A tale of two voter strategies

In my perusing of the blogosphere and news sites while here on my vacation I've noticed a couple of different election strategies as it comes to voters. On the left, primarily with the Liberals is the standard strategic voting paradigm that we have seen before. On the right, there's a more bizarre voter suppression strategy that the Harper Conservatives seem to be putting forward.

A look at the first strategy. The premise behind the strategic vote strategy which this time is based on the withdrawl from the campaign of NDP candidate Ryan Dolby. The theory is that in this race at least, all the NDP vote will swing to the Liberals, causing them to have more votes than the Conservatives in that riding. The call is for NDP and Liberals that are trailing in third place to drop out and allow the other party to win to take seats from the Conservatives. Straight forward enough except that for the most part, it won't work. Going beyond the whole trying to get people to not run, the premise is based on a false assumption. As I have previously explained Liberal and NDP voters aren't a monolithic bloc. The second choices of most of these voters is not the other party. As my previous article shows, there would have been little effect on the 2008 election had this strategy been put in place in all ridings. The same would happen this time. What is actually needed from the opposition parties is to take control of the message and show that what they have to offer is more in line with Canadian values than what the Harper Conservatives have to offer. Though the difficulty of getting this through a right-wing media makes this an up hill climb, it's not impossible and unlike the Conservatives, who emptied their revolver before the campaign began, the opposition has the opportunity to take control of the agenda.

This brings me to the Harper strategy of voter suppression. I've noticed this in the large number of commenters stating that the only way to punish the parties is to not vote. Given that the tone of these comments is constant with the "angry white guy" tone of most Conservative posts it is safe to say that these are coming from Conservative supporters. Further to this since it is so well known that the Conservative party "war room" is the source of most of the Conservative comments in media and on blogs (to the point where a likely Craigslist hoax is seen as probably true) this would indicate that is part of the overall Harper strategy to get re-elected. This is based on the fact that high voter turnout generally doesn't favour the sitting government. If the Harper Tories can suppress the opposition vote, they have a better chance of taking more seats. Simple enough.

Except that there is a serious flaw in the attempt. The voters most likely to not show up at the polls when they are miffed at politicians are actually Conservative voters. The supporters of other parties will still vote, just for more fringe parties in order to punish their preferred choice. In general only the Conservative voter stays home to punish their party. This means that this Harper strategy will most likely backfire on him, causing his own vote to stay home on election day while the voters of other parties stream to the polls in their usual numbers.

So here we have it, the two strategies. One won't work, but generally won't have much in the way of negative consequences as the effect on the election outcome is minimal, but not negative. The other has the chance of backfiring in the most negative way in terms of the desired outcome. Harper is not nearly the chess master he and his press think he is.