The NDP Started Something They Couldn't Finish

On Abacus And A Campaign On Life Support

One of my worries about this Alberta election is not, like usual, whether my prediction is correct or not. Right now, I’m quite confident that I’m in the right direction, mostly because it is fundamentally easier to release projections that go against ideological preferences. It’s easy to be relaxed about potential biases given I fucking hate the UCP, so I know if I have them winning or gaining seats it’s a legitimate reason.

What scares me is that when the history of this Legislature and this election is written, this will be written as the UCP inevitably winning this because of the nature of Alberta, and that the NDP had no chance to win against a United right. It’s a fancy narrative, and one I’m sure the NDP will pivot to if and when I’m right in a week, but it underlies the fundamental truth of this campaign and the last three years – the NDP were pushed to a zone they were clearly never meant to go. And now there’ll be four more years of Danielle Smith (or whoever replaces her, if the rumours are right) because of it.

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Right now the UCP are on track for 50 seats in the next Alberta Legislature. They might win more, might win less, but there’s a gap where there’s not much more the NDP can lose beyond that unless the polls get markedly worse – even taking Abacus’ data alone, I’d still have the NDP on 33 seats, only down 4 from reality. The NDP’s floor now is much higher than their 2019 result, and the inroads they are set to make in Calgary do have a long term value in making the province more ready to vote for progressives in the future. But let’s be honest here – 50 UCP seats is a pathetic performance for the NDP.

I wrote in January that the NDP opposition was Milibandian in nature, after the failed campaign of UK Labour Leader Ed in 2015, where there was a policy for stuff but the overall campaign lacked an overall message and strategy. This campaign has exemplified it, where there’s been children’s activity tax credits and new health cards (do y’all really have paper ones? Fucking hell) and a teaching clinic in Lethbridge and absolutely no coherent vision of what an NDP Alberta would look like.

Did I say I liked the first two weeks of the campaign? Yes, because in isolation all of those announcements are good, but also because I’m a political tragic who follows all of this shit to my mental health’s (and my liver’s) detriment and it is hard to always keep perspective on the right amount that normal people pay attention to this shit. And now we’re a week out and the NDP campaign is in free fall.

Let’s have an honest and frank conversation about the state of the polling right now. The NDP are fucked unless Mainstreet is correct, but given that Mainstreet’s province wide polling and the one Calgary seat poll they’ve done don’t agree with each other, not really sure that Mainstreet is even the unambiguous good news for the NDP that it’s sometimes presented as.

If Mainstreet (and to a lesser extent last week’s Angus Reid) are correct then I’ll eat my hat, but I won’t have to, I’m not usually this willing to go out on a limb this close to an election if I’m not sure, and the only time I have ever done it for the right was the 2019 UK election, which ended in tears for the left. Here, I’m not predicting a Corbyn-esque collapse, but it is clear that the NDP are going to massively underperform here.

The NDP did set themselves up as an alternative government and have fundamentally failed to convince people that they need to be in office. They have failed for an eminently predictable reason, which is that their message on Health Care is not believable to the electorate. I don’t care if Danielle Smith actually wants to make doctors visits chargeable, but it is clear that voters do not believe it because it would be so terrible that they cannot conceive of anyone actually doing it.

I said when I went on Ryan Jespersen’s show earlier this year that the “Protect Public Healthcare” line the NDP was trotting out would fail and it has, in the same way it did when Doug Ford did it, for the same reason – nobody actually believes the fundamental basis of the claim, that free at the point of use health care is going anywhere. In the same way that Hillary Clinton stans still say she was right about Roe, it’s a worthless conversation to focus on whether you were right – it’s politicians jobs to convince people you’re right. Notley, like Hillary, seems likely to go down in history as vindicated but useless to stop it.

The reason why is that Notley and her people have been too insular, too myopic, and too unwilling to make the kinds of moves that would win them this election. The Janet Brown/CBC poll showed 45% of Calgary had favourable views of Notley and 29% had a favourable view of Danielle Smith but the vast majority of people who were neutral on Notley were voting for Smith. We know that Notley has failed to capitalize on her marked advantage in leadership, because the Alberta NDP are still captured by being New Democrats.

Do I think the NDP were a name change away from winning this election? No, but they were a culture change away, but the fact that all of the key players in the Alberta NDP were there when they were a minority party focused solely on Edmonton remains. There isn’t an instinctive understanding of Calgary in the NDP in the way they need if they want to win, and that’s why they’re going to lose.

I don’t say this with any joy – Rachel Notley is the Canadian politician closest to me ideologically. I am also a pragmatist first and a progressive second, but the left in Alberta cannot get rid of the shackles of their own membership and their own aspirations. The decision makers in the NDP are substantially more left wing than the voters they need, and their bubbles are apparent when they make arguments that no normal person will believe.

If the NDP takes this as a success you might as well disband the party, because while it is a success at a very basic level it is a monumental failure. They could have won, if they had known how to. They didn’t, because when the moment got real, they choked this election away. The solution is a new leader – and it 100000000% has to be a Calgarian, but more importantly the person who can win the centre and left an election probably voted for Jim Prentice. And I don’t know how ready the NDP is for that.

The problem the NDP had is they ran a campaign that failed to understand the voters they needed to win in the macro – they picked off a few key targeted promises, but in the aggregate this hasn’t been a campaign about embracing Calgarians who support them on gay rights and vaccination but disagree on taxation. This has been a campaign around winning because Smith was so awful, instead of winning because what you have to offer is any good.

In 2019 the NDP campaign spent the entire time trying to recreate the electoral magic of Lake Of Fire, but the difference is Lake Of Fire was organically outrageous, and the NDP’s attempts to make everything controversial since then a redux has failed. The NDP spent today trying to trot out some bullshit about a secret agenda, which is the surest sign in politics that someone is losing.

I get that losing is hard and admitting it is even harder, but the NDP have lost an election they should have won because they were not ready for the moment when the chips were down. They were, to slightly misquote The Smiths, pushed to a zone and they were clearly never meant to go there. The NDP are institutionally incapable of being ready for the moment, and their imminent loss reflects it. They’ll have four years to fix it, or else they’ll have wasted their best chance to save their province.