Alberta: Smith In Control

A Mea Culpa

I was wrong.

Obviously, after today’s run of polls where Abacus and Mainstreet swung right in Calgary and Ipsos also put up a very good Calgary number, it is wrong to still currently believe that the NDP are favourites to win this election, and it’s a position I’ve already disavowed on Twitter (but willingly do again in these pages). Where part of me wants to argue is whether I was wrong for believing on the weekend that Notley was favoured.

It’s clearly turned out wrong, but given how bad the UCP’s first 10 days were and the trendline we were getting, I’m not sure it was necessarily wrong to think they were favoured. But at this point it’s a fairly academic argument that I’m mostly just pre-arguing with in a vain attempt to save my mentions, because barring a debate debacle from Danielle Smith, this seems pretty cut and dried that it’s a UCP government.

And honestly, I was gonna be writing a version of this even before the bad polls.

…

This was the Tuesday board of all the seats in Alberta – which is not my current projection, to be clear – and the most notable part of it for me is how few extra seats the NDP can go get. Morinville-St. Alberta could go – it’s a classic version of a seat design I know well, a suburban-rural combo seat where there’s two halves to the electorate. In this case, it’s suburban St. Albert and some other shit, in the same way the riding I’m currently typing from is the Ottawa suburb of Kanata and then a bunch of shit west of the Capital including Carp right up to the Arnprior border.

Beyond Morinville, the options are slim. Calgary Peigan exists, but Peigan voted 6% right of North West in 2019 so that’s a big lift. Lesser Slave Lake was always a pipe dream based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic fact that the NDP’s elevated polling in the regions was based on either bad polling, undecideds not being treated as de facto UCP voters, or sheer delusion, and beyond that, there’s almost nothing else close. And that was fine when those were all the seats needed for seat 45. But now? I don’t think it will be.

Right now, I have the NDP winning Lethbridge East, but in my gut I don’t think they’ll win it. Rural voters are coming home to the UCP, which makes all the sense in the world given the (say it with me y’all, you know where this is going) Global Fucking Realignment, and if you asked me right now, by the end of the campaign, the UCP will survive the rural swing by enough to stop Lethbridge East falling. Remember, for all the assumptions made about it, the UCP still won it by 14% last time, and that’s where the NDP’s chances fall apart.

Maybe this is evidence that the NDP were never favoured and I was an idiot for saying it, but the NDP have such a narrow path to victory that even if today’s Abacus poll is to be ignored and its old one put back in the model, I’m not sure it’s plausible. The fact the NDP has had a fairly hard ceiling in my model even at the best of times was why I never believed in them for months and months, and it’s clear this skepticism was correct.

I’m not going for defeatism, and there is still a sizable chance that the NDP can win – it’s called Danielle Smith goes on a massive bozo eruption at the debate, which is not insubstantial. But it’s hard to deny that the NDP find themselves in a corner, be it of their own making or of circumstance.

It’s possible we will look back at the results of the election and conclude that the NDP never could have won, that the path didn’t actually exist to 44 seats and that we should have known better than to believe it, or at least believe it at this point. That’s a very possible outcome with the benefit of hindsight. It’s also possible that the NDP aren’t in such a terminal state, because for a given swing in the Edmonton CMA, more of that swing is in the airquotes “Greater” bits of the Edmonton CMA, and less pronounced in the city. If that’s true, then Morinville St. Albert probably is a tossup.

But what we do know now is that banking on that, or banking on Lethbridge East as the for sure gain that a lot of people (myself included) were doing for months, or banking on Lesser Slave Lake, is an industrial sized vial of copium designed not to reflect reality but to convince people that this isn’t as dire as it is. Right now, the NDP are in a very bad spot if their goal is to actually win this election.

Will this result be a win for the NDP, given they had 24 seats last Legislature and now they’ll have at least 10-15 more than that? Sure, yeah, if you’re in the business of caring about that, sure. But if you care about an NDP government the case down the stretch has to be perfect – “the UCP’s internal crises are costing you money” has to be the answer. It has the added benefit of being true, but it also has the key advantage of being able to refract every NDP commitment through it.

“We want to eliminate corporate tax for small businesses”, “we want to lower power prices”, and “Danielle Smith thinks the vaccinated are like Nazi sympathizers” seem like disparate messages, but the way back, if there is to be one, will run through convincing Calgary that their economic policies are better. And running all of the various messages through the lens of UCP infighting and psychosis having a tangible – and economic – cost is the best hope.

Maybe Danielle Smith comes out and says that the unvaccinated went through what gay men did during the AIDS crisis and all of this ends up being a foregone conclusion, but right now the NDP’s in deep shit. Even without the Calgary slippage their hold on 44 seats is increasingly tenuous because of Lethbridge East, and short of Smith lighting herself on fire in the debate, it looks like my months of pessimism were correct. This is the UCP’s race to lose, and barring another Smith bozo eruption I can’t see them losing it.