The lesson from Nova Scotia

In Newfoundland and Labrador these past few days some local adherents of the Orange Creed – that’s New Democrats, not Protestants or Dutch – have been buoyed by the success of their Nova Scotia brothers and sisters.

Others have been talking about the prospect of local New Democrats doing the same thing here that Darrell Dexter and his party did in persuading Nova Scotians to take a chance on voting NDP.

Therein lies the first lesson local New Democrats should learn:  Darrell and the crew didn’t ask Nova Scotians to “take a chance” on anything.  They presented a professional, credible alternative to the other two parties. 

There was no chance involved.

There was a choice.

A few years ago, the Nova Scotian Dippers were like other labourites.  Being a New Democrat was to be part of a social cause or a social group, not a bunch who seriously thought of winning an election.  That’s not unusual. Other labour parties have gone through the same thing.  The Labour Party in Britain once cherished ideological purity over electoral success.  So too did New Democratic parties across Canada.

But, like those other labourites elsewhere,  the Nova Scotian New Democrats decided it was better to be in office than standing impotent on the sidelines with their ideological purity intact.

That’s the second lesson the local New Democrats need to learn:  there is no substitute for power.  You can have all the lovely ideas you want but if you don’t win the election it’s just as well to order another round at the Ship and explain your theory to the bottom of a pint of Guinness.

You get to win by organizing.  Find volunteers.  Get people who know how to organize. Raise money and put it in the bank.  Find candidates.  Reach out and bring new people and new ideas into the fold.

Inevitably, there will be a crowd who will get pissed at the loss of ideological purity, but that’s the price of shedding the sack-cloth and the stench of burning martyr and donning the mantle of government.

Equally inevitably, for every old bolshevik who abandons ship for the Greens, there’ll be two or more new people who either weren’t in politics before or who defect from another team.

The two major parties don’t get elected because people vote the way their parents and grandparents did.  That’s a convenient excuse dreamed up by someone who just can’t face facts. 

The two major parties get elected because they hold onto a cadre of supporters and then add on a whole bunch of people who change their votes from time to time. The other two major parties appeal to voters with the platforms and promises by finding out what voters are looking for and then offering it to them.  Put another way, they get elected by building coalitions of people who have similar views or who can find enough reasons to vote for one team over another. 

That’s basically what politics is about:  bringing people together and that should be what New Democrats do naturally.

But they don’t.  Instead, they try to not just distinguish themselves but drive a wedge between themselves and voters.  New Democrats of the old school make it seem like it is a sign of moral weakness to have voted for the other two parties at some point.  Before one can vote New Democrat one must first  admit the sins of ones voting past.

That’s the essence of that common NDP refrain that the other two parties are all alike.  Predictably, it turns voters off.

Think about that for a second and then look at two New Democrat leaders.

Think about Jack Layton, he of the “they are all alike” school.

And then think about Darrell Dexter.

If you can perceive the differences, and you are a New Democrat, then you are well on your way to learning the Lesson from Nova Scotia. You are well on your way to bringing a genuinely competitive alternative to voters.

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Nova Scotia goes orange

They did it the old-fashioned way, working district by district and over a number of years to build up the party and its infrastructure.

“I've believed right from the beginning that we had to move the party into a mainstream position where we were in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people,” he [NDP leader Darrell Dexter] said before the start of this campaign.

“I think people have begun to realize that the values that the New Democratic Party stand for are the values of the people of the province and it's just a matter of how we go about presenting them.”

There’s a lesson in there for some people.

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Nova Scotia Election checklist

The seats to watch, via labradore, with rationale.

Commentary that beats the shite out of most of the stuff coming from the people who get paid to make commentary like this.

Yes, Don, that includes you.

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Bluenose Dippers in front: Angus Reid

A poll by Angus Reid for CTV shows the Nova Scotia New Democrats with 47% support heading into Tuesday’s general election, ahead of the Liberals at 26%, the progressive Conservatives at 23% and the Greens at 3%.

The online poll, conducted June 1 and 2, reports a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The new poll, which is considerably more comprehensive in its detail than recent efforts by Halifax-based Corporate research Associates shows Nova Scotians looking for change. 

The poll also tracks apparent vote switching, with the New Democrats holding on to their 2006 votes and adding chunks from both other major parties.  The Angus Reid/CTV poll also carried enough detail to look at the geographic distribution of votes, something that would be important for trying to predict seat counts:

In contrast, the NDP appears to have gained broad-based support both regionally and politically. The party holds the upper hand in most regions except rural Cape Breton (where the Tories lead) and the Annapolis Valley (where the Liberals are ahead). While holding on to 83 per cent of their vote from the last election—the highest vote retention of any contending party—the NDP is drawing about a third of voters (31%) who backed the Liberals in 2006 and a quarter (26%) of respondents who supported the Tories. NDP voters are also more likely to vote than supporters of the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, suggesting that even a low turnout will not slow Dexter’s momentum.

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NS election: undecideds dominate

Forget what you’ve seen reported.

Take a look at the Corporate Research Associates quarterly poll results since early 2008, adjust them to take out the “percentage of decideds” skew and it’s pretty clear that no political party in Nova Scotia is lighting anyone on fire.

There’s what you get and it really isn’t pretty.

With the exception of the poll taken in the first two weeks of May 2009, “undecided” more Nova Scotians are undecided than are opting for any one of the three major political parties.
 
The New Democrats may wind up on top in next week’s vote, but that’s just the way the electoral system works.  It sure won’t be because there is any massive excitement among Nova Scotians for an orange option.  Blue and Red are in worse shape.

Leadership certainly isn’t a factor.  Sure, CRA asks which leader Nova Scotians prefer and sure the NDP guy comes out on top.

But when asked to rank the issues, leadership comes out as the big issue for a mere five percent of respondents in the poll done in the second half of May.

According to that poll, the top issues are health care funding (37%) and dealing with economic concerns (33%).  The next most frequently mentioned issue  - education funding – comes in at a mere 11%.

That’s interesting because the NDP are pushing Darrel Dexter above all in what has become a fairly typical “Big Giant Head” type of campaign.  But  - stealing an approach from the federal Conservatives - the Nova Scotia New Democrats are making seven key commitments.  The top two are the economy and health care.  Stephen Harper only needed five commitments, incidentally.

Ditto the Liberals, at least as far as making the party leader the centrepiece.  That’s a weird choice given that the guy doesn’t poll all that well in comparison to others and – if CRA is correct – the leader ain’t the vote driver. The Nova Scotia Grits also have seven ideas at the heart of their plan, the second and third of which are health care and the economy.

The Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives are in trouble.  Google the party and the information that comes back claims the party is led by some guy named Hamm. If the party website can’t get any more up-to-date, then there are issues here that help explain the Tory’s consistently crappy polling and why they are likely to be headed for the opposition benches for a while.

The Progressive Conservatives play down their leader a bit – hint:  it ain’t Hamm -  which is understandable if the polling is right. The party platform has five core areas and the top one is the economy. The second one is also the economy, expressed as “rural development”.  The third and forth are about crime and “defending” Nova Scotia while the fifth is another traditional Nova Scotia economic engine:  the political pork feast of roads and infrastructure.

If you look at all three parties, neither of them is really hammering away at health issues or the economy, at least as far as their news releases are concerned. 

For an outsider watching the election from afar, media coverage wouldn’t suggest the election is a hot topic.  Take a gander at the Chronicle Herald website and find any highlight of election coverage. Try and find it.  CBC has the standard [Insert the name of the jurisdiction here] Votes [Insert Year Here] but the web space is nothing to write home about. those are just two.  The actual on-air coverage from the electronics, plus Connie TV’s Steve Murphy or Global might be different.

Something suggests, though, that the election isn’t turning anybody’s crank in a big way.

That, rather than the idea the New Democrats will be the government, might turn out to be the story next week:  “Nova Scotia had an election and they swapped one minority government for another;  see you again in a year or so.”

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NS election: Undecideds double in two weeks

The number of undecided voters in the Nova Scotia general election doubled in the second half of May compared to first half, according to two polls from Halifax-based Corporate Research Associates.

In a poll taken in early May only 17% of respondents were undecided or weren’t planning to vote.  In the second poll, 33% of respondents were undecided. 

The second poll covered a larger sample (834) than the first poll (627). The first poll was conducted from May 7 to May 16.  The second poll as conducted between May 18 and May 30.  CRA reports the margin of error for both polls as 3.9% for the first poll and 3.4% for the second, 19 times out of 20.

Support for the front running New Democrats dropped from 30.7% to 29.5%.  Liberal support dropped from 25.7% to 18.8% and Progressive Conservative support dropped from 23.2% to 17.4%.

Interpretation of the poll in conventional media relies on dealing only with decided voters. Thus, CBC concludes that “support for the NDP has risen sharply to 44 per cent from 37 per cent” while ignoring the change in undecideds.

There is no indication that Corporate Research Associates probes undecideds in the two polls, completed as part of CRA’s quarterly omnibus polling in Atlantic  Canada.

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And they’re off…

to a bad start in Nova Scotia.

Well, bad start if you are Premier Rodney MacDonald trying to explain that a budget which is in the red is supposedly in the black but only if a piece of legislation was changed to allow the government to divert cash from debt reduction to program spending.

How much the budget is out of whack depends on who is doing the math, apparently, but there’s no doubt the government budget bill  brought in spending higher than revenues.

That alls sounds rather odd in a province where the government has flatly rejected any balanced budget commitments, let alone mandating it in law.  They’ve even rejected investing massive gobs of cash flowing from offshore oil prices, preferring instead to save them up – temporarily – to cover deficits in at least the next two fiscal years.

How much cash?

$1.8 billion, apparently, of which $1.3 billion will cover the overspending in the current fiscal year.

Nova Scotians, meanwhile, will head to the polls June 9 to elect a new government.  The opposition teamed up to defeat MacDonald’s minority Tory government on a confidence vote on the budget measures.

The opposition parties can’t promise they wouldn’t also bring in a deficit budget if they win the election.

The stakes are high, though with all three parties apparently polling around the same numbers.  As some astute Nova Scotian observers have pointed out in the past, the New Democrats may have a tougher time of things than it appears since their votes appear clustered in several areas and are therefore considered “less efficient” when it comes to winning seats across the province.

Sign of the high stakes came early with the release in early April by an unnamed Liberal campaign worker of a photograph of New Democrat candidate, actress Lenore Zann. The photo shows Zann topless and comes from her appearance on the cable show The L Word.

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Related:  Issues, via Canadian Press