Two thirds of tax filers in Newfoundland and Labrador report incomes of less than $35,000 per year.
The Harris-Decima poll released by the Newfoundland and labrador Association of Public Employees on Wednesday has only 27% of the sample with an income less than $40,000 per year.
Still, the results show that the provincial government either didn’t have a communications strategy or whatever strategy they had failed miserably.
In fact, it was a stunning, utter, complete, abject failure of their entire communications effort.
What’s more, allowing for the the skew in this polling toward the wealthier urbanites in the province, the results suggest that the old Tory base in St. John’s is gone and won’t be coming back to the fold without lots of really hard work.
Respondents have no confidence in this government’s budget or its forecasts. They do, however, have confidence in the economy. That’s a potentially dangerous combination. People are apparently prepared to decouple the administration from the economy. When people do that, they are open to tossing the incumbents out and letting someone else take over, provided the new people don’t offer any threats to the economy.
Try as they might, there’s no sign the Conservatives – who the public trust less and less anyway – have had any luck scaring people into believing that the NDP are some sort of huge threat to the future.
No one knows for sure when the next election will come so these results could make the next election very interesting. As people learned again in British Columbia on Tuesday, campaigns do matter.
But that’s a subject for another post.
For this post, just realise that parties in the kind of political jam the Conservatives face have a very hard time coming back from the kind of self-skewering the NAPE poll is showing.
A very hard time.
-srbp-