Most independent analysts would readily answer that question in the negative. Martin’s public show of indignation was meant to dissociate him from a blooming scandal in the lead-up to his first campaign. Instead it did more to establish the sponsorship affair as a ballot-box issue than any amount of opposition rhetoric.
With allegations of vote suppression swirling around their party, no one should be surprised that Conservative strategists have gone in the opposite direction.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s expressions of dismay at the suggestion that persons apparently sympathetic to his party may have tampered with the electoral process have been, to put it mildly, excessively restrained.
The government’s minimalist strategy has predictably raised the temperature on the opposition side of the House of Commons and it has earned the Conservatives and their leader some toughly worded editorial scolding. But two polls suggest the approach is working.
Is it really or is something larger at play?
According to Ekos and Nanos, the robocall saga has so far had no impact on Conservative fortunes.
Based on his findings, pollster Nik Nanos predicts that the voter suppression issue will not make a serious dent in the support for the government unless it is conclusively tied to the Prime Minister and his party.
But if the past is any indication, it might take pictures of Harper with his hands in the proverbial cookie jar to seriously erode core Conservative support.
In their latest polls Nanos and Ekos respectively pin the Conservatives four to eight points below their 39 per cent election showing — a decrease that hails back to the fall.
That suggests the swing voters who gave Harper his majority last May had already gone missing from the Conservative column before the robocall controversy erupted.
By virtue of their recent (low?) attachment to the Conservative party, those voters would have been the most likely to be sensitive to the latest controversy.
In contrast, the remaining bulk of the Conservative clientele sits at the other end of the volatility index.
It is largely made up of voters who were not shaken loose from the Conservatives by the long-form census controversy, the repeat parliamentary prorogations of the recent past or the fact that Harper’s last minority government was held in contempt of Parliament.
Past evidence suggests that many of them would be more likely to stay home on election day or even to break off and vote for a maverick party than to switch to the Liberals or the New Democrats.
Hosts of Conservative sympathizers did the latter when they left the Mulroney Tories to join the Reform party in the early 1990s — paving the way for a decade of Liberal majority rule.
In five of the six federal elections held over the last 15 years, support for the conservative options on the ballot — separated or united — has hovered around the 37 per cent mark.
The exception was the 2004 campaign when the Conservatives won a bit less than 30 per cent of the vote. That election took place on the heels of the reunification of the party under Harper at a time when many Red Tories were still smarting over what they then saw as a Reform takeover of their party.
By 2006, most of them were back in the Conservative fold, where they have remained until now.
The bottom line is that the Conservative core vote is more solid than that of either of the other two main parties.
And that helps explain why the Liberals and the New Democrats — even as they hammer the Conservatives daily with robocall allegations and even as the government response often comes across as an insult to the intelligence — are still having a hard time chipping away at their support.
The opposition parties may be banging their heads on the equivalent of a political brick wall.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Chantal Hébert
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