A lesson from the BC election: Young people don’t vote and never will

Christy Clark

For about a year, the British Columbia provincial election looked like a slam dunk for Adrian Dix, and even when the polls started to narrow in the final stretch, the only question on most people’s minds was how big the NDP win would be.

On election night, however, Christy Clark’s Liberals swept back into power with five more seats than they took in 2009. It was a shock to the NDP and most pundits who had seen the orange revival in B.C. as a fait accompli. The only people who weren’t surprised were the people in the Liberal war room, as The Province’s Michael Smyth reports.

The Liberals’ internal polling was done by Praxicus Research, a company owned by Dimitri Pantazopoulos, a Conservative pollster who worked for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford among others.

During the campaign, Pantazopoulos conducted daily telephone polling in 30 closely contested ridings.

The Liberals then did something other pollsters didn’t: they “weighted” the results by age group, according to their likelihood to vote.

That “weighting” essentially meant ignoring voters in the 18-34 age range, a group that heavily tilted toward the NDP. The Liberal pollsters rightly predicted that young voters, being the flaky demographic they are, wouldn’t show up to the polls in any great numbers while older Liberal voters would probably camp out by polling stations the night before to help avoid a socialist takeover of the province.

They were right.

Young people don’t vote. Repeat that to yourself: Young people don’t vote, young people don’t vote, young people don’t vote.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone. For over 20 years now campaigns to encourage youth engagement have failed, with each election followed by depressing day-after realizations that the vote didn’t get “rocked” and that given the choice of “Vote or Die,” most young people decided for the more extreme choice, I guess. (Thank God Diddy is out of the voter encouragement racket, by the way. He was a terrible motivator.)

BC_Election_2013

Pantazopoulos’s predictions in B.C. came within a percentage point of the actual election result, which is pretty remarkable considering how wrong other polls ended up being. Pantazopoulos knew the party was safe when he noticed a particularly strong uptick in Liberal support following the leaders’ debate, which is significant because old people actually watch debates. Not only that, they often form impressions and voting intentions based on what they see in debates, rather than viewing them as simply another meme-ing opportunity.

So while the Liberals were quietly high-fiving each other, the NDP’s internal polling “still showed Dix with a four-to-five point lead and headed toward a majority government,” Smyth’s sources told him.

It’s rather unbelievable that the NDP ever thought that support would translate into actual votes, because young people suck. The same is true for federal elections as well. Here’s Elections Canada’s assessment of the 2011 election that saw Stephen Harper’s Conservatives win a majority:

Turnout steadily increased with age from 38.8% for ages 18–24 to 75.1% for ages 65–74 and then declined to 60.3% for those 75 and older. This same general pattern has been seen in every general election since 2004, when these studies began.

Whether it’s progressive parties or, in some bizarro world, conservative parties getting screwed over by young people sitting at home on election day, it doesn’t ultimately matter. Young people’s concerns simply won’t be taken seriously and no party is going to go out on a limb on, say, student debt or public transit or affordable housing — why on earth would political parties even pretend to care if the voters most affected can’t be bothered to actually go and vote?

The only upside is that when I’m in my 60s, I’ll know that all the parties will bend over backwards to protect my retirement.

The ProvinceBy Kris Krug/Flickr

Adrian Dix, B.C. politics, British Columbia, Christy Clark, polls, provincial politics