It's not easy being Green

That was perhaps an overly lengthy holiday break - back to posting, now.

In the last election, the Green Party earned over ten percent of the vote in forty ridings. That's a pretty impressive take for a party with no seats; moreover, they are distributed across the country:
These Green ridings are heavily distributed in big urban areas, unsurprisingly - Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver all feature prominently. Perhaps more surprisingly are the overall winners in these ridings; many of them feature a Conservative MP, and some (likely the Calgary ridings, or Stockwell Day's Okanagan-Coquihalla) are the safest Conservative seats of all:
Almost three-quarters of that pie (29 ridings out of 40) is blue; clearly, the Green party is flourishing in righty ridings. Some (like my blogging comrade Allan) would suggest that this is because the Green party is "stealing" or splitting the vote in a Naderesque fashion, but consider the following histogram for the margin of the Conservative victory in those ridings:
This graph shows just how well the Green Party does in Conservative-heavy ridings; in the average riding where the Green Party won more than 10% of the vote but the Conservatives won overall, the margin by which the Conservative Party won was more than 30% of the total vote. In Calgary Southeast and Wild Rose, the Green Party placed second while the Conservatives picked up over 70% of the total vote.

In these 29 ridings, a (very unlikely) total shift of Green vote to the second-place party would lead to only two ridings changing parties - both Kitchener-Waterloo and Saanich-Gulf Islands would have gone Liberal under these circumstances. Under these circumstances, it is ludicrous to accuse the Green Party of "splitting the left vote" - generally, the Greens do well in ridings in which there is not a huge left vote there to split.

Why is the Green Party doing its best in very Conservative ridings? It seems likely that, in such ridings, voters recognized the inevitability of a Conservative win, and responded accordingly, through one of the two following actions:

1. Voters did not vote strategically in these ridings, and instead voted for their favoured party, and this meant a very large Green share. This seems unlikely, as it would imply a far greater preference for the Green Party than was relected in polls, but it could be that sites like VoteForEnvironment really did help the Liberals significantly.
   
2. Liberal voters in these ridings were demoralized by their party's poor standing in polls and did not bother to come out and vote, while Green supporters all voted anyway (as they never expected their party to win). This seems far more likely; in the heaviest Conservative ridings (with a share of over 70% for the Conservatives) the voter turnout averaged a dismal 40.2%, far lower than the Canadian average of 59.1%. (In Medicine Hat, barely one-third of voters turned out to vote, which is a bleak statement about Canadian democracy.)
   

This points to a deficit in get-out-the-vote operations by the Liberal Party, and a general enthusiasm gap. Hopefully this was just a one-election type thing, but what should the party be doing to attract voters in an increasingly Conservative-dominated political culture?