The provincial election campaign a decidedly nastier turn on Monday. Conservative leader Paul Davis is trying his best to save the party’s furniture.
Davis’ best is nasty stuff.
Davis called Dwight Ball a liar.
Rarely does one politician openly attack another using words like that. They try to remain civil and respectful. Davis is the first Premier since Confederation who, facing imminent defeat at the polls, has thrown any trace of decency out the window.
“It was a previous Liberal government that wanted to actually privatize Hydro. This particular government wants to strengthen Hydro, wants to make it a very valuable corporation: a corporation that will ultimately pay significant dividends back to the people of this Province; a corporation that perhaps some day may have enough value in its assets overall as a result of the Hebron deal and the White Rose deal, possible Hibernia deal, possible deals on gas, possible deals on oil refineries and other exploration projects, where hopefully we might be able to sell it some day and pay off all the debt of this Province, and that would be a good thing.”
Premier Danny Williams, House of Assembly, 30 April 2008
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Corporate Research Associates’ latest poll is in line with polls by MQO and Abacus.
The table below shows CRA’s quarterly poll results since the last provincial election with the CRA “decideds” skew taken out.
Liberals are at 50% of all respondents, with the Conservatives at 16% and the NDP at seven with 26% undecided or giving no answer.
The only winner in the debate was David Cochrane.
He’s no Paul Wells but he did a fine job of wrangling the three leaders.
And that’s the problem for the politicians.
Real people were talking about the fact the neutral guy didn’t frig up like the guy on the other network. The other folks – all the party h’acktivists on Twitter - were just talking about how their guy won, which they were saying before the thing started.
If debates matter at all in Canadian elections, this one was a must win for Earle McCurdy or Paul Davis. They needed to score big points on Dwight Ball in order to stand even a vague hope of shifting a few votes in the last week of the campaign.
Neither did.
Muskrat Falls has been the big issue in two successive elections.
In 2011, the parties wanted to talk about the project, while voters didn’t. It never showed up in the list of any Top Five issues for voters.
The parties wanted to talk about Muskrat Falls because it was something they all agreed on. The 2011 election was a good example of an election in which the three parties ignored what the voters wanted to talk about and chattered instead among themselves.
Well, in 2015, Muskrat Falls and its impact on the economy is a huge issue but none of the parties want to talk about it. The best they’ve done is insist that non-existent export sales will help keep electricity prices low. It wasn’t true in 2011 and it certainly is nonsense now.
Another Muskrat Falls issue turned up recently and it could prove to be one of the most significant things so far.
The only people who think this is a dull election don’t know anything about politics.
Seriously.
On the day before nominations closed for candidates, the governing provincial Conservatives admitted on Thursday that they probably won’t have a full slate of candidates. Reporters were quick to remind everyone that we haven’t seen that situation since 1972.
That was the year the Conservatives won a majority government and put an end to 23 years of uninterrupted rule by the Liberals under Joe Smallwood. That was also the first time since Confederation that we’d had a change of political party governing the province. The second one of the two in the 20th century came in 1989.
Think about that for a second. In the 40 years after Confederation we changed governing parties precisely twice. Come December we will have done precisely the same thing within the first 15 years of the new century.
While the townie media are clamouring for details from people who don’t have the details, it’s important to look at what the people with the details are saying.
CBC’s Ramona Deering had Premier Paul Davis all to herself for a minute on CBC Radio’s Crosstalk.
She asked him what the current provincial deficit is.
“Hard to put a number on that,” said Davis just before launching into a long-winded rambling yack in order to run even further away from the simple question.
In his major interview with NTV on the first weekend of the formal provincial election campaign, Premier Paul Davis insisted that his party was not the same as the federal Conservatives.
Then he argued that Liberal Dwight Ball would not be able to represent the province’s interest in Ottawa because the Liberal leader would not be able to challenge the Liberal prime minister, who Davis referred to as Ball’s “boss.”
It was a classic Conservative ploy to resort to fear.
Fear a Liberal government, Davis warned. Bad things will happen.
Ryan Cleary told a gaggle of reporters that the prospect of a Liberal government in Ottawa and a Liberal government in St. John’s kept him awake at night.
More fear.
Then we got the hat-trick of fear. While the other two were pretty much par for the course, the third one was a gob-smacker..
If the polls are right, we could be looking at an unprecedented shift in politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We could be looking at lots of things but it’s a useful exercise to put a bunch of ideas on the table. That’s about the only way you can tease out rends that others won’t see.
What can we say about these polls?
A third poll has confirmed that the provincial Liberals have the support of an overwhelming majority of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
74% of decided and leaning respondents said they would vote Liberal if an election was held tomorrow. 17% said they would vote Conservative, while only nine percent chose the New Democratic Party.
Asked who they thought would be the best Premier, 36% chose Liberal Dwight Ball, 24% chose Conservative Premier Paul Davis but only six percent chose NDP leader Earle McCurdy.
The provincial election campaign is barely a week old and already we have seen certain themes and interpretations emerging that are the product not of fact and observation but of invention.
The most striking one is the imagined explanation for the massive Liberal lead revealed through two polls released at the start of the campaign. Already we have commentators in local media connect the Liberal lead to the recent federal election. They call it the “Trudeau Effect.”
Political scientist Amanda Bittner told a CBC audience on Tuesday night that because the poll came on the heels of the federal election “it’s hard to say what is going on there.” She then talked in the abstract about what potential impacts the poll results might have on voters.
This is a bizarre comment on several levels.
If you want to get a sense of how accurate polls were in the last federal election take a look at the ones we have in public and compare those to the actual result on polling day.
In each of the tables below, we are using the official vote for each party as a share of eligible vote. Basically, that’s what the pollsters surveyed. They asked people who were eligible to vote what they would do.
Over the past couple of weeks, some people have been questioning the accuracy of public opinion polls.
People have questioned the polls in the federal election, especially after the defeat of two candidates in metro St. John’s a lot of people thought would win. The two polls released last week show the Liberals with such a commanding lead that some people – especially Conservative and New Democrat supporters are doubting the accuracy of the polls.
If you are a Conservative and think the Conservatives should be doing better, then you may be disappointed by what follows. But if you are interested in a better understanding of polls and what you are seeing in public, then read on. You should always look closely at public opinion polls to make sure you understand what you are looking at.
On Day Two of the official provincial general election campaign, a new poll by a different polling method lines up with the Abacus Data poll. In both Abacus and Forum Research, results are shown for decideds and leanings.
Forum goes farther than others, though, by showing demographic breakdowns of the responses. The Telegram had the poll first.
In the party choice question, Liberals dominate ever age category. The narrowest gap is in the 65+ group where the Liberals have 55% of support compared to the Conservatives 33%. In the 18-34 cohort, Liberals hold a commanding lead with the support of 70% of respondents. The Conservatives and New Democrats have the support of 16% and 14% of respondents respectively.
The sex split is equally stark (L/C/N): 62/24/12 for males and 68/19/13 for females.
No surprise that the Liberals are way ahead in the latest Abacus horse race poll.
No surprise the NDP have fallen and the Tories have held steady.
What you need to look at to understand what this means are the results for three Abacus questions.
While Paul Davis and the Conservatives were launching their official election campaign, Ryan Cleary turned up in a recorded interview on NTV to talk about the controversy he embodies.
The single biggest thing Cleary did was confirm that his answer to David Cochrane last week was a lie.
Did you discuss running in Virginia Waters-Pleasantville, David Cochrane asked Cleary for the second time.
“Absolutely not,” said Cleary clearly.
Yet there was Cleary not even a week later telling NTV’s Lyn Burry that – in fact – Cleary had talked to NDP leader Earle McCurdy about Cleary running in Virginia Waters instead of the current candidate Bob Buckingham. Cleary brought up the idea by questioning whether Buckingham could run a law practice and be a candidate at the same time.
