About a month ago I wrote a post about, in part, CBC’s Vote Compass.  This is kind of old news now, but in light of how the election campaign has been going the past few weeks, I wanted to discuss it again.

As you’ll recall, I had discussed the scenario that Vote Compass would indicate that two people with diametrically opposite views on everything would both be closest to the Liberal party.  I assume that the algorithm that the site uses goes something along the lines of “if half of your answers are right-wing and half of your answers are left-wing, then you’d land right in the centre”.  In other words, some sort of scoring the answers and averaging them out.

Is that really the way that people think when they vote?  When you go to the polls tomorrow to vote, will you be thinking “Well, Party X is a little too left-wing for me on this issue and a little too right-wing for me on that issue, so if you put the two together, they should be the right fit for me”?  I would imagine not, for the most part.  I would imagine that you would look for the party whose stance best agrees with yours on whatever issues you find important.

To give an example, imagine that there are two parties, Party X and Party Y, and four issues, Issue A, Issue B, Issue C, and Issue D.  Say that Party X is a somewhat too left-wing for your tastes on Issue A and Issue B, and somewhat too right-wing on Issue C and Issue D, and that Party Y is a good match for your tastes on Issue B and Issue C, but is nowhere near your beliefs on Issue A and Issue D.   I would suggest that most people would vote for Party Y, with whom they agree on two of the issues, rather than Party X, with whom they don’t agree on anything.

Similarly, people who answered “Strongly Agree” or “Strongly Disagree” to every question on Vote Compass would be more likely to vote for whichever party agreed with their stance on the most issues (probably either the party of the right, the Conservatives, or the party of the left, the NDP) rather than averaging their answers out and voting for the party of the middle, the Liberals.

This brings me to something else that’s come up over the past few weeks.  Opinion surveys now indicate that the Liberals have been significantly overtaken by the NDP.  While there are many explanations, I would suggest that one explanation for this is that more and more people are finding that they agree with specific issues in the Conservative or the NDP platforms; while the Liberal platform may provide close matches to their beliefs, it just isn’t as close as the other parties.  What do the Liberals stand for, anyway?  It certainly seems that, over the past little while anyway, the Liberals have become less and less principled and instead have just stood for whatever centrist mush will get them votes.  I think that more and more people are noticing this, and, as already discussed, people aren’t going to vote based on averaging all of their opinions, it means that the Liberals are going to get fewer and fewer votes.