Alberta Reset: Is It Really A Tossup?

Questions To Which The Answer Is No

Given that this weekend is a holiday and every pollster in Canada except Leger has released a poll this week of the Alberta election, it’s a reasonable bet that we’re gonna be in for a few days of limited new Alberta data. (The exception, of course, is Mainstreet, which feeds all of our addictions.) Oh, and the election debate already happened, so, it seems like a fair time to reset here.

And frankly, despite my skepticism, we actually have meaningful doubt about the result with 10 days left – but not for the reason I thought we’d be up in the air. We have a very different polling picture depending on who you ask, and that’s leading to a situation where it’s unclear what’s happening.

Or, at the very least, you have to choose who you trust.

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If you trust the good people at Mainstreet Research, Rachel Notley will be Premier and it won’t even be particularly close. Without revealing how much their Calgary lead is, the NDP would win the tipping point seat by something like 9% if their Calgary result is correct. Counsel Public Affairs and an NDP internal poll given to the Calgary Herald in response to Janet Brown’s poll back up this general state of affairs, but amongst the other pollsters, it’s an unpopular view.

Punt the Janet Brown poll from your minds, you still have Ipsos and Research Co having UCP leads in Calgary and Angus Reid and Sovereign North having sufficiently small NDP leads as to still elect the UCP, and the smaller sample newer Abacus also showing a UCP lead. On average, I have the NDP up 0.8% in the Calgary CMA, and Bryan Breguet has that lead at 1.8%, so not even a methods argument gets you to an NDP lead in seats.

What we have is an electoral map that is shrinking the closer we get to the election – Lesser Slave Lake, Leduc, and Fort Sask-Vegreville are exiting stage left, and what we have left is an election where the NDP need to win 8 of Lethbridge East, Banff, Morinville St. Albert, and Calgarys Bow, Acadia, Foothills, Glenmore, Elbow, and North West. Now, they can do it – and Bow and Acadia should be relatively easy gains, on the whole – but if they have a bad local result they’re essentially fucked, and that’s an uncomfortable place to be in.

The fundamental problem for the NDP is they need to pull off an inside straight because realistically, they have 46 seats they can win. Win all 9 of the ones I said they need to win 8 of, and beyond that, there’s no immediate next seat to win. Maybe I’m just low on the NDP in the Edmonton donut (though I’ve made a methods tweak to account for it) and Strathcona Sherwood Park is really in play for seat 46. But beyond that, the pickings are slim.

Does it mean that the NDP can’t win? Fuck no – again, in a scenario where Mainstreet is right – or even directionally correct – we’re likely to get a result that seems closer than it is, aka the NDP win a small majority but to say that they almost lost the election isn’t actually fair, because the tipping point seat won’t have been particularly close.

But it does mean you have to believe that Mainstreet alone in the last few days is speaking truth, because Abacus saw a massive swing left immediately after the Hitler comments and a big swing back, but Mainstreet isn’t seeing that swing back. Next week we’ll see a Leger I’m sure and I can say we’ll get a CBC/Janet Brown, but that’s all secondary to the fundamental question of what I think will happen, which is actually what readers want because for some reason, y’all have decided I have insight worth listening to.

The NDP’s chances of winning this election are comparable to the Oilers in the Peter Chiarelli era, who were capable of winning any game on the ice but frequently didn’t. The NDP has the chance to win for two reasons – Rachel Notley is a consistently more liked and more trusted leader than Danielle Smith, and there is a global fucking realignment going on of urban and suburban social liberals away from right wing parties that means that, polls aside, the case for why the NDP is having a surge this time around is explicable. In the same way, the Oilers walking into every game with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl meant they could never be written off.

But in the same way that Chiarelli saddled that team with bloated contracts and shitty goalies and dumbass decisions at all times, the NDP have structural problems that mean their assets cannot always be enough. The Global Fucking Realignment is a win for them in a net sense, but it is fair to say that it takes Lesser Slave Lake and Camrose and wherever else had NDP MLAs in 2015 from reaching the same share of the vote. The dynamic that helps the NDP in Calgary has made 2015 NDP voters in these sorts of regional towns more UCP friendly, and that means that projecting those seats to go Orange was never going to be borne out in reality.

What will be borne out in the next 10 days is whether or not Notley can thread the needle and get the inside straight to land. It’s a hard path and one that failing to decisively win the debate makes much harder, but the path for an NDP government still exists. But it is as much intellectual and statistical malpractice to overstate the likelihood of an unlikely but plausible outcome as it is to deny that it’s still plausible.

I could sit here and pretend to be an objective analyst but I’m not. I want an NDP government badly, because I think Danielle Smith is the most genuinely terrifying conservative in this country. I do not fear the prospects of a Pierre Poilievre government or the lived experience of a Doug Ford one like I do Smith. She is psychotic, authoritarian, and completely and utterly fucking nuts. And she is likely going to win again in 10 days.

I do not like what I am predicting, and if Quito Maggi is able to dunk on me on the 30^th as a non-believer, I will gladly take it because it means this country has one less crazy person in a position of power. But just because I want it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

Danielle Smith is clearly favoured with 10 days left. I don’t like that fact, but it’s true. The NDP have a real path from here, but don’t confuse that they have one with it being likely. It’s clearly advantage Smith from here, and any partisans who tell you otherwise are the ones acting in bad faith.