There has been much discussion about the potential for “ticket splitting” in the upcoming provincial elections in October, and given the impact this could have on the outcome, it’s worth recalling previous experience.
The granddaddy of all split-vote elections was 1996, when the NDP government was re-elected despite receiving nearly 40,000 fewer votes province-wide than the BC Liberals. The NDP won 39 seats with 39.5% of the vote, while the BC Liberals won just 33 with 41.8%.
The reason for this anomaly is that the newly formed Reform Party in British Columbia received nearly 10% of the vote and two seats, and it can be reasonably argued that without the Reform Party, most voters would have voted for the British Columbia Liberals.
The Reform Party may not have attracted many voters (about 146,000), but those voters were spread across enough ridings to allow the NDP to win four seats with less than 40% of the vote because the Reform Party and the BC Liberals “split” the anti-NDP vote.
In the northern riding of Bulkley Valley-Stikine, for example, the NDP won with just 37 per cent of the vote, while the Reform Party and the BC Liberals split 57 per cent. A similar pattern played out in Kootenay, Prince George North and Cariboo North, while the NDP won six other ridings due to split votes.
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If these splits had not occurred and the Reform Party did not exist, the BC Liberals would have probably won about 43 seats and the NDP would have been down to about 30 seats.
There was also a split-vote election in 1991, when the NDP likely won at least nine seats because the Social Credit Party and the newly formed British Columbia Liberals split about 57 per cent of the vote. The 2017 election elected three Green MPs, but this was not a typical split-vote result because it was difficult to determine which party lost the most votes to the Greens.
Fast forward to the October election, and if you apply a vote-splitting scenario based on the assumption that the NDP will be ahead in the race (based on a range of polls), the potential impact can be seen from past election results.
Even a small percentage split could strengthen the NDP's control over the 15 ridings it captured from the British Columbia Liberals in the 2020 election and increase its chances of winning other ridings such as Skeena, Columbia River-Revelstoke, Kamloops-North Thompson and Surrey-White Rock.
There will almost certainly be a split vote in the upcoming election as the competition between the United BC Party and the BC Conservative Party heats up to be the only choice for those who do not want to elect an NDP government for a third consecutive term.
But neither opposition party shows signs of quitting. Despite the loss of another BC United Party MP to the BC Conservatives last week, most of the party's current MPs have said they will remain with the party, and another 40 candidates have been appointed by the party.
The British Columbia Conservatives continue to remain the strongest second choice in opinion polls, giving the party a big boost in appointing more and more candidates.
Be prepared, friends. Splits are going to happen.
Keith Baldrey is chief political correspondent for Global BC.
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