Global Courant 2023-05-26 16:00:00
In getting former MLA Blake Pedersen recommendationthe New Democrats claimed one of the most traveled political beasts in Alberta.
He was elected Wildrose MLA in Medicine Hat in 2012 along with then leader Danielle Smith. When she crossed the floor to Jim Prentice’s Progressive Conservatives, so did Pedersen, and then in 2015 took political blows from the same party he now supports.
He spent most of his time between then and 2023 support for the Alberta Partywho is not a candidate on the current Pedersen board, or in 78 percent of Alberta constituencies.
Another ex-MLA whose plug has touted the NDP is former PC Secretary Doug Griffiths. He has wanted nothing to do with the UCP since Jason Kenney founded that party, and he had also lost his allegiance to the Alberta party until now.
Throughout the campaign and months before, Rachel Notley’s party has shrouded itself in shades of blue. They hoped to appeal to multitudes of undecided former Tories who felt Smith was too extreme for their tastes, and carve out a large enough chunk of Kenney’s 2019 UCP base to win.
New polls suggest the NDP has mostly failed to pick up on those wayward conservatives. What they have managed to do, however, is absorb all the past Alberta Party voters who had nowhere to go after that faction fell into relative obscurity.
According to the new Janet Brown Opinion Research poll for CBC News, Smith’s party has 52 percent of picky and determined voters province-wide, compared to 44 percent for Notley’s, and one percent for the Alberta Party and the same for some other minorities. parties.
Compare that to the 2019 election result: 54.9 percent UCP, 32.7 percent NDP, along with the 9.1 percent the Alberta Party got without winning any seats.
According to Brown’s poll, Smith has cost Notley a few points, but almost the entire dim centrist AP option goes orange this year, in the most binary election Alberta has had in generations.
The center right is united behind the UCP and now the center left is more fully united behind the NDP. This is Alberta, so that’s nowhere near a tie.
It seems the UCP’s relentless focus on the economy and taxation — and playing stereotypes about how the NDP handles both — may hold the Kenney coalition together. This may have been enough to counter all the unsavory things Albertans discovered about Smith and her party, from her 2021 comment comparing vaccine advocates to the cheerful Germans who let Nazism riseto the ethics commissioner’s report finding her in violation of a 2023 attempt to interfere with the justice system, and a UCP candidate’s description of transgender children in inhuman terms.
On Thursday, two much more popular conservatives rallied behind the UCP in hopes of strengthening the right-wing coalition and keeping the grassroots motivated.
Then the party placed that of federal leader Pierre Poilièvre endorsement videoit used the title “Let’s bring it home”, while former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s appearance at a rally on Thursday had a similar ring to it.
Jason Kenney’s UCP received 55 percent of the vote in Alberta in 2019, winning a landslide majority. Smith’s party has 52 percent in Janet Brown’s latest poll, but the rest of the electorate consolidating behind the NDP is likely to see a much smaller gap in seats won. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
It may be just a temporary, fragile unity around a leader who has given candidates a lot of headaches at the door; but it is a party that seems united when it counts at the end of the campaign.
And leadership accountability appears to have cut both ways in the election, with Brown’s poll showing Smith and Notley tied at 42 percent.
The battlefield, as always
In Calgary, Notley’s name still means more (or brand less) than Smith’s — with a five-point lead for the NDP leader in and around Alberta’s largest city, according to Brown’s poll.
And with Calgary’s gap at just three points, there are signs that the NDP has done more than just boast all former Alberta Party voters, but also eaten up UCP margins.
The race has tightened since the last subscriber-only poll, which Brown conducted — and that’s someone leaked to Postmediaapparently hoping to derail the narratives surrounding NDP-friendly polls.
The UCP’s lead in the Calgary region has shifted from 12 to three points in recent weeks in May. As that regional subset includes satellite cities where the NDP barely shows up, such as Okotoks, Airdrie and Chestermere, the two parties may be closer together in Calgary, the election’s top prize with 26 seats.
But a tie or near-tie is likely to translate into a clean win for the UCP, as the seat tally means the NDP must decisively dominate Alberta’s largest city for a chance to overwhelm the massive firewall of dozens of seats that Smith will control in rural and small town Alberta.
Everyone wants a piece of the old Tory/UCP blue voice, and Notley and Smith dressed the part during last week’s debate. (CBC/YouTube screenshot)
Of course, this is just one poll, albeit one by the most highly regarded pollster in Alberta. And skeptics and pro-NDP optimists may look suspiciously at some anomalous results in the poll, which shows a big lead for the UCP among 18- to 24-year-old Albertans (57 percent to 36, a reversal of typical demographic trends). but that’s a small sample of 142 within a 1200 person poll.
But the gap between first and second, centre-right and centre-left, remains wide, and it is in many publicly released surveys.
The United Conservative coalition that Kenney built and then lost control of does not seem to have eroded, Smith’s generally attractive economic stances appearing more important than her other woollier positions that the NDP has surrounded with emergency flash beacons.
With Smith, the Wildrose movement has consumed enough of the old progressive conservative base to care less that the disgruntled types who had previously flirted with the Alberta party are now New Democrats.
The CBC News random survey of 1,200 Albertans was conducted using a hybrid method between May 12 and 24 by Edmonton-based Trend Research led by Janet Brown Opinion Survey. The sample is representative of regional, age and gender factors. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For subsets, the margin of error is larger.
The survey used a hybrid method where respondents were contacted by phone and offered the option to complete the survey at that time, at another more convenient time, or to receive an email link and the survey online. Trend Research contacted people using a random list of numbers, consisting of both landlines and mobile numbers. Phone numbers were called up to five times at five different times of the day before another phone number was added to the sample. The response rate was 5.35 percent.
