Glenmore: Changeout or Old Fashioned Switch

In my last post, I shared a few preliminary thoughts about Monday's by election in Calgary-Glenmore.

On Monday, Paul Hinman won 37% of the vote, a staggering increase from the 8.1% won by the Wild Rose Alliance's candidate in 2008 (Ryan Sadler, for those who are keeping track). The obvious question is, where did these votes come from?

Today, I'd like to consider 3 hypothetical scenarios to answer this question.

The first, and I think least likely, is that the Wildrose votes came from voters who supported the Alberta Liberals in 2008. Given that the Wildrose Alliance is a right wing party, and the Alberta Liberals are a more centrist or left wing party, such a scenario would require the assumption that Liberal voters in 2008 were non-ideological, and their vote for the Wildrose Alliance on Monday was equally non-ideological. In essence, it assumes that those voting Alberta Liberal in 2008 were essentially casting a protest vote against the governing Progressive Conservatives, and then shifted their vote of protest to the Wildrose Alliance. Given the fact that the Alberta Liberal vote total did not change substantially (both in terms of absolute votes and percentage), this scenario seems unlikely.

The second scenario is that those who, in 2008, may have held their nose and voted PC - either because they liked Ron Stevens or because Ed Stelmach hadn't yet lost their support entirely - moved their support to the Wildrose Alliance. The sharp decline of the PC vote between March 2008 and Monday's by election lends this scenario some substantial support, but there is one final possibility.

It is also possible that a substantial group of 2008 PC voters simply chose not to vote, effectively choosing none of the above. In this scenario, Wildrose voters in the by election come from the ranks of the sixty odd percent who did not cast a ballot in 2008. In effect, PC voters may have disengaged from the process, while the Wildrose Alliance provided an outlet for voters who were previously disengaged from provincial politics.

So which scenario is correct? I would suspect that the simplest answer - that PC voters switched their vote to the Wildrose Alliance - is correct, however I am hoping to investigate this further in the coming days by looking at the poll by poll results, and plan a final post in the coming days.