If I were Green Party leader Elizabeth May, I'd be glad I was being excluded from the leaders' debate.
Far from needing a platform for solidifying and growing its potential vote coalition, I think the Green Party is something like mushrooms: It grows best in the dark. The less people know about the party, the more they project their own values onto the Greens. They are a handy protest vote for Red Tories, left-wing New Democrats, disaffected Liberals and bored Bloquistes - those who won't go so far as to vote for another main-line party, and can't stand not voting.
Let's take a look at one of the better tools for understanding the current structure of your vote coalition: second choice. You ask respondents how they are going to vote, and then you ask them their second choice. The second choices of your own supporters show where you might lose votes. Being the second choice of other parties' voters shows you where to go for votes. Ideally, your voters will all say they don't have a second choice, and you will have a nice big chunk of second choice votes sitting in one of the other parties' coalitions that you can go after. Here is a recent Strategic Counsel poll with some second choice numbers.
On page 14, you'll find “Second Party Choice” and see that the second choice of Green voters today is 30% Liberal, 26% NDP, 17 Conservative, 5% Bloc and 23% Other/Undecided/Won't Vote.
So that is the structure of the current Green coalition. The Liberals make sense. So do the NDP. Neither seems likely to move unless their leader does something that really disappoints their supporters and their vote goes into free fall. The ‘Won't Vote' number is typically bedrock supporters of the party, although they have mixed it in with Other and Undecided here. But 17% of Greens would vote for Stephen Harper if they couldn't vote for Elizabeth May? Huh?
I get a feeling the more that 17% hears about the Green Party's values, the less they are going to make the Conservatives their second choice, and the more they are going to make the Conservatives their first choice.
On the upside, the Green Party has a potential growth of about 14%, meaning of all the voters in Canada, 14% said their second choice is the Green Party. But again, to get those votes, they need to go after very different voters. Some are Liberals, probably a reflection of Dion's Green Shift, and probably unreachable unless the Liberal vote melts down to the core. Some are New Democrats, probably to the left of the party since the Liberals aren't their second choice. A few are Blocquiste who are probably attracted to the internationalism of the Green brand.
But the largest single bloc of voters are Conservatives, probably disaffected Red Tories who see the Greens as a soft-libertarian alternative to Stephen Harper. (Remember 15% of the Conservative vote is a much larger total number of votes than 24% of New Democrats because the current Conservative coalition is much bigger than the NDP coalition.) That potential for growth is going to snap shut ten seconds after Elizabeth May finishes her opening statement on “respecting the specific values of all forms of life, including non-human species” and “declaring our commitment to non-violence.”
So take a page out of the Tom Hanks stinker The Money Pit . Keep the lights off. Say you are lighting the place with candles to prevent global warming. Stay in the shadows. Mumble when people ask what your specific policies are, and then talk vaguely about a bold new Green future. And be glad you won't actually have to show up at the debate!
