Christy Clark

Ex-Liberal voters: where will they go?

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By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca

It’s still too soon to write the Christy Clark Liberals off, but for some time they’ve been showing the signs of a coalition on the verge of a breakup.

One indication is the number of people who are telling pollsters that they voted Liberal in 2009, but would vote for someone else today.

Angus Reid Public Opinion vice-president Mario Canseco said in an interview that the Liberals have a retention rate of 66 per cent. That means one-third of self-identified former Liberal supporters say they are going to vote for someone else. (See main story.)

“Some of them go to the Greens, some of them go to the Conservatives,” Canseco said. But roughly half of the former Liberals who are going elsewhere are going to the NDP.

“That is the big issue that we are looking into as we get closer to the election,” he said. “If you continue to have that shift of BC Liberal voters for Gordon Campbell in 2009 becoming NDP voters for Adrian Dix in 2013, then it’s going to be very difficult for them to turn the numbers around.”

One ray of hope for the Liberals is their retention rate has increased from a low of 50 per cent in the fall of 2010, when Campbell quit. And the number of former Liberals who say they would switch to the BC Conservatives has dropped.

But not everyone moving away from the Conservatives is going back to the Liberals, Canseco said.

“They’re saying, ‘Maybe I’ll vote, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll vote NDP.'”

Amazing Comebacks Christy Clark Hopes to Emulate

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ChristyClark
BC’s Premier Clark: Big ground to make up, but stranger things have happened.

Four election shockers that keep BC’s New Dems up at night
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca

With less than three months to go until Election Day, Premier Christy Clark’s Liberals are betting on a major come-from-behind surge to wipe out the New Democratic Party’s lead in the polls.

It’s a tall order, but it wouldn’t be the first time voters have shifted that much, that fast.
“Things can change very quickly,” said Angus Reid pollster Mario Canseco. Even when an opposition party enters an election campaign with a healthy lead, voters can abandon it if they decide the party isn’t ready to govern.

For the past several years, the NDP has held a robust lead over the BC Liberals in the polls. Although the lead has dropped from highs of 20 points or more, the most recent polls still show the NDP up by 10 to 15 percentage points.

But headlines like Hudak Tories Roaring Toward a Majority: Poll and Danielle Smith’s Wildrose on Track for Majority suggest just how volatile voters can be. And headlines like ‘We Were Wrong’: Alberta Election Pollsters Red-faced as Tories Crush Wildrose serve as a reminder that polls are a snapshot in time, not a forecast.

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Dix’s Big Gamble: No Dirt

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As Libs sling mud, NDP leader refuses to go negative. Will out-of-the-box strategy box him in?
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca

Mr. Nice Guy: Adrian Dix
Mr. Nice Guy: Adrian Dix

The New Democratic Party intends to win the May 14 election by campaigning against negative campaigning. NDP leader Adrian Dix has said the party won’t fight fire with fire — or, in this case, mud with mud — no matter how nasty the other side gets.

Like pornography, negative campaigning is hard to define, but we know it when we see it. And most of us say we hate it.

Still, political strategists tend to believe it works. Just look at what the Stephen Harper Conservatives did to Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. Will negative ads hurt Dix in the same way? And if they do, is being positive an effective counter-strategy?

As election day approaches, the NDP’s lead on Christy Clark’s Liberals is likely to narrow. If that happens, “the NDP may have to resort to some harder-hitting commentary on the Liberals generally and Christy Clark in particular,” said political scientist Hamish Telford. “And that will raise all sorts of questions: ‘Well, Mr. Dix, you said you were going to have a positive campaign, now you’re doing this that and the other’…

“So it does box him in a bit and that may cause him a problem for sure.”

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