The day before many polls said “Too close too call,” election night saw a near 50 per cent majority in the crucial Nanaimo byelection. Why?

It has become routine to trash pollsters for their forecasts, often widely divergent from real election outcomes. Less common is to hold pundits to task for their equally poor hit rate. Why have voters’ intentions become so hard to predict?

Conventional wisdom is that a large slice choose, or even change their mind, in the 48 hours before election day — too late for pollsters. A second favourite is that voters choosing a “controversial” candidate — Trump, Ford, Corbyn — conceal their intention.

Recently, some social scientists and anthropologists have begun to develop a different and compelling thesis. It’s a cliché that with the decline of partisan loyalty, and in the face of rapid social change, “identity” has become an anchor. Some now see a two layered decision-making process: one transitory and tactical, responsive to events, and one deeper and grounded in culture. The two are often in conflict.

The values layer is harder to elicit in election polling.

For decades Canadians have been among the most enthusiastic about the benefits of immigration. As many as 7-out-of-10 Canadians give Canadian immigration success a thumbs up. But images of desperate families struggling up a winter back road pouring into Canada illegally, test this. There is a tension between the deeper value and the “media-driven” reaction to events.

Or consider guns. The rise in homicides in some Canadian cities has provoked a rise in support for a handgun ban. However, many of these same people may have resisted what they saw as the Liberals intrusion into the right to own a shotgun to “defend one’s family,” in the gun registry fiasco. Cultural values — privacy, family, security concerns — drove opinion then, the terror of a child being caught in a gang’s crossfire trumps culture now.

Then there is the long slow rise in previously unthinkable positions: a majority of young Americans feel more comfortable with socialism than market capitalism today. They may not really understand what the two poles represent. But the fairness value, built on revulsion at events post-2008, dictates one offers more help to working people and the other protects the wealthy. Does this mean they will say yes to higher redistributive taxes? Not necessarily.

This is uncomfortable terrain for political parties as well as pollsters. How do you assess what are a voter’s priority decision-making tenets? How do you safely tap them, without triggering a backlash on another level? We are beginning to see the exploding slate of Democratic candidates for president wrestle with these complexities.

First, no bullshit, no spin. Second, admit the conflicts run through you, too. Joe Biden apologizing for his former support for heavy prison sentences. Admitting that he has learned, and that his earlier stand was an overreaction to security angst. It seems likely that the politicians who find the safe path through this minefield will be the winners this fall in Canada, and next year down south.

A hard anti-immigrant pitch from Maxime Bernier may win a slice of culturally conservative voters. A much larger slice will go the one who most persuasively makes the case that we need to close our back door, but continue to show compassion for asylum seekers and invite the world to come in the front door.

A candidate who says banning handguns won’t work, it will only raise prices, but we do need to know who has one and impose heavy penalties for illegal ownership, is probably on more solid ground.

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Admitting that there are often immediate needs crosscutting deeper values is hard. Offering solutions that respect those values, but address the hunger for immediate change simultaneously, harder still. A politician risks looking two-faced rather than respectfully nuanced.

It seems clear though that any monotonal politician who takes refuge in old slogans — ‘government is the problem’, ‘free trade lifts all boats’, ‘make the rich pay’ — will get smacked by today’s conflicted but clear-eyed voters.