NDP: Irrelevance, Here We Come

On The Other Byelection Story

So, I know a lot of the attention in the aftermath of Monday’s byelections has been on the pathetic results the Tories put out – and I certainly stand by everything I said about the Tories last night – but there’s another party with questions to answer after last night, and that’s the NDP, who are now 5/5 on losing vote share at byelections this Parliament. Allegedly, they’re polling at or above 20% nationally, but their vote is going down everywhere.

Now, in part that can be summed up by local factors – in Portage, some NDPers (and Liberals) might have gone to the CPC to stop Bernier, in NDG-Westmount the Greens were running their deputy leader, in Oxford and Mississauga the Liberals ran squeeze campaigns – but it’s still true to point out their polls are not matching the reality. And that’s the thing about the NDP – we know what’s going to happen the second a campaign starts.

And it’s gonna end in tears.

…

What happens in normal times with a government that is polling badly is that their voters scramble to find any life boat at a byelection, picking sometimes ideologically incoherent ways of expressing their displeasure. Hilariously, the Oxford result would make complete sense if this was a Conservative government – they lose some votes, the opposition gets more concentrated, and the incumbent party retains – but what is wild is that the Liberals are gaining as their polls decline more.

I’ve made the point before, but a poll where the CPC have a lead because the NDP is at 22 is fundamentally worthless, because when the election comes we’ll get the classic squeeze campaign and the NDP vote will fall in behind the Liberals. It is history in this country, a heritage moment in both its simplicity and its consistency. Every campaign the NDP tries to tell us it is different, but the one time it wasn’t – 2011 – the Liberals were the ones who got in behind the NDP. Third parties don’t poll 25% in Canada, they poll 19%.

The one exception to this was Ontario last year, but the problem there wasn’t the fact that both left wing parties got 24% but the fact that the two of them could only combine for 48% of the vote because both options were electorally repellent to voters. In this case, the Conservatives have limited forward momentum, it’s just that the left splitting more efficiently in the polls produces a CPC plurality in seats.

I’m not saying that the polls are even necessarily wrong – I do not believe that right now 21% of people say they’ll vote NDP, or that those 21% are lying. I think what it is is that people genuinely believe this now, but they won’t believe it when the time comes. We’ve seen this too many fucking times to genuinely be surprised when “fuck, I can’t actually risk the Tories” works again. At some point, the NDP are Charlie Brown, and so are their believers.

These byelections give one hell of a boost to the idea that when the chips are down the NDP vote will crash back, because it’s both logical and obvious. The NDP do not have the ability to stop the Conservatives in most places, and with the fears around the Tories – which the campaign in Portage-Lisgar will give the Liberals plenty more to work with – higher now than under O’Toole, the pull factor back to the Liberals will be higher. And Jagmeet isn’t the right leader to save the party.

At some point we have to acknowledge that Jagmeet’s role as a leader that is broadly inoffensive to large swathes of Liberal voters isn’t a good strategy for the NDP, because the voters who like Jagmeet won’t actually vote for his party – either because of First Past The Post or genuinely preferring Trudeau. And in that case, running a leader this Liberal friendly, this urban-focused, and this elite will have the effect of ending careers in Northern Ontario and non-Vancouver BC. We have a Conservative Party that is prioritizing Kootenay over Kitchener, and a NDP leader who seems willing to cede that ground in a futile attempt to go from 10% to 14% in Oakville.

In the same way the CPC just showed that politics is choices last night – that the effort to kill Bernier’s career caused Ben Carr to nearly double his late father’s margin in 2021 – the NDP are similarly unwilling to reckon with what choice to make as a party. And in making no choice, they’re having events happen to them, as opposed to influencing them. Why were the Liberals the ones who could benefit from the CPC infighting in Oxford? Because they had a strategy. The NDP did better in Oxford in 2021 than they did in Ontario or nationally, and even then, they tanked. And they did so because they have completely and utterly lost the plot.

The NDP under Jagmeet is polling well and will lose seats when the election comes. There are a half dozen NDP MPs who should be praying this Parliament goes as long as possible just to ensure they delay the inevitable, but they’re dead as soon as they get to the polls. The gains they’re chasing to make up for Skeena and Timmins going aren’t going to come, because the voters they need have already rejected Jagmeet twice. And now they’re stuck.

If they wanted to save their asses they’d replace Jagmeet with Angus, for whatever my big-L Liberal readers think is their best chance at keeping their small town working class seats and reducing the Tory numbers. But they won’t, because they’re either idiots or cowards. The NDP might be polling great right now, but it’s a fugazi. Jagmeet’s byelection performances show the NDP is on track for a very bad night whenever he forces an election, and the NDP will pay the price for his ego and their cowardice in getting rid of a staggeringly incompetent clown. But, at least their incompetence should put the risk of a vote split electing the Tories to bed.