I've been trying to avoid commenting on the coalition-prorogation-confidence situation, because it's not largely numbers-based and revolves around a parliamentary rather than an electoral coalition.

However, one reader asked me to calculate what the outcome of the recent election would have been if, outside Quebec, only the higher of the Liberal and NDP candidates ran against winning Conservatives, assuming their votes could be combined. I did this calculation, with the following results:

• Of 31 ridings won by the Conservatives outside Quebec, combining the votes of the two coalition partners would have shifted 26 seats to the Liberals and 5 seats to the NDP, for a House of Commons composition of 112-Cons, 103-Lib, 49-BQ, 42-NDP, 2-Ind.
• But the coalition had also been endorsed by the Green Party, so I also tested adding in the Green vote: which would have put an additional 23 Conservative seats into play, giving 3 more to the NDP, plus now 2 to the Green Party (Central Nova, NS and Bruce – Grey – Owen Sound, ON), for a Commons composition of 89-Cons, 121-Lib, 49-BQ, 45-NDP, 2-Grn, 2-Ind.

At first blush then the Liberals would appear to benefit from an electoral coalition more than the NDP, although they would be facing a very divided House.

But I just don't buy the assumptions that have to be made in order to run that kind of analysis. As Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe said last week, echoing the famous quote of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor".

Here's why:

• Turnout matters too. Turnout dropped significantly in the most recent general election. Early speculation is that it was Liberals who stayed home for whatever reason (leadership, policy reasons, regional reasons, negative advertising, who knows). Would those voters have been more or less likely to vote under other conditions?
• Would Liberal voters and non-voters have supported a coalition candidate, or would they have been more likely to vote Green or Conservative?
• Would all NDP voters have supported a coalition candidate, or might some of them have voted Green or stayed home?
• Who would have led the coalition, because clearly that would have mattered when answering the above questions?

Meantime, Glen McGregor ran a similar analysis for this morning's Ottawa Citizen, but extended it to account for recent opinion surveys by using second choice preferences reported in the recent Ekos survey to redistribute the votes of the junior coalition partner in each riding.

This approach tries to address the 2nd and 3rd points above, but also fails to take turnout into account. Also, while it's probably highly unsafe to rely on polls while leadership issues are in such flux, the approach suffers doubly from using a national result with a sample much too small to extrapolate to riding-level results, which was one of my major criticisms of the methodologies used by the so-called strategic voting websites during the last election.

Look, it's easy to criticize, and I love the work Glen McGregor has been doing with data analysis for the Citizen (he's the author of the definitive compilation of voting and non-voting records in the last Parliament, and a very impressive recent cross-reference of party fundraising and results by riding). If an election were held today, the results might indeed be similar to those McGregor projects using his methodology. But if we've learned no other lesson from the massive effort invested in strategic voting in the last election and the results it produced: voters will make up their own minds when the times comes, a week is a lifetime in politics, and if my grandmother had wheels ...

Labels: Electoral Coalitions, Strategic Voting, What-if scenarios