Why some Manitobans are still undecided a day before the 2019 federal election

Tens of thousands of Manitobans will head to the ballot box on Monday, but hours before the stations open, some voters still don’t know who to pick.

“I’m still trying to figure out which party, who’s the best,” said Eddy Santos.

“I’d like to hear about job security and health care — those are the two things I care about.”

Other voters echoed those sentiments.

“I’ll decide tomorrow when it comes,” Ken Smorhay said.

“Whatever all the politicians are promising, nothing seems to come through so I don’t know which way to go.”

In a Global News Ipsos poll, respondents said the most important issues when determining who to vote for included health care, climate change, affordability and taxes.

Some voters say it’s been difficult to hear the party promises over the smear campaigns between parties.

“They’re too busy running each other down and not saying any of the important stuff as far as I can see,” voter Margaret Stagg said. “That’s terrible. That turned me right off.”

Christopher Adams, a political scientist based at St. Paul’s College, said Manitoba has a unique problem with the provincial election having just wrapped up.

“I think having back-to-back elections is difficult on the volunteers. I think a lot of them were pretty tired out before the September provincial election. The other thing where they might have an impact is on the donations. People donating to their local candidates, they might be less willing to donate for the second election,” he said.

Adams suspects the province to revert back to normal voting habits in this election.

“I suspect much of this campaign will bring many of those seats back to the historical patterns of what we saw before. (It will be) a mixture of all three parties within Winnipeg and mostly rural blue and then up north probably will be held by the NDP.”

The full data for the reported poll can be found here.

Exclusive Global News Ipsos polls are protected by copyright. The information and/or data may only be rebroadcast or republished with full and proper credit and attribution to “Global News Ipsos.” This poll was conducted between October 4 and 7, 2019, with a sample of 1,502 Canadians from Ipsos’ online panel. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. This poll is accurate to within +/ – 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled.

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