Liberals and New Democrats haven’t changed perspectives as quickly as their leaders
One of the oddities of this campaign and the period leading up to it is that the Liberals and NDP often seem to have all but switched traditional roles, with Kathleen Wynne seeming more enthusiastic about government spending and ambitious new programs than Andrea Horwath.
Interestingly, though, if the party leaders have shifted perspectives, that doesn’t seem to have happened as much with people who identify as their supporters.
Among the many questions asked in Innovative Research Group’s first Listening Post survey for us, apropos of the May 2 budget which the NDP rejected to kickstart this election, was whether “in developing its annual budget,” it’s more important for the Ontario government to “Increase spending to provide more and better services to Ontario residents,” or “Hold the line on the growth of government spending in order to provide room to reduce taxes and pay down the province’s debt.”
Here’s how self-identified Liberals responded:
Liberals
SOURCE: Innovative Research Group
And here’s how New Democrats responded:
New Democrats
SOURCE: Innovative Research Group
As for unaligned voters, the other group whose votes Ms. Wynne and Ms. Horwath might be competing for, they wouldn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about the sort of budget Ms. Wynne’s government delivered.
Unaligned voters
SOURCE: Innovative Research Group
These perspectives help explain why for a long time the Liberals were taking a somewhat contradictory two-pronged communications approach, telling some audiences that Ms. Horwath’s party had abandoned its traditional values, and others that the NDP was still the risky party on the left clamouring to spend recklessly.
In this campaign, the Liberals have tended to mostly emphasize the first argument, which rings a bit truer than the second, as they make their play to rally centre-left voters behind them. They may be safe in doing so, since Tim Hudak’s polarizing campaign makes it unlikely that right-leaning Liberals will switch to his party. But it’s safe to say she’s taken at least some risk of alienating her party’s traditional supporters.
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