In the mix of reactions to the recent provincial election, one person I know asked why his vote even matters. Apparently he was not a supporter of Brad Wall and the Sask Party, given that they cruised to an easy third majority, but it’s a question that deserves an answer. Why does the vote of the individual actually matter?
Looking at the numbers in the provincial election, at least locally, something interesting stands out. Yorkton’s MLA, Greg Ottenbreit, has had a consistent number of votes over his three terms in office, hovering around 5,000 votes each time. His share of the vote, however, has increased dramatically, going from around 60 per cent to the low 70s. He has benefitted from a lower voter turnout because it wasn’t his support base that didn’t turn out – between 2007 and 2011, there were 900 fewer votes cast in Yorkton, but Ottenbreit saw an increased number of votes overall, leading one to assume that all of the people who stayed home voted for the NDP previously. What is apparent is that people who support Ottenbreit vote for him, while people who do not apparently have decided to simply not vote.
Credit to the Ottenbreit campaign, they recognize that getting their supporters to the polls is how elections are won, and they have effectively done that for three straight elections. On a provincial level, that’s also what his party has done overall, and as a result they have won for the third time in a row. They have a healthy majority in the polls, and part of that is simply getting their supporters out to vote for them, something which their primary opponent has not managed to do. It’s no coincidence that the Sask Party continues to win, their supporters believe their votes matter, and as a result they actually vote.
This is why an individual vote matters. It’s not because elections are decided by a narrow margin, because they usually are not, but because you’re relying on the movement of crowds. In this case, you have one crowd that believes their vote matters, and one crowd that is getting disillusioned with the process. As a result, one of those crowds wins with little difficulty, while the other can barely maintain seat totals after each election. It’s not so much a matter of one person deciding their vote doesn’t matter, it’s when a large group of people agree with that person, and wind up staying home instead of actually voting.
As a post-mortem, one can make different guesses about why this is the case. In this particular campaign, the NDP seemed, to these eyes, to be deliberately tanking it, being ghosts outside of the two major cities and generally not doing much to hold the incumbent’s feet to the fire. The opposition did have material to work with, and then didn’t use it effectively, and as a result couldn’t increase their support – while also seeing their leader lose his seat. There was nothing inspiring about the NDP campaign, and in the process of giving up on rural voters they might as well have gift-wrapped a number of rural seats for Sask Party candidates. And now their supporters are feeling disenfranchised, because they lost by such a big margin.
The Sask Party campaign was basically a greatest hits album, Brad Wall toured the province with old records, playing to a devoted fanbase, without giving much new and exciting. There was deliberately little in the way of new promises – it was, in some cases, a point of pride, given that the campaign made a point of rejecting the NDP platform’s new spending – but it was something that resonated with their support base. It’s like how everyone’s happy when the Rolling Stones tour. They might have a new album every once in a while, but nobody cares about that, they just want to hear Paint it Black and will turn out to hear it. Sask Party supporters didn’t need new spending, they like what they’ve seen over the past eight years and want more of it. The repeated mantra of “Keep Saskatchewan Strong” was the Paint it Black of the election season, the only thing the fans actually needed to hear.
If the NDP wants to be an effective opposition party, let alone a real candidate to govern the province, they have to be able to energize their supporters. On that count, they’re failing, and as a result they’re failing to actually count as a force in the provincial election. Love them, hate them, or somewhere in between, the Sask Party wins because their supporters understand the value of actually making the trek to the polls.
People can argue that one vote doesn’t make a difference, but when one group believes their vote is important and a second group does not, the former group’s cause is going to win. In the case of the provincial election, the former group was made up of Sask Party supporters.
