How familiar are Sask. residents with the party leaders?

EXCLUSIVE: How well does Sask. know party leaders? In an exclusive poll Cole Davenport looks into how well Saskatchewan residents know party leaders heading into the election.

As Saskatchewan awaits the election call, how are voters feeling about the leaders of Saskatchewan’s two major parties? CTV News sought to find out, in partnership with Insightrix Research.

Most residents polled said they were familiar with Premier Scott Moe, the leader of the Saskatchewan Party at 80 per cent. For NDP Leader Carla Beck, 61 per cent of those surveyed said they were familiar.

According to Insightrix Research Director Lang McGilp, that’s a gap the NDP will need to work to close over the course of the campaign.

“Certainly people are more familiar with the premier of Saskatchewan than they are with the leader of the NDP. We might expect that given that she's more new to the [leadership] space,” McGilp said. “But I think it's important context as we approach this election, because certainly the leader of the NDP will want to try to raise her familiarity with the electorate as much as possible.”

When asked for their impressions of the two major party leaders, 31 per cent said they had a positive opinion of Scott Moe, with Carla Beck drawing a similar number of positive impressions at 30 per cent.

As for negative opinions, 54 per cent of those polled said they had an overall negative opinion of Moe and the Saskatchewan Party, compared to 31 per cent for Beck, who saw a drop from 37 per cent negative in July.

“People gave a free text response. We reviewed those and coded those into groups or categories. Then we further lumped those into comments that are positive, negative or neutral,” McGilp said.

The majority of respondents attributed their dislike of Moe to “general dislike and negative sentiments,” but more specific issues include dishonesty and lack of transparency, inadequate healthcare and education support, and divisive or partisan politics.

McGilp attributes the negative sentiments towards Moe as carryover from how long his party has been in power. Moe has been premier since 2018, while the Saskatchewan Party has held government since 2007.

“When you're in the leadership position in the governing party and you're making decisions, you're not always going to make decisions that everyone supports or is happy with,” McGilp said. “There's just sort of a collection of kind of things that can build that up.”

On the NDP side, most people listed a perceived lack of strength and effectiveness as their main reasons for holding a negative opinion of Beck, but the number of people attributing that as their number one issue with her has dropped from July to September.

“The most common thing was perceived lack of strength or effectiveness,” McGilp said. “These are their words. That was at 19 per cent and that's fallen to 11 per cent. So I think, [Beck] is probably starting to get out there a little bit more to get a bit of an impression.”

The next largest holdup is negative party association.

The largest block of voters view the best positive quality of either leader is Moe’s effective leadership and advocacy for Saskatchewan and Beck’s compassionate and socially-focused leadership.

Just 12 per cent of those polled said they had a neutral opinion of Moe, while 26 per cent said they had a neutral opinion of Beck – a number that’s down from July polling.

“The big finding from July is that four in 10 people said something neutral about Carla Beck, meaning that they really didn’t know a lot about her,” McGilp said. “That number actually dropped from 39 per cent down to 26, which is a fair decline in just two short months. So I think that suggests people are starting to at least hear a little bit more about her and what the party might be about.”

By demographic, those who are typically more engaged in politics generally are more likely to be familiar with both leaders.

“This would be males and those over the age of 55 years,” McGilp said. “Regionally though, we actually see this is also where the NDP has a little bit, more of a weakness is Carla Beck doesn't have as much of command or familiarity with those outside of Regina and Saskatoon.”

The sample size involves 806 adult residents, surveyed online through the Insightrix SaskWatch Research panel, a reflection of the province’s general population through age, gender and region. The research was conducted between Sept. 10 and Sept. 12, with an estimated margin of error of plus-minus 3.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The poll was conducted in partnership between CTV News and Insightrix Research.