The BC Liberals dramatically defied the polls leading up to the election with a stunning, turnaround win over the BC NDP party Tuesday night. But how exactly did they pull it off?
The shocking comeback was a head-scratcher for political experts, voters and poll makers alike, who relied on the numbers that all predicted a strong NDP win.
At the start of the campaign, initial polls from Ipsos Reid showed the Liberals trailing by 19 points. With 10 days leading up to the election, they had closed they gap by 10 points, but were still behind.
Within days leading up to the election, the Liberals were up two points at 37 per cent, with the NDP down two points to 43 per cent.
Liberal leader Christy Clark was just three points ahead of NDP’s Adrian Dix when it came to who would make a better premier after starting out 13 points behind Dix at the start of the campaign.
Ipsos Reid spokesperson Kyle Braid said they are going to look at the polling systems to figure out why the numbers were so off.
“Whether it’s a shift or there’s something wrong with the way that we sampled in the last part of the campaign, clearly everybody is surprised, it’s not just the online polls, but the telephone polls as well. We need to adjust and reflect and learn from this,” he said.
How did the Liberals pull it off?
The BC Liberals gained ground both in the polls and literally, on the ground, throughout their campaign.
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Doug McArthur, professor of public policy at SFU, said the surprising win was the result of a hard-fought campaign.
“The lesson learned is that this was won in the campaign,” McArthur said. “It was a focussed campaign, they knew what they wanted to do, it was hard hitting, it was tough, but they drove the message to undermine Adrian Dix and the NDP.”
According to McArthur, as the momentum started to shift, the numbers began to move.
“The lesson in this is that the campaign matters in politics. You have to fight a hard campaign,” he said.
Clark’s campaign, which was highly criticized as being negative, resulted in huge gains Tuesday night. The Liberals re-elected incumbents and even stole a few seats from the NDP in ridings nobody expected them to win.
Braid agreed that the Liberal win may be due to Clark’s effective campaign.
“When I look at the numbers, we have 51 per cent of British Columbians who say the province is on the right track, only a third say it’s on the wrong track. Those number have shifted quite a bit since before the campaign,” he said.
“It seems like a lot of voters got into the voting booth and thought, ‘B.C.’s doing pretty well, do I really want to take a chance on change right now? Let’s keep going where we are.’ That’s not discounting the polls were clearly off. The question that Christy Clark put in people’s minds clearly worked on voting day.”
Alberta Premier Alison Redford, who has butted heads with Clark in the past over the Northern Gateway pipeline project, congratulated her B.C. counterpart on Twitter.
Redford similarly defied polls and popular opinion when she lead her Progressive Conservative party to beat the favoured Wildrose Party in 2012.
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