According to Senior Vice-President Doug Anderson “Recognizing that the devil will almost certainly be in the details, the notion put forward by NDP leadership candidate Nathan Cullen that the NDP allow its local riding associations to decide whether to run a joint candidate with the Liberal Party appears to have some basic degree attraction for some Canadian voters. Our question forced Canadian voters to assume that a joint NDP-Liberal candidate would end up being offered in their own riding. Within that context, more Canadians claim they would vote for that joint NDP-Liberal candidate than for any other party’s candidate.”

• Overall, 37% would support a joint NDP-Liberal candidate in their riding, while 23% would support the Conservative candidate in such a scenario. One in five (19%) would vote another candidate, while the remaining 21% did not offer an opinion.
• A joint NDP-Liberal candidate would be most popular in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, while the Conservatives would continue to be the preferred choice on the Prairies.
• Three in four Liberals would vote for the joint candidate, as would 58% of New Democrats, 37% of Greens and 18% of BQ supporters.

As our results show, the level of support for a joint NDP-Liberal candidate is not simply a sum of the support for each of the two parties, but the results also show that not all partisan supporters react in similar or predictable ways.

The results on this show that those who would currently vote Liberal are the most predisposed to voting for such a joint candidate. While a majority of NDP voters say they would vote for the joint candidate, almost one third of NDP voters say they would vote for some other party’s candidate in that situation. As a result of this kind of erosion, although the level of support for the joint candidate does turn out to be higher than it would be for either party individually, it cannot add up to the sum of the current NDP and Liberal support.

Beyond the inclination for the majority of current NDP and Liberal supporters to transfer their support to the joint candidate, the notion does also appear to have some ability to draw some voters from among those who currently support parties other than the NDP or Liberal Party.
 

Each week, Harris/Decima interviews just over 1000 Canadians through teleVox, the company’s national telephone omnibus survey. The most recent data were gathered between March 15 and March 19, 2012. A sample of the same size has a margin of error of 3.1%, 19 times out of 20.