The national pre-election polling scene looks like three men trying to push through the same revolving door at the same time. The trends of recent weeks have settled into a three-way deadlock. What’s most striking about this ‘new normal’ in federal politics is how none of the parties seems to be generating much enthusiasm among voters.

The NDP is the clear mover and prime beneficiary of the changes over the past few months, but it’s still sub-thirty and slightly below its 2011 result. The Liberals are up significantly from 2011, but have fallen back from a clear lead last fall and are now drifting listlessly in the 27 to 30 point range. The Conservatives similarly find them mired around or under the 30-point barrier, well short of their almost forty-point result in 2011.

As this pattern solidifies, we see signs that voters are increasingly receptive to some new approaches. Most voters do not support the Harper government; only 36 per cent of voters disagree with the argument that it is time for Stephen Harper to follow his lieutenant Peter MacKay into retirement. Frustration with the fragmentation of the center-left may be making voters more receptive to things that they did not find acceptable in 2011 — such as coalition government. As more Canadians realize that no party is in a position to form a majority, we see rising support for both coalition government and strategic voting. In fact, these options may be emerging as the best tools to serve the interests and values of a frustrated majority.

The newfound strength of the NDP reflects their recapture of the labour and university-educated vote. Many of those voters are more upset with the current government than they are attracted to either the NDP or the Liberals. Moreover, we don’t see much evidence that either party is poised for a pratfall.

The graph above shows that Canadians’s previously strong aversion to a coalition government — which may have been critical to Mr. Harper’s late drive to a majority in 2011 — has softened dramatically. In the lead-up to 2011, voters were even divided between a preference for a Harper minority or for a coalition. Today we see a profoundly different picture: By a margin of almost two-to-one, the voters of today would send Mr. Harper packing in favour of a coalition. The government’s marketing line about the need for a “strong, stable Conservative government” is being greeted with deep skepticism.

Who would be in a position to lead such a government — Tom Mulcair or Justin Trudeau? The NDP has been climbing back to the support levels it enjoyed in 2011, but both a Liberal or NDP government remain live options. While a slim plurality of voters think the Conservatives will win, almost as many predict a Liberal victory — and now the previously unthinkable prospect of an NDP victory has squarely entered the realm of plausibility for voters.

For voters, it’s all as clear as mud. They have no real idea who is going to win, and they don’t think anyone is likely to achieve a majority. The sharp rise in support for a coalition is one interesting response to this political dilemma. Another would be the use of strategic voting to more efficiently fashion a non-Conservative government of some sort.

Explore the data

As Mulcair’s NDP is the only party with wind in its sails right now, we need to understand how the public would view the prospect of either a Trudeau-led or Mulcair-led coalition. Here we encounter an interesting finding which may serve as a source of uplift to a pretty listless voter outlook on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party.

While Canadians express a clear preference for a coalition led by either Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Mulcair over four more years of Stephen Harper, it’s Trudeau who has a clear advantage here. His 56/35 advantage is nearly double the 51/39 advantage that Mr. Mulcair enjoys. Given the obvious momentum advantage for the NDP, this is a mildly curious and possibly important finding. Perhaps the public prefers to tilt to the center in anchoring any future progressive coalition. Or perhaps they simply haven’t caught up with the new polling position of the NDP. This will bear careful watching.

Some of these same forces are at play when we look at strategic voting.

We can see that there is rising support for strategic voting. Among the majority of Canadians who want to retire Mr. Harper, most would hold their noses and vote for the most plausible progressive option to defeat a Conservative candidate. While this approach hasn’t been terribly effective in shaping electoral outcomes in the past, support for it is now stronger and the technology and resources are in place to actually guide strategic voting in the next election. If the numbers remain this tightly bunched, we fully expect to see strategic voting applied, and with some success, in the fall election.

Last week, we conducted what is called a trade-off analysis on how the federal government should spend one billion dollars over the next ten years. Respondents were presented with pairs of choices from a list of 15 items; rather that ask them to assign some arbitrary rating for each one, we asked them to choose between the two. In a world where wants are infinite but resources are limited, a forced-choice exercise is a good tool for disciplining choices, creating an hierarchy and a highly accurate picture of the hard choices that Canadians would make.

The figures in the chart above represent how often each item was selected over the other items tested. A score of more than 50 indicates that the option was selected over other options the majority of the time and is therefore a relative ‘winner’. Conversely, a score of under 50 suggests a relative ‘loser’. Each respondent was presented with three pairs, for a total of 8,802 responses.

Urban infrastructure and home care dominate the list, followed closely by investing in a post-carbon economy and targeted tax relief for the middle class. The relative strength of paying down the debt is unusual (fiscal issues typically rank quite low on Canadians’ list of priorities ) but this could reflect skepticism about the government’s ability to get things done.

What is perhaps most interesting is the stark difference between the vision the government is presenting to Canadians and what Canadians actually want. Indeed, many of the key pillars of the current government’s platform — tax cuts, income-splitting, combating terrorist threats and new military purchases — find themselves at the bottom of this list.

Frank Graves is founder and president of EKOS Polling.

Methodology:

This report draws on data from two separate surveys. The first survey was conducted using High Definition Interactive Voice Response (HD-IVR™) technology, which allows respondents to enter their preferences by punching the keypad on their phone, rather than telling them to an operator. In an effort to reduce the coverage bias of landline only RDD, we created a dual landline/cell phone RDD sampling frame for this research. As a result, we are able to reach those with a landline and cell phone, as well as cell phone only households and landline only households.

The field dates for the first survey are May 20-26 2015. In total, a random sample of 2,934 Canadian adults aged 18 and over responded to the survey. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/-1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The second survey was conducted using EKOS’ unique, hybrid online/telephone research panel, Probit. Our panel offers exhaustive coverage of the Canadian population (i.e., Internet, phone, cell phone), random recruitment (in other words, participants are recruited randomly, they do not opt themselves into our panel), and equal probability sampling. All respondents to our panel are recruited by telephone using random digit dialling and are confirmed by live interviewers. Unlike opt-in online panels, Probit supports margin of error estimates. We believe this to be the only probability-based online panel in Canada.

The second survey involved an online only sample of 2,116 Canadians. While panellists are randomly recruited, the survey itself excludes the roughly 1 in 8 Canadians without internet access. The results should therefore be considered generalizeable to Canada’s online population. The field dates for this survey are May 12-19, 2015. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/-2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Please note that the margin of error increases when the results are sub-divided (i.e., error margins for sub-groups such as region, sex, age, education). All the data have been statistically weighted by age, gender, region, and educational attainment to ensure the sample’s composition reflects that of the actual population of Canada according to Census data.