Unsure about UCP or NDP, Alberta's 'orphan' voters are looking for a home

EDITOR'S NOTE: CBC News and The Road Ahead commissioned this public opinion research in mid-October, starting six days after Danielle Smith won the leadership of the United Conservative Party.

As with all polls, this one is a snapshot in time. 

This analysis is one in a series of articles to come out of this research. 

"If an election were held today" is the preamble most pollsters use when trying to assess the public mood and figure out how the next election may play out. 

It helps to ground survey respondents in the present, and to elicit a definitive answer from someone who may be sitting on the fence. It also gives the pollster an out if the election results don't match their polls — that was then, and this is now.

The further out you are from an election, the more hypothetical the typical voting intention question becomes. That's because we're not having an election today, and it's hard to know what factors will ultimately influence voters when an election does roll around.

Will the political parties have the same leaders they have today? Will all the parties run candidates in my riding? And a question that's become all too common in Alberta politics — will some bozo eruption change my vote?

Typically, when measuring voting intention, pollsters ask a two-part question that goes something like this:

(1) If an election were held today, which party would you vote for? 

(2) If you're not sure, which party are you leaning toward?

Decided and leaning responses are then added together, and undecided voters are dropped from the calculation.

Until March 2021, that's how I was asking about voting intention in my polls. But around that time, I started to become concerned about how high the Alberta Party was tracking in my polls. At one point, I had them at 14 per cent, despite the fact they had no leader and no formal policies. At the same time, other polls were recording high levels of support for other small parties like the Wildrose Independence Party.

This made me wonder if respondents were using small parties like a "none of the above" category. So, I changed the way I ask about voting intention. It's now a three-part question:

(1) If an election were held today, would you vote for the UCP, NDP, or for another party?

(2) If you prefer another party, which party?

(3) If you're not sure, which party are you leaning toward?

In the second question, half of the "another party" group go on to name a party. The other half do not. And we call that other half the orphans — one in 12 Albertans.

In other words, orphans know they don't want to vote UCP and/or NDP, but they aren't sure whom to support. They're homeless.

It's a hard-knock life for UCP (and NDP)

It's important to distinguish between orphans and undecided voters. Orphans are more engaged and more likely to vote than the truly undecided, who often are not paying attention to politics or have no preference.

Our latest poll for CBC News shows the NDP with 47 per cent and UCP 38 per cent. It also shows eight per cent of the sample are "orphans".

A nine-point lead may seem commanding, until you realize the margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 2.8 per cent (19 times out of 20), and an additional eight per cent of voters are essentially up for grabs. This eight per cent could ultimately determine the outcome of the next election.

So who are these orphans? The data suggests they look like other Albertans in terms of their age, gender, where they live in the province, and the issues they care about.

You won't be an orphan for long

However, compared to other Albertans, they are unlikely to consider themselves to be left leaning, and more likely to consider themselves to be centrists or right-wing.

When asked to plot themselves on a scale from zero to ten, where zero means left and ten means right, almost half of the orphans (47 per cent) rate themselves as a five.

By comparison, only 16 per cent of UCP supporters put themselves smack in the middle of that scale, as do 27 per cent of likely or leaning NDP voters.

The other key thing that differentiates orphans from other Albertans is that they tend to be unimpressed with both Rachel Notley and Danielle Smith.

Only 20 per cent of orphans are highly impressed with Notley, and even fewer (seven per cent) are highly impressed with Smith.

Always a day away

With six months before the next election, the most important thing for each party leader is to convince orphans their policies are neither too far right, nor too far left — that they are best positioned to represent the severely average voter. Alberta Party Leader Barry Morishita, meanwhile, needs to convince these voters his party is a viable alternative and can provide the centre-right representation they crave.

Tracking the orphans in the way I do makes it difficult to compare my polls to others. And I may revert to a more standard way of asking about voting intention as we draw closer to the next provincial election.

But for now, I think it's instructive to track these orphan voters as they look for a political home before the next provincial election.

The CBC News random survey of 1,200 Albertans was conducted using a hybrid method between Oct. 12 and 30, 2022, by Edmonton-based Trend Research under the direction of Janet Brown Opinion Research. The sample is representative of regional, age and gender factors. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For subsets, the margin of error is larger.

The survey used a hybrid methodology that involved contacting survey respondents by telephone and giving them the option of completing the survey at that time, at another more convenient time, or receiving an email link and completing the survey online. Trend Research contacted people using a random list of numbers, consisting of half landlines and half cellphone numbers. Telephone numbers were dialed up to five times at five different times of day before another telephone number was added to the sample. The response rate among valid numbers (i.e. residential and personal) was 16.3 per cent.