Support for Political Parties & Leaders in Alberta

Feodor Snagovsky | University of Alberta | feodor.snagovsky@ualberta.ca  

Jared Wesley | University of Alberta | jwesley@ualberta.ca 

December 14, 2020

Introduction

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic often impact the dynamics of political party competition. Alberta is no exception. Viewpoint Alberta surveys in November 2019 (following the federal election) and August 2020 (six months into the pandemic) reveal the shape and extent of changes to the Alberta party system. They also suggest shifts in Albertans’ attitudes toward the Trudeau Liberals.

Leadership

As illustrated in Figure 1, support for all party leaders – federal and provincial – was lukewarm in November 2019. On our 10-point feeling thermometer, not a single leader reached the mid-point. By August 2020, all of them (except for Andrew Scheer) were above 5. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s popularity rose most dramatically, from an average of 3.1 to 5.7 over the course of nine months. He went from being the least popular party leader in Alberta to being tied for the most popular with Rachel Notley. The provincial NDP leader saw her popularity rise 1.3 points on our feeling thermometer over the same period. By contrast, Premier Jason Kenney’s and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh both saw smaller increases in popularity (only 0.8 points) over this period. This suggests that all major political party leaders in Canada received at least a minor bump in approval over the course of the first wave of the pandemic.

Vote Intentions

According to our August 2020 survey, a plurality of Albertans indicated they would vote for a UCP candidate if an election were held that day (Figure 2). While down from the 22-point margin they earned in the May 2019 provincial election, the 6-point lead over the NDP suggests the UCP was still in majority government territory late last summer. The Alberta Liberals continue to run a distant third, though are still more popular than the various minor parties who collectively make up almost 19% of vote intention.

Despite the UCP’s relative popularity, their overall drop in terms of support is striking (Figure 3). In the nine months between November 2019 and August 2020, the UCP lost over 8 percentage points. The NDP and Liberal vote remained virtually untouched over this period, while respondents indicating a preference for other parties, like Wildrose Independence, rose by nearly 6-points. This suggests that, in the first wave of the pandemic, the governing UCP was not losing votes directly to the Official Opposition NDP. Rather, minor parties have been the largest beneficiaries of the UCP’s decline.

Issue Priorities

There are several explanations for the UCP’s drop in fortunes between the fall 2019 federal election and late-summer 2020. Leadership does not appear to be one of them. More recent public opinion polls in October and November 2020 attribute the UCP’s decline to the unpopularity of Premier Kenney and his handling of the pandemic. However, as we noted in Figure 1, Premier Kenney’s popularity actually grew over the course of the spring and summer of 2020 while his party’s share of vote intention fell 8 points. This suggests that while other provincial and federal leaders might be more popular than Premier Kenney (which makes him relatively unpopular by comparison), his popularity alone is unlikely to be responsible for the UCP’s drop in vote intention.

What, then, is responsible for the UCP’s declining popularity? One answer may lie in Albertans’ shifting priorities associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. As Figure 4 shows, the proportion of Albertans who view health care as the top issue rose by 6.5 points over the first 6 months of the pandemic. Almost 1 in 4 Albertans (23.2 percent) named health care as their top issue in August 2020. By contrast, while the economy is still the most important issue to Albertans (28.2 percent), this figure fell by 8.3 points over the course of the first wave of the pandemic. 

Moreover, there appears to be a strong relationship between Albertans’ shifting policy priorities and the UCP’s slipping popularity (Figure 5). As previous research indicates, Albertans who view economic issues as being most important in provincial politics tend to favour the UCP, while those who prioritize social issues (like health care) tend to support the NDP. More than half of respondents who said the economy was the most important issue in Alberta politics also said they would vote for the UCP. This was slightly less than the much smaller group of voters who said energy was their top issue. By contrast, more than one-third of respondents who prioritized health care said they would vote for the NDP, similar to the smaller number who said they were most concerned about civil rights. Other social issues, like education and the environment, were also associated with more NDP support than UCP support.

We also asked respondents which party was closest to them on their most important issue. Between November 2019 and August 2020, the UCP dropped almost 10 percentage points on this metric (Figure 6). This places the UCP (31.9 percent) barely ahead of the NDP (30.0 percent). These figures further support the idea that the UCP’s declining support is less likely to be attributed to Premier Kenney’s personal unpopularity. Rather, the issues that the UCP are traditionally seen as “owning” are becoming less salient in Alberta politics.

The Demographics of Vote Intention

When examining the survey results more closely, we find UCP support flagging across all major demographic groups. The perennial gender gap in Alberta has meant women are less likely than men to support the UCP. This gap has been exacerbated by the pandemic (Figure 7). While UCP support among men dropped by 6.2 percentage-points from November 2019 to August 2020, women deserted the party to an even greater extent (12.1-points). Again, it is notable that the NDP was not the beneficiary of the governing party’s losses; minor parties picked up many of the votes.

One of the most striking aspects of Albertans’ change in vote intention concerns where they live. The most dramatic drop in UCP support occurred in rural areas (Figure 8). There, the party’s vote share of vote intention fell 15-points during the pandemic; NDP support fell 3.7 percent. This is, in part, because the UCP had more to lose in rural areas, where the bulk of their supporters reside. However, the NDP also lost votes in rural areas, though by a much smaller amount. Instead, minor parties, including Wildrose Independence, picked up the lion’s share of these would-be voters, reinforcing perceptions that the UCP is worried about its rural-right flank. The UCP might also find cause to worry in their decline among suburban voters – the only regional demographic where their loss translated to NDP gains.

UCP support also fell sharply among the province’s youngest and oldest voters (Figure 9). The youngest group of voters (18- to 34-year-olds) in our sample shifted their vote intention to the Liberals (4.4 percent) and other parties (6.2 percent), the number of young people indicating they would not vote at all increased by 8.6-points. It is interesting that these young voters, who are typically portrayed as right-wing, were also less likely to indicate they would vote for the NDP. Instead, the NDP appears to only be a considerable beneficiary of waning UCP support among Albertans over 55 years-old. This may worry the UCP more for strategic reasons, since this demographic is more likely to vote. It is noteworthy that the only group among all of the cleavages we examined here (gender, place of residence, and age) that seems marginally more likely to vote UCP are those in middle-age (35- to 54-year-olds) – though this increase is well within the poll’s margin of error.

Concluding Thoughts

Examining the first six months of the pandemic reveals that initial declines in UCP support appear to have less to do with Premier Kenney’s handling of the crisis than with Albertans’ shifting policy priorities. These early losses did not tend to benefit the NDP, except among older voters and those who view health care as the most important issue in the province. Rather, the UCP appears to have bled support to minor parties, like the Wildrose Independence Party, particularly in rural areas. As the pandemic persists, it will be important to track how the Premier’s waning popularity affects his party’s support levels, as well as any further shifts in Albertans’ policy priorities from the economy to health care.

Methodology of the Viewpoint Alberta Survey

The Viewpoint Alberta Survey was conducted between August 17 and 30, 2020. The survey was deployed online by the Social Sciences Research Laboratories (SSRL). A copy of the survey questions can be found here: https://bit.ly/35rtU9F. SSRL co-ordinates the survey with an online panel system that targets registered panelists that meet the demographic criteria for the survey. Survey data is based on 825 responses with a 17-minute average completion time. The Viewpoint Alberta Survey was led by co-principal investigators Loleen Berdahl, Elaine Hyshka, and Jared Wesley. It was funded in part by an Alberta-Saskatchewan Research Collaboration Grant from the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Alberta and the College of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan.