Ontario voters were not scared into voting Conservative by the idea of an NDP-led coalition government in the May federal election, according to new research.
"In hindsight, this NDP-Ontario late shift – it never happened," EKOS pollster Frank Graves told The Globe. "The evidence is overwhelming. Almost nobody changed their mind in the final day."
The EKOS Research analysis shatters the view that Stephen Harper and his team were successful in scaring Ontario voters in the dying days of the federal election campaign. Tories were aggressive in their fear-mongering, frequently reminding voters of Bob Rae's unpopular NDP provincial government in the 1990s.
On election night, the Conservatives made a big breakthrough in Toronto and the ridings in the much-coveted 416 area code, stealing them away from the Liberals. That boost helped propel the Tories to their first majority government.
In his post-election analysis, which he presented to a polling conference in Ottawa last week, Mr. Graves says that his sample of 1,000 voters in Ontario did not find a respondent who shifted to the Conservatives because of fears of an NDP-led coalition.
What actually happened, Mr. Graves said, is that the Conservatives had a "huge advantage" among those Canadians – mainly older citizens – who actually came out to vote. Those who weren't as favourable toward the Tories, he added, tended to stay home. "But so what, they didn't vote. Who cares."
And of those Canadians – not just Ontarians – who did switch to the Conservatives, Mr. Graves's research suggests they moved because of a desire for stability. Forty-three per cent of the respondents said "it was time for a majority government" and 32 per cent said the country needed to "stay on a sound economic trajectory."
Only 6 per cent said they were concerned about an NDP-led coalition government. "It was trivial," Mr. Graves said. He added that there was no real strategic voting, which he called "theoretically appealing" but in practice the empirical evidence suggested it didn't make any difference to the outcome.
Mr. Graves believes Canadians should care about the fact that younger people are not voting. He said that pollsters should stop measuring the so-called "horse race" – who's up and who's down – and start looking at the issues that are important to younger Canadians.
The political agenda reflects the concerns of older Canadians, not those of the movers and shakers in the 18-to-40 age group, he said. "We have ended up with this gerontocracy where the political system continues to be dominated by ... older Canadians."
He sees this as a problem as Canada tries to transition from the views and issues of older Canadians to those in the middle part of their lives, who are the major sources in the economy and other parts of Canadian life.
"We should take the tools of representative sampling ... that are applied to polling and adapt them to providing scientific methods of engaging the people who aren't showing up at elections so that we better understand their values and preferences – so that those can be fit into a national conversation," he said.