Ontario's election hasn't changed voters' fundamental views, polling finds

There's an axiom in politics: "campaigns matter."

It's the idea that voters will turn their attention, however briefly, from their everyday concerns to politics during the election period and they'll form or reform opinions on the parties and their leaders before they cast a ballot. When a shift happens en masse, you can see it in the polls.

And then there's 2022 election in Ontario.

Polling by Mainstreet Research on behalf of QP Briefing probed some of the underlying dynamics of Ontario politics and tracked how things changed.

The upshot? Not by much.

Ford Nation

PC leader Doug Ford has long cast himself as a different kind of politician who appeals to voters. He said it often in 2018 and again in this campaign.

"I'm not a big partisan guy," he said in the leaders' debate, adding that he gets voters from Liberals and New Democrats.

Before the election, Ford had a base of supporters, not all of them Progressive Conservatives, who considered themselves members of "Ford Nation." That base maintained its size — almost 20 per cent of the electorate — before, during and after the campaign.

The Wynne factor

It was clear in the months leading up to the election that the Progressive Conservatives would try hard to define the largely unknown Liberal leader Steven Del Duca by tying him to former leader Kathleen Wynne, who was deeply disliked by much of the electorate by the end the last election.

Indeed, both the PC and NDP started referring to the grits as the "Wynne-Del Duca Liberals" and there were several attack ads hammering the point home — but it didn't seem to make a huge dent.

We asked Ontarians whether the current or former leader motivated their vote for or against the Liberals, and it turns out neither grit leader was a draw for many voters — but only slightly more voters were disinclined to vote for the party because of them. By the last week of the campaign, 11 per cent of voters said they were primarily motivated by Del Duca to vote against the Liberals, up five per cent over the course of the writ period. Motivation to vote Liberal because of him was up three points, from 4 to 7 per cent.

The populist, progressive NDP

Before the campaign began, one of the big unknowns was how the anti-Ford vote would shake out. In 2018, the NDP was the clear winner of the progressive primary, giving it opposition status and depriving the Liberals of official party status.

Over 13 years under Andrea Horwath, the NDP has embraced a mix of populist progressive politics that fits its leader. It's shifted over the years and it hasn't been without controversy: in 2014, the party had been accused by some of its own members of running to the right of the Liberals.

To see whether the NDP was appealing to a broad coalition of progressives in 2022, we asked them. At the outset of the campaign, it appeared the party had found a "sweet spot" where the policies were "just right" for more than a quarter of voters, including a substantial share of those who intended to vote Liberal, suggesting they and those who weren't yet sure, could be persuadable.

That didn't change much over the course of the campaign, aside from a small spike in the number of unsure voters at the outset. By the last week, 31 per cent said the NDPs' policies were just right — a good ten points higher than the per cent of all voters who said they planned to vote for the party.

The poll linked in this story was conducted between May 19 and 25, 2022, among a sample of 1,622 adults living in Ontario using automated telephone interviews on landlines and cellular phones. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 2.4 per cent at the 95 per cent confidence level.

The graphics, by Mainstreet Research, are compilations of similar polling conducted throughout the election. 

Mainstreet Research is part owner of QP Briefing and iPolitics.