• Current CPC voters,
  
• Potential CPC voters drawn from among Liberal and other party segments as well as the undecided, identified as “potential CPC voters” because they affirmed that they might vote CPC in one of the next three federal elections,
  
• Strong CPC opponents, identified as anti-Conservative voters because they affirmed that they would never vote CPC or certainly not within the next three elections, and
  
• A special type of undecided voter, non-Conservatives who would not indicate whether they would or would not consider voting CPC in any of the next three federal elections.
  

The portrait of the Conservative party that emerged from the data resembles that of some wellknown business school consumer product cases. In the era of the video cassette recorder, customers had difficulty distinguishing the ironically named Betamax from the VHS format competitor. Betamax’s technical performance exceeded that of VHS but Betamax lost market share and disappeared first because customers could not connect psychologically with the product.

The famous Ford Edsel was an adequately performing vehicle—some say more than adequately performing - that promptly disappeared because of poor marketing. By conventional wisdom, Edsel failed because it was marketed as everyman’s car in an era of aspiring consumers.

In Canadian politics, the Conservative party is the political “product” with the more appealing features in the eyes of today’s consumer-voter, much closer to where the public stands on issues. The Liberal party appears to outsell or outpoll the CPC because it appears to outperform the CPC in marketing. In consumer product language, the Liberal brand appears to trump the Conservative brand while the Conservative product appears to outperform the Liberal product.

One consequence of superior Liberal marketing is a public image of the Conservative party as somewhat extremist. The Conservatives’ image of extremism emerges in the public’s tendency to see the Conservatives as somewhat “rightwing” while scoring the Liberals, the BQ, and themselves as essentially centrist. For the vast majority of the electorate, the terms left and right have no policy meaning; they are epithets that denote psychological rather than policy or ideological positions. The left-right spectrum is above all a measure of the degree to which voters feel a party is “like me.”

Canadian voters are different from American voters. American voters do use ideological labels meaningfully, correctly positioning themselves on liberal-conservative or left-right scales. Canadian voters, by contrast, are non-ideological in their language. The terms left and right mean almost nothing to them of an ideological or policy nature.