatives.
Once people assumed these two goals were the same, they were the same. Everyone changed their
votes once they assumed everyone else already was.

The rest lacks foundation entirely.

What magical force convinced everyone one to change their votes at once? What new information did
everyone get to come to the decision they weren’t alone in their resentful safety voting?

Statistics; statistics did this.

To me it feels like the ghost of all the data the Conservatives butchered like the long-form census and
the health survey and the cuts to Stats Canada are coming up and, with a perfectly timed dumb-luck blip
or two, tipping the entire election from the Conservatives to the party they dislike the most.

Honestly, this was going to happen eventually, but who could expect it so soon?