Calgary Polls And The NDP's Path

On Janet Brown

Today marked the closest thing to a Canadian nerd polling holiday, with CBC Calgary’s release of a Calgary-only poll from the best pollster in Alberta, Janet Brown. It’s a treasure drove of data, and given the fact that we can write in pen the results of all but maybe 4 non-Calgary seats, it’s a much more valuable exercise than a traditional provincial poll.

If we take Janet Brown’s poll of Calgary at face value, and say that the NDP would win 18 seats the city, then we have the interesting question of trying to count out the remaining map. There’s a broad consensus that the NDP will flip back the one UCP seat in Edmonton, allowing for a 20 seat sweep there. If they hold St. Alberta and Lethbridge West, seats they held after 2019, then they’re at a notional 40 seats.

Banff, Lethbridge East, and Sherwood Park should go NDP, meaning the NDP can get to 43 – or, one short of a majority. But beyond that, the pickings outside of Calgary are fairly slim – I don’t buy Lesser Slave Lake flipping, and then the outer-Edmonton suburbs seats aren’t close enough to flip on provincial swing (though, the NDP finally got a high quality recruit in Fort Sask-Vegreville), so it comes down to Calgary.

And right now, they’re one seat short.

…

The poll’s main insight – beyond the 47%-42% NDP popular vote lead in the city, of course – was probably the massive gap in opinion on Rachel Notley and Danielle Smith. Smith only has a positive impression from 29% of the city, while Notley’s at 45%, while Smith’s unfavourables are at 50%, while Notley’s at 30%. Smith is both more polarizing in a vacuum than Notley, but it is worth noting that Notley doesn’t seem to be eliciting the same fervent hatred that saw the NDP knocked out of office.

The problem for the NDP is that the Notley Neutrals, as it were – the 25% of the city with a neutral view of her – aren’t voting NDP. She’s at 45% positive impression and the NDP’s at 47%, which means the group of voters who are neutral on Notley still don’t trust the brand and the rest of the caucus, even if they’re fine with Notley. And that, more than anything, is the story of this campaign.

The NDP has the leadership advantage in this campaign – they have a leader who, plainly, isn’t a fucking crazy person, and it shows in the views of Smith. The gap between Notley’s vote share and her favourables are functionally non-existent, but with Smith, they’re not – if we assume that all 29% of people who have a positive impression of Smith are UCP voters, they’re still getting nearly 1/3^rd of their vote from voters who are neutral or negative on Smith. And that’s the opening for the NDP, and the weakness for Smith.

What the UCP will be banking on is that this election becomes UCP versus NDP, whereas the NDP want this to turn into Rachel Notley versus Danielle Smith, for obvious reasons. The NDP brand in Alberta is substantially weaker than Notley’s personal one, and the UCP’s brand – or just the brand of any party with the name “Conservative” in it – is stronger than Smith’s. Especially in Calgary, where Smith’s brand of cultural firebrand politics go over much worse than in Fort Mac or Camrose.

The battle of the campaign will be two-fold – both parties will be trying to shore up their weak flank, while also trying to draw out the opposition’s weak flank. There’s a reason Notley’s been having her prospective cabinet out making announcements in recent weeks – so that they can seem more credible to the province. The other part of that credibility will come from policy, which is helped by Notley commissioning policy work from outside the party apparatus in recent weeks.

The UCP will try and do a similar thing – keep Smith in controlled situations and have her make announcements that make her seem more personable, less extreme, and more moderate. Today’s announcement on health is an attempt to start that process, and presumably the efforts to have her shut the fuck up about COVID, pardons, and pastors is also for this purpose.

What the NDP have to do is try not to just focus on their ascendent message, but actually reassure voters who don’t like Smith that they’re not a risk. The key swing constituency in that poll is the outer ring of the city, which is where the wealthy, fiscally conservative socially liberal voters in Calgary live. If the NDP are going to win, they need to win 2015 PCAA voters in the kinds of areas that elected Jim Prentice, Ric McIver, Sandra Jansen, and Greg Clark (as an Alberta Party MLA). These seats, mostly in the northwest and the southeast, are where government will be won or lost, and the voters that will win it for the NDP are instinctively distrustful of their economic credibility.

Whether that’s fair or not, the group of voters that could tip the NDP back over the line is not the 2015 NDP coalition, when they won Lesser Slave Lake and Camrose and Peace River, but this time it’ll be by trading those voters for lawyers and bankers in outer Calgary, who got hit by the Notley tax rise of 2015 but think Danielle Smith is a nutter. It seems safe to say these voters prefer Notley, but they also prefer lower taxes and economic competence.

This poll makes clear what the NDP have to do – they have to paint the UCP not just as dangerous ideologues, but as economic idiots. They need to take a message that the UCP is led by a crazy person and expand it to they’re not to be trusted on the economy. That the safe pair of hands, Finance Minister Travis Toews, is retiring helps this argument, and allows the NDP to take a specific weakness and make it a broader narrative about Take Back Alberta, Danielle Smith, and the UCP at large.

Jason Kenney managed to avoid getting Lake Of Fire’d in 2019 despite candidates with bad and offensive comments on homosexuality because he wasn’t seen, for good or for ill, as a crazy. The UCP back then had a veneer of sensibleness and a leader that most people trusted was up to the job. Now, they don’t, and the vanguards against insanity are gone. If the NDP can’t make that an economic risk as well as a story about offensive comments, they don’t deserve to win.

If the NDP can flip some more of the voters who are neutral on Notley their way, government is there. If they can’t get beyond the people who like Notley, they’ll come up just short. And if they do, they’ll have to live with the consequences for the next four years of likely craziness.