Voters in the Columbia-Kootenay-Southern Rockies riding who want to see Conservative candidate Rob Morrison defeated in the April 28 election are faced with a difficult choice.
If they want to strategically vote, should they choose the NDP or the Liberals?
Debates on social media about this often point to projections by 388Canada and Smart Voting, which put the Liberals in second place in the riding. Some interpret those projections as polls.
Richard Johnson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of British Columbia, says the projections are not polls and voters should be skeptical of them.
"They are using no current political information from the riding and have done no polling there," he told the Nelson Star.
Smart Voting and 388Canada offer identical projections (as of April 14) of 52 per cent for the Conservatives in the riding, 28 per cent for the Liberals, 13 per cent for the NDP, and three per cent for the Green Party.
These projections show significant gains for the Liberals in a riding where the party has run a distant third in the last several elections, far behind the Conservatives and the NDP. In 2021 the NDP received 37 per cent of the vote as compared with the Liberals' nine per cent.
The riding has historically been a Conservative stronghold, with the exception of the 2015 election with NDP candidate Wayne Stetski earned a surprising victory. Conservative MP Rob Morrison has represented the riding, formerly known as Kootenay Columbia, since 2019.
The projections by 338Canada and Smart Voting appear to reflect a national upward trend for the Liberals and downward for the NDP in the current election.
But do national trends necessarily apply locally?
Johnson said 338Canada and Smart Voting are taking polling data from the federal and provincial levels and extrapolating it to a local race. He said they may have also have applied an algorithm to take into account the shift in boundaries since the last election.
"Then you throw in a few more things about census information, a few fudge factors, and then you come up with an estimated share. I would think anyone in the riding that wants to make decision based on this projection, just shouldn't do it."
The 338Canada website clearly states that it is not a poll.
"This projection is calculated using a mostly proportional swing model adjusted with provincial and regional polls conducted by professional pollsters," the site states. "This is not a poll, but a projection based on polls. For instance, if a party goes from 30 per cent to 33 per cent (provincially), an increase of 10 per cent (three points over 30), then this party's score goes up by 10 per cent in every district."
The site goes on to further explain its methodology in terms understandable only to a statistician.
Smart Voting states that its purpose, as a non-profit organization, is to help people vote strategically to defeat the Conservatives, and to push for electoral reform.
"We're here to help voters make informed choices and prevent right-wing governments from winning without majority support," the website states. "Our advanced political modelling analyzes polling, trends, and historical patterns to recommend the smartest strategic vote in each riding."
Justin Burrows of Smart Voting told the Nelson Star that his organization takes national polling data from the most reputable polls and uses postal code data and demographic information from Statistics Canada to project for individual ridings.
He said the group's projections were 98 per cent accurate in the recent provincial election.
Presented with the historically low numbers for the Liberal Party in Columbia-Kootenay-Southern Rockies, Burrows said, "But this is a change election. This election is like no election like we've ever seen. And in these types of very polarized election cycles, people's opinions change.
"But that doesn't change the fact that the Conservatives are probably going to win this riding that you're in," he said.
Patricia Smuga, campaign manager for NDP candidate Kallee Lins, told the Nelson Star that her campaign pays little attention to polls or projections and instead relies on personal experience.
"We have our canvassing, and we have our on-the-ground teams that are going door knocking and are making phone calls. That's really the bread and butter of of our data, because it's live information that's coming to us each and every day."
The Liberal Party's campaign manager, Robin Goldsbury, said the same thing: conversations with people on the phone and on the streets are the indicator in their campaign for candidate Reggie Goldsbury.
The campaign manager for the Conservative Party in Columbia-Kootenay-Southern Rockies did not respond to the Nelson Star's request for comment on polling.
Smuga thinks the high projection for the Liberals locally is overblown because it appears to ignore the history of the riding and she worries this will mislead people into voting Liberal as a strategic vote against the Conservatives. Robin Goldsbury, on the other hand, thinks the strong Liberal projection is an under-representation of how well the Liberals will do in the riding.
Political scientist Johnson is not optimistic that these projections make strategic voting possible, because the projected numbers have little grounding in local reality.
But if the local projections for Columbia-Kootenay-Southern Rockies are accurate, he says, they show that "the chances that anyone can beat the Conservatives, even if you do vote strategically, are very low."
