Re: “Many Green votes taken from Liberals,” column, May 19.
Lawrie McFarlane notes that the B.C. Liberal vote was down in the 2017 election compared with 2013, the Green vote was up by a similar amount and the NDP vote was largely unchanged. From this, he concludes that “a good chunk” of the Green vote came from disaffected Liberals.
However, this is faulty logic. It assumes that there were no other changes in voting patterns between 2013 and 2017 other than a shift to the Green Party. Given the increasing dissatisfaction with the Liberal government, it seems likely that, even if the Greens hadn’t run, there would have been a shift away from the Liberals, and most of that would have gone to the NDP.
If that underlying shift were true, then the results indicate that the Green Party likely did “take” many more votes from the NDP than the Liberals.
Of course, this is all speculation: The only way to know would be to ask Green Party voters how (or if) they would have voted if the Green Party hadn’t run in the election.
While I haven’t seen a poll that asked that specific question, a Mainstreet poll taken after the election does provide some insight. It asked Green Party voters whether they want the Green Party to support the NDP or the Liberals, and they preferred support for the NDP by a nearly three-to-one margin. That would seem to indicate that Green supporters would be much more likely to vote NDP as their second choice.
Steven Murray
Victoria
