Election analysis: What are the key voter segments that could drive change?

Rupen Seoni is Senior Vice President and Practice Leader at Environics Analytics. This is the second in a series of blogs leading up to the provincial election that will look at voter segments their party preferences and key ridings.

Every vote counts, but some votes count more than others.

If you live in an area that traditionally favours one political party, then in most elections voting against that trend will have less sway on the outcome than a vote in a riding with no clear defined political affiliation.

While voter support drifts between parties in every election—we would never see a change in power otherwise—it’s well established that each party has a core base of support votes the same way in every election.

For this reason, political parties wanting to get the most out of their campaign will focus more of their attention and resources on those individuals and ridings where voters are likely to be receptive to their message.

This information can be helpful to voters, too. By knowing more about the voting preferences of a riding, voters make more strategic decisions on how to cast their ballot.

But looking at past election results alone doesn’t tell you the full story. You can’t simply decide a voter is Liberal or a Conservative because of how they voted in the last election.

To get a better sense of voter political leanings you need to consider all of their behaviours and social values along with voting histories before you can start to really understand who voters are.

PRIZM5, the comprehensive segmentation system we developed here at Environics Analytics, does just that.

It segments Canadian households into one of 68 groups, according to shared values, socio-economic status and behaviours and more. Through this lens party preference patterns start to emerge. We distill this down to seven manageable groups that cover off voting preference and demographic patterns.

With this approach we can quickly see voting patterns and measure how much they’ve shifted between elections and that gives us an opportunity to understand which voters are driving the change. This is especially important since, for the first time, Elections Ontario will be releasing poll-level results by party in real time.

So, who are the key voter segments?

Three of the seven clearly and consistently had a preference for one of the main parties—and their names obviously reference that (Red Core, Blue Ontario and Orange Heartland).

While the remaining four segments all voted Liberal in 2014, the results were not as decisive. In each of these groups another party was pretty close behind the Liberals or there was regional strength for another party which could indicate the potential for changes in allegiance this time. In one of the segments, it was effectively a three-way split.

Keep in mind that these party preference patterns hold provincially, but there are external factors that can throw a wrench into our analysis.

For instance, regional voting preferences mean that the same segment may tend to favour a different party depending on which region we are looking at. “Star” candidates can be another wildcard that can draw voters to support a different part. But these factors seldom affect more than a handful of ridings.

Here is a thumbnail sketch of the key voter segments to watch in this election:

In the next blog, we will talk about which ridings to watch closely on election day.

Rupen Seoni is Senior Vice President and Practice Leader at Environics Analytics. He provided commentary on voter segments and demographics in CTV’s federal election coverage and will be part of CTV’s provincial election night coverage on June 7. This is the second in a series of blogs leading up to the provincial election that will look at voter segments their party preferences and key ridings.