HOW VOTE SPLITTING HELPS CONSERVATIVES

Primarily Conservatives win elections using three tactics:  

The first is Gerrymandering.  

In America, the first requires that they control the Senate on any year ending in the number 1 (1991, 2001, 2011, 2021, etc).  The reason for this is the Senate controls the redrawing of election districts following their census, which is done every ten years.
Since whoever control the Senate gets to redraw the election map, by focusing on winning the Senate over the House of Representatives then, the Republicans get to gerrymander all the districts, typically to their benefit, thus making it easier for the Republicans to with both.
Funfact: Since 2000, the Republicans have only lost the House for a total of 4 years.

In it's simplest form gerrymandering is taking a pocket of Democratic voters and breaking them up, diluting their vote, into any surrounding pockets of Republican voters.  The idea being what might've been 5 Democratic districts now becomes 3 Republican ones and only 2 Democratic ones.

But this happens in Canada too.  In 2014, Harper's Conservatives added 30 seats to the House of Commons.  Dis-proportionally those seats were in Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC, areas that are safe Conservative seats.
The rest were in areas of the country that Conservatives consider "Hot".
Mississauga got a new one and with it the city went from having basic shaped ridings to funny shaped ones.
The borders between the new ridings cut right through Liberal voting neighbourhoods, grouping them with larger populations of Conservatives and swing voters but the process of Gerrymandering is relatively simple, even in a complex multi-party environment like Canada.

GERRYMANDERING 101:
Say for example, each symbol represents a the political stripe of each neighbourhood in a city.  The city had 2 ridings but with a bit of population growth (as found in the census) the Government decides to make 3 ridings, and being Conservative they want to break up that pocket of Liberalism so they don't have 2 long-term safe seats anymore. 

The second is Attack Ads.  Attack ads are different from Negative Ads (which attack the policies of your opponent) in that they only go after the person you're campaigning against.  

Using the 2019 Canadian election as an example: Trudeau comparing Scheer's platform to Doug Ford's is a Negative ad (and wholly accurate), while Scheer bringing up things that Justin did before his Father and Brother died, before he was in politics, before he became Prime Minister, is an Attack ad.

In my opinion any party resorting to Attack Ads has nothing to offer.  Compare and contrasting platforms, while unpleasant to sit through all the time, are at least valid.
If Andrew Scheer and Doug Ford met in multiple strategy sessions and Scheer campaigned for Doug when the latter was running for Premier, then it's valid to question whether the disaster Doug has made of Ontario would be repeated on Canada if Scheer won.
Negative Ads at least help the voters identify whether they should vote for the types of policies a candidate supports.
Attack Ads means you have nothing to offer and you're a coward with the maturity of a High School mean girl.  Most of what you say is rumour and too often unfounded.  A candidate running Attack Ads is no different from a bully.

And that's how Andrew Scheer ran his very first campaign for the House of Commons in 2004.  He went up against the longest serving member of the HoC in history and was losing a tight race against this well respected member until he started spreading rumours that his opponent, Lorne Nystrom, was "soft on child porn".
There was nothing to substantiate this claim.  The Conservatives wanted tougher punishments for people caught with child pornography and Lorne wasn't Conservative.  The House had never voted on it so there was no way to know whethre Lorne was soft or not.
But Andy spread it and Andy won that election.  By only 861 votes.
Even the Conservative National Post described Scheer like this way:
"He was 25 years old. He wasn’t from the riding — he’d barely lived in the province two years — and his work experience amounted to little more than a gig busing tables and a few years in the office of a disgraced MP."
Scheer was picked to run against Nystrom because the Conservatives couldn't find anyone else willing to.  Seriously.  He was a hat holder.

The third method Conservatives use to win is Voter Suppression.

This too takes multiple forms.  It can be doing things that keep people who would vote Liberal/Democrat from being registered to vote.  Requirement of ID is a good one.  Since many poor people can't afford cars they don't have driver's licenses, which means most don't have picture ID.  If the Voter Registry requirements are rewritten so you have to have picture ID to vote then a lot of poor voters become disenfranchised.
In America this is also a way to suppress the Black and Hispanic vote, votes that typically go for Democrat candidates.  For the GOP that's a win/win.

But there are other ways to suppress voters.  And one that's become quite common on both sides of the border lately is the little known fact that Conservative voters are so fearful of progressive policies that they will vote Conservative even if they don't trust their candidate.  In study after study it was shown that Conservative voters believe ALL politicians are corrupt but at least theirs agree with their values.
However, those same studies show that Liberal voters expect a high standard from their candidates and won't vote if they don't believe their candidates are moral.

So by attacking ALL politicians Conservatives only discourage Liberal voters.

The election of Trump as President provides the best example of this.  Democrats who wanted Bernie Sanders, or were convinced Hillary was corrupt, stayed away from the polls.  It felt like a safe thing to do.  Even Trump thought Hillary was likely to win on Election night.

The 2011 Canadian Federal election, the one where Conservative Stephen Harper finally got his majority government, was also the Canadian Federal election with the lowest voter turnout.  So fewer people went to vote, and yes, the Conservatives had snuck into an omnibus bill additional restrictions for registering to vote (under the guise of preventing voter fraud even though the only confirmed instance of voter fraud in Canada this millennium was perpetrated by his candidates in the 2008 election, had nothing to do with voter ID and one of Harper's MPs ended up serving time for it).

But the 2011 election demonstrated just how effective splitting the Liberal vote is for Conservatives and that's the fourth method, which by the way only happens in places like Canada where there are multiple parties.

The Canadian Method 4 - VOTE SPLITTING:

According to the Gallagher Index the disproportionality of parliament in the 2011 election was 12.45, mainly between the Conservatives and NDP on the one hand, and the Liberal, BQ and Green parties on the other.  

From this we can see that the percentage of seats swung between the parties can be calculated as:

• Liberal to Conservative: 4.66%

• Liberal to NDP: 9.90%

That's a lot of splitting but what does it mean?  Well, almost all of it represents the undecided voter, a person in the center who either didn't go to vote or was convinced to change their vote from a Liberal one to a Conservative or New Democrat.

And while you'd think 9.9% of the Liberal vote going to the NDP wouldn't benefit the Conservatives, not only did it get Harper his majority, but it put Jack Layton as the Leader of the least effective Opposition in Canadian history, somehow being less effective at holding the government to task than Lucien Bouchard's BLOQ QUEBECOIS was in 1993.

And here's the kicker, Harper got his majority despite 5.24% of the seats leaving the Conservative column and going to the NDP.  So, do you still think the two parties have nothing in common?

When I wrote "THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY NDP" in the Top Secret Conservative Handbook, I wasn't just editorializing.  Election after election have shown the Conservatives give only cursory swipes at the NDP because they don't threaten them and the stronger the NDP is the weaker the Liberals are and the better chance the Conservatives will get a majority.

And look at the Gallagher chart again.  Harper got almost 54% of the seats in the House of Commons with only 39% of the vote.  As of last night Scheer is within the margin of error for that same number.

Unless you're in one of the handful of ridings where the NDP, BLOQ or GREENS are second to the Conservatives, the only progressive vote that doesn't benefit Andrew Scheer is a vote for the Liberals.  And it's easy to tell what your riding is like: you can find it's latest tracking right here at 338Canada.com