The Quebec election provided a good opportunity to test the importance of leadership attributes, the strength of party brands and the degree to which voters felt affiliated with the parties, irrespective of their voting intentions.<\/p>\n
These fundamentals\u2014 party affiliation, leadership and strength of the party brands\u2014 are important attitudinal indicators in any election.<\/p>\n
We found (question 1) that nearly as many Quebecers (23.9 percent) did not identify with any of the major parties as associated themselves with the Liberals (25.8 percent) or Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois (24.3 percent). While the Action d\u00e9mocratique du Qu\u00e9bec trailed at 15 percent, the high number of voters who were unsure or would state no affiliation turned out to be a leading indicator of how \u201cundecideds\u201d and \u201cdiscreets\u201d would vote on election day. A majority of these unaffiliated voters clearly broke to Mario Dumont and the ADQ. Dumont also enjoyed a comparative advantage on election day\u2014 alone among the leaders, his name appeared on the ballot, as ADQ-\u00c9quipe Mario Dumont.<\/p>\n
SES Research was in the field for Policy Options<\/em> on March 14 and 15, the two nights following the leaders’ debate. We conducted 500 telephone interviews over the two nights, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percent, 19 times out of 20.<\/p>\n Since our findings would not be published until after the election on March 26, we saw no point in sampling voting intention. Nor did we test the dissatisfaction rate with the Charest government, which all the polls put at 50 percent at the outset of the campaign, and as high as 60 percent by the end of it\u2014 very close to a tipping point, as the election results indicated.<\/p>\n We tested five leadership attributes\u2014 vision, trust, competence, character and shared views. Jean Charest won all five of them handily against Andr\u00e9 Boisclair. But Mario Dumont was very competitive, finishing second on all five leadership attributes. And on two of them\u2014 trust and shared views\u2014 Dumont trailed Charest within the margin of error. Boisclair finished a distant third on all five questions, showing a reverse coattail effect for the PQ.<\/p>\n Charest scored most strongly on competence and character\u2014 two key components of who would make the best premier. On question 2, \u201cWhich leader is the most competent,\u201d Charest outscored both opponents by a margin of about 2-1, at 38 percent, versus 20.8 percent for Dumont and 17.9 percent for Boisclair.<\/p>\n On question 3, \u201cWhich leader has the personal character to be the premier of Quebec,\u201d Charest was again the clear winner at 35.6 percent, compared with Dumont at 24.7 percent and Boisclair at 18.2 percent. Again, Charest outscored Boisclair by a 2-1 margin, but Dumont narrowed the gap on character, and would narrow it even more on the other leadership questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n On question 4, \u201cWhich leader has the best vision,\u201d Charest came out on top at 30.5 percent, while Dumont scored 25.5 percent and Boisclair trailed at 21.4 percent.<\/p>\n Asked which leader they trusted the most (question 5), Charest came in first at 29.0 percent, Dumont was a close second at 25.1 percent, and Boisclair was again third at 20.6 percent.<\/p>\n Asked which leader had views most like their own (question 6),<\/p>\n Charest was first at 27.1 percent, Dumont pulled to a virtual tie at 25.8 percent, and Boisclair was again third at 21 percent.<\/p>\n When we asked which of these five leadership factors was most likely to influence their vote, competence was by far the most important at 29.8 percent, followed by vision at 17.3 percent, views most like the voter’s own at 14.4 percent, trust and understanding Quebec both at 13.2 percent and personal character at 7.3. percent. Competence was by far the most important leadership attribute likely to influence Quebecers’ vote, and Charest enjoyed a huge 2-1 competence advantage over both his rivals. It isn’t for pollsters to determine why Charest and the Liberals were unable, in the end, to capitalize on their clear comparative advantage on leadership.<\/p>\n When we examined the strengths of the parties, the Liberals enjoyed an even greater advantage on voter preference for their brand.<\/p>\n Asked which party had \u201cthe strongest team of candidates\u201d (question 7), fully 48.9 percent said the Liberals, with 22.9 percent for the PQ and only 7.4 percent for the ADQ. These were slam-dunk numbers for the Liberals.<\/p>\n However, they also suggested that even Dumont’s voters knew he had by far the weakest team, but they were going to vote for him anyway.<\/p>\n Again, when we asked which party had the strongest policy platform (question 8), the Liberals easily came in first at 36.5 percent, compared with 23.4 percent for the PQ and 15 percent for the ADQ<\/p>\n When we asked \u201cWhich party is best at ensuring Quebec receives its fair share within Canada\u201d (question 9), the Liberals were again a strong first at 41.5 percent, the PQ a distant second at 27.6 percent and the ADQ a bad third at 12.7 percent.<\/p>\n This question of getting Quebec’s fair share is not dissimilar to the litmus test question of which party or leader is the best defender of Quebec’s interests in Ottawa. While the PQ might have been expected to do better, the Liberal strength probably reflects the current context of negotiating enhanced funding for Quebec in the federal budget, which would address the fiscal imbalance four days after we were in the field. When we asked which of these party factors was most likely to influence their vote, the party platform was seen as the most important by 39 percent of Quebecers, obtaining Quebec’s fair share within Canada was a close second at 36.6 percent, while the best team was a distant third at 14.6 percent.<\/p>\n Again, as on leadership, the Liberals enjoyed an important advantage on brand preference, but were unable to use either to their advantage on election day. Indeed, a post-election poll of 600 Quebecers by L\u00e9ger Marketing, published by Le Journal de Montr\u00e9al<\/em> on April 1, found that 48 percent of Quebecers thought a minority government led by Jean Charest would be \u201cefficace,\u201d pretty close to the competence question.<\/p>\n Clearly, the Liberal campaign failed to communicate the strengths of the leader and the party. In running on the record, the Liberals risked allowing their opponents to drive dissatisfaction to tipping-point levels. And in promising a $700-million tax cut with new equalization money in the federal budget, Charest risked reminding voters of his broken 2003 campaign promise of $1 billion a year in tax cuts.<\/p>\n There was another important factor in the outcome. In a word: Mario. The fact that his party ran a bad third on all the brand equity questions was not beside the point, but helped make the point that he was the brand\u2014 indeed, he had his name on the ballot.<\/p>\n Inasmuch as Dumont’s supporters were voting for him rather than his party, his strong second-place showing in the leadership numbers provided a road map to his strong second-place showing on election day.<\/p>\n Dumont is a populist in the oldfashioned sense of the word, in that support for his leadership runs way ahead of support for his party, and even for his ideas.<\/p>\n We also found that Charest shouldn’t have expected to get much of a bounce from the federal budget, no matter how much money he got out of it. Only 20.9 percent of our respondents said they would take a more favourable view of Charest as a result of gains for Quebec on the fiscal imbalance, while 38 percent said their view of him would be the same, and 37.8 percent said they would have a less favourable view. Clearly, Quebecers who weren’t voting for him anyway weren’t about to be impressed.<\/p>\n Stephen Harper fared somewhat better with Quebecers when we asked about the $350-million February environmental announcement to support Quebec’s Kyoto compliance plan, as well as the expected good news on equalization in the federal budget. Here, 27 percent said they would have a more favourable view, while 33.5 percent said their view would remain the same, and 36.6 percent said they would view the Prime Minister less favourably. Not surprisingly, Harper scored more favourably with Liberal voters (36.7 percent) than with PQ and ADQ voters (20.5 percent and 27.8 percent).<\/p>\n Coming back to the opening questions in our poll on association with parties, we also tested this at the federal level in Quebec (question 10), and found that 28.3 percent self-identified with the Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois, 18.7 percent with the Liberal Party of Canada and 15.3 percent with the Conservative Party. As in the question on identity with provincial parties, there was a large pool of voters, 24.1 percent, who identified with none.<\/p>\n In essence, one-fourth of the Quebec electorate is in play and could hold the key to the outcome of the next federal election in the province.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Quebec election provided a good opportunity to test the importance of leadership attributes, the strength of party brands and the degree to which voters felt affiliated with the parties, irrespective of their voting intentions. These fundamentals\u2014 party affiliation, leadership and strength of the party brands\u2014 are important attitudinal indicators in any election. We found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-07T23:58:36Z","apple_news_api_id":"b982d60f-5ffc-4d0d-82d0-834aaebf2c7a","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-07T23:58:36Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AuYLWD1_8TQ2C0INKrr8seg","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9346],"tags":[],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-262330","issues","type-issues","status-publish","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n