Conservative Leadership: This Is Over

Also, Charest Campaign Mockery

(News: I’m writing about the CFL now over at TheLines, so my Week 1 column can be found here. Check it out!)

Well, the Conservative Leadership race is officially over now, so this will be my last column on it.

Okay, so maybe I’m slightly misusing the word officially, but I can’t see how this isn’t over, and so my hope is that this column can be the last time I have to write about this race and I can spend the summer pivoting back to America, prepping for Alberta next year, and covering all the angles for a Poilievre-Trudeau (or Freeland) General Election in 2025. Because even though we have to pretend this is a real race for the next three months, it’s not one.

If you go by Q1 Fundraising or Google Trends, you see a Skippy landslide, if you go by polls of Conservative voters, you see a huge Skippy lead (and moderates always get overvalued in polls of voters compared to when the members vote), but the theory of the case otherwise has always been Patrick Brown’s ability to sign up heavily ethnic minority members to vote for him on masse and overwhelm the old membership.

On Friday, Brown announced he had signed up 150000 members, a number big enough to provisionally change my tune of my adamance that the leadership race was over, and so I built a little model and played around with it. At 150000 members and reasonable assumptions for the others, Pierre could have been in some danger. Depending on the exact number, Skippy would either just barely lose the leadership or just barely win it, depending on whether he signed up 100k members or 150k.

And then Pierre signed up 311k, and the leadership is over.

…

This is what a reasonable estimate of the first round of the CPC leadership race will probably look like, based on the membership numbers so far and some guesses for the rest. This is a votes model, not a points model, which is one of those things that matters if this is close and doesn’t matter at all in a blowout, and this is looking like a blowout.

On these numbers, Skippy wins on the third ballot on Baber’s exclusion, but even if he doesn’t win on that exclusion, he’d win on Lewis’, or even Jeb!’s, because not all Charest supporters will be Brown next. (Also this is a model that assumes no exhaust, but it’s worth remembering that some number of people will vote for one or two candidates and not them all, and exhausted ballots always helps the guy with a lead on first preferences.)

If you’re curious what a final round looks like, and therefore what kind of lead Skippy actually has, then here you go, but this is over.

Yes, there are some number of theoretical swing voters, but there aren’t that many in leadership races. Most of the time, leadership races are like what this model sees for this one – a blowout where the only question is whether the winner gets there on first preferences or not. All 3 of UK Labour’s leadership races under One Member One Vote have been blowouts, Boris v Hunt was a blowout, May v Leadsom was cruising for one before Leadsom dropped out, David Cameron broke two thirds of the members’ vote in 2005. The fact that the 2017 and 2020 leaderships were close – and that DoFo beat Christine Elliott by 153 points (and lost on votes!) – has spoiled us into thinking we get another close one. We won’t. It’s over.

But now, let’s spare a moment for Tasha Kheiriddin, the National Post columnist turned Fournier backed contender for the Leadership who dropped out to work for Charest, who has the fucking quote of the year on Twitter trying to dismiss Skippy’s chances. No, I’m not making this up, yes I have checked to make sure it’s not a fake account, and no, I’m really not making this up, I’m not clever enough to.

“It’s not about numbers.”

“It’s not about numbers.”

“It’s not about numbers.”

The fuck are you smoking? It’s not about numbers? Are you fucking kidding me? How have you not been fired yet?

Like, her point is (kind of) not completely insane – it’s about points, not votes, and so yadda yadda yadda, efficiency, whatever. They’re in third and they’re trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, sure. I get it all. But holy fucking shit, this is the greatest quote of all time.

“It’s not about numbers” is like saying an F1 race isn’t about drivers – like, yes, it doesn’t matter if George Russell or Lance Stroll are driving a Mercedes, they’re going to do better than George used to do in his old shitbox of a Williams, but also George has an extra like 27 points than Valtteri Bottas did through 7 races last year, so even though there’s some reasonable point buried beneath the shit, it’s not even actually true. (Editor’s Note: Are we sure Stroll in this year’s Merc would finish ahead of George in a Williams? Stroll would still probably crash it.)

I am clearly no fan of Charest’s, so this pathetic spectacle in some ways brings me joy, but also, this is making me sad. Charest, despite all the corruption and uselessness and shit governing, did make it so I don’t have to pass through customs to buy Steamys or go to Dorchester Square, so for that, if nothing else, I don’t enjoy seeing him brought down like this.

The race is over, and the desperation of the Brown and Charest campaigns to suggest it isn’t is the clearest sign it is – but also, like, my model has Skippy winning by 26%. It’s over, and so is my coverage of it on this site. On to Alberta!