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Riding Studies - Calgary South Centre
Joe Clark’s Condemnation of New Conservative Party Earns Polite Agreement But Is Ignored - Clark Earns Lacklustre Rating as M.P.

CPC Landslide in an Almost Purely Party Vote

Conservative party candidate Lee Richardson is expected to win an absolute majority of the vote, according to a COMPAS riding poll (n=300) conducted for the National Post, Global Television, the Calgary Herald, and other CanWest newspapers. Liberal candidate Julia Turnbull is far behind with 29% of the decided vote compared to 53% for Richardson, as shown in table 1.

The actual intended vote is almost a pure party vote, as shown in table 2. Asked how they would vote in a hypothetical election involving candidates whom they didn’t know, 49% of respondents said that they would vote Conservative, 28% Liberal, and 14% NDP—virtually identical to the intended votes among the actual candidates.

The sense of partisanship in the riding is reflected in the following verbatims from respondents:

• I come from a PC family so that is pretty much it. I will always stick with the Conservatives.
  
• I have always voted Conservative and I always will.
  
• I have been voting Liberal all my life.
  
• I will always vote NDP
  

Richardson does slightly better than his party (53% vs. 49%). In general, some candidates outperform their parties while others earn less voter support than their party could normally expect. A combined Appendix for all 12 riding studies, containing COMPAS' proprietary electability-traction index scores for each significant candidate in every riding, is provided as a separate, stand-alone document.