Manitoba’s Liberal support fluctuates in polls, but it’s largely irrelevant at ballot box By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 3:36 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 11, 2023 Last Modified: 4:10 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 11, 2023 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2023 (1231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been a while since the Manitoba Liberals dropped to single-digit support, as they did in a Probe Research public opinion poll released last month.

In years past, that would have been good news for the NDP. The conventional wisdom in Manitoba politics is that the two parties draw from the same left-of-centre voting pool. When the Liberals falter, the NDP benefit at the ballot box, or so the rule of thumb goes.

In recent years, though, the relative strength or weakness of the Liberals has hardly mattered in Manitoba elections. The party has, for the most part, hovered around the low teens in public support since the 1999 election. During that time, Manitobans have elected both NDP and Tory governments.

The Liberals drew 14.5 per cent of the popular vote in the 1999 election when the NDP won government. During the NDP re-election years of 2003 and 2007, the Liberals remained steady at 13 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively.

When the Tories won government in 2016 and were re-elected in 2019, Liberal support barely changed. The party’s popular vote was 14.1 per cent and 14.5 per cent in those elections.

The only outlier year was 2011, when the Liberal party’s popular vote plummeted to 7.5 per cent. However, it had virtually no impact on the overall election results. The NDP won 37 seats that year to the PC party’s 19, almost identical to the seat count in the previous election (36 to 19) when Liberal support was 12 per cent.

The dynamics were different in the late 1980s and 1990s when the Liberals were winning 25 per cent to 35 per cent of the vote. At that level, it probably helped the Tories win government between 1988 and 1999. Since then, the Liberals have had little influence. Whether they score single digits or 14 per cent in popular support, it appears to have little, if any, effect on who forms government.

For the first time since the 2011 election, the Liberals are polling in single digits again. According to the most recent Probe poll conducted March 8-20, Liberal support has dropped to nine per cent. The closest the Liberals have come to that in recent years was in March 2021, when they polled at 11 per cent. Beyond that, the Liberals have hovered between 12 per cent and 18 per cent in Probe’s quarterly polls since the 2019 election. They did better in two byelections last year. However, byelection results rarely, if ever, reflect provincewide voting patterns in a general election.

Conventional wisdom suggests the Liberals’ recent drop in the polls might benefit the NDP. However, as the data shows, it doesn’t seem to matter, unless the Liberals return to their glory days of 25 to 35 per cent support (which isn’t going happen, at least not under the lackluster leadership of Dougald Lamont).

It’s just one poll. For all we know, the Liberals will return to the low teens again. Either way, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. What last month’s poll (and the past few provincial elections) shows is how irrelevant the Liberal Party of Manitoba has become. Not only does it appear incapable of winning more than three or four seats, it no longer has the ability to affect the outcome of a general election the way it used to.

The NDP will almost certainly win the fall election (scheduled for Oct. 3), not because the Liberals have declined in the polls, but because the time-for-a-change dynamic has been entrenched in Manitoba for the past two years. The gap between the NDP and the Tories in Winnipeg, where elections are won and lost, has been well over 20 percentage points for nine straight quarterly polls (even after a provincial budget chock-full of pre-election goodies, including tax cuts and heavy spending). It would take a herculean effort by the Tories to reverse that trend.

There are seven ridings in Winnipeg the Tories won by less than 1,000 votes in 2019 that are strong contenders to turn NDP: Assiniboia, McPhillips, Radisson, Riel, Rossmere, Southdale and Fort Richmond. There are two in rural Manitoba the Tories won with pluralities of less than 1,000 that could also turn orange: Brandon East and Dauphin.

The Tory ridings of Kildonan-River East, Waverley, Seine River and Selkirk are also ripe for change. If the NDP win 11 of the 13 ridings above and hold on to the 18 seats they have, they would form a majority government (which requires 29 seats). There could be more Tory losses if the election turns into a bloodbath for them.

Meanwhile, the Liberals would be lucky to keep the three seats they have.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca