NTV and Telelink released the only independent poll of the campaign on Monday and with a week to go in the 2011 general election, things are on track for a historic election.
For starters, let’s look at the Telelink party support numbers:
These numbers are ones you can trust for accuracy and reliability. In fact, once you read along here and look at 2007 you’ll understand the real reason why CRA and other numbers are pure crap on a cracker.
Next, let’s take a look at the 2007 poll numbers.
In 2007, Telelink’s election poll turned out these numbers:
The actual poll results on election night, as a share of eligible voters was:
By comparison, CRA’s August 2007 poll (adjusted to show percent of all responses) was:
All opinion polls in this province survey eligible voters. The polling firms don’t report their figures that way. They make it seem like they are talking about share of popular vote. But if you look at it, they simply talk to anyone eligible to vote. That means you have to compare their poll percentages to the share of eligible votes a party got on voting day.
Incidentally, if you looked at the popular vote numbers and the ones CRA actually reported (as a percentage of decideds) their accuracy doesn’t get any better.
So compared to CRA, Telelink was almost spot on for everything, except the Liberal vote.
And with all that in mind, let’s look at what we can see in 2011.
Record Low Turnout
For starters, we can expect a record low turn-out at the polls beating the previous record set in 2007. Given the way the Telelink numbers compared to actual then, we could be looking at half the population not bothering to get out to vote.
In patronage-addled political cultures like Newfoundland and Labrador, voting is one of the ways people pay the patron back for his benevolence. They also need to turn out to vote to show their continued loyalty to the Boss or to signal their allegiance to a new one.
Not surprisingly, in the 18 elections from 1949 to 2007, turnout was above 69% in all but three. Turnout in 1949 was 95%.
So in years when the turn-out was low, you have to wonder what the heck was on the go. What do 1956, 1966 and 2007 have in common with 2011? One thing they don’t have in common is overwhelming satisfaction with the party in power at the moment.
Tory support high but dropping
Conservative support sits at 35% and that’s likely where it will hold. What’s most interesting over the past four years is the way even CRA polls have picked up a decline in Tory support. When you take out the misleading twist of giving the numbers as a share of decideds, the Tory support has dropped dramatically since early 2010.
The Race for Second Place and Other Bullshit
While plenty of people in 2011 will be talking about the low Liberal number in the Telelink poll, you already know it’s exactly the same number the Liberals turned up the last time out in the Telelink poll.
On voting day in 2007, the actual Liberal share of eligible vote turned out to be almost double that number. And as a share of popular vote, the Liberals turned out three times what turned up in the polls. They held three seats at the end of the night and picked up another one later on.
The polls don’t tell the story and the media reports on those polls sure don’t tell the real story.
You can also see that when you consider that the NDP polling number in 2011 (15% to 18%) is roughly what the party had in the mid-1980s. They had two seats.
The final seat count will depend very much on what happen on the ground this week.
The Conservatives have undoubtedly dumped as many bodies as they can into the seats where they are under pressure. Some of those seats are in St. John’s and others are spread across the island and into Labrador.
If the Liberals and New Democrats learned anything from the last time, they are pushing back hard as well.
There is no race for second place. That’s a fiction invented by the media. The real election race is being played out in those pressured seats – as many as a dozen or so – across the province. The Liberals pose the bigger threat to the Tories because they are potentially viable in more seats. That’s just a function of the electoral math.
What you will see Tory partisans doing is pushing hard on the theme that the Liberal Party support is collapsing. They want people - especially Liberal campaign workers - to become demoralised and stay home.
The Tories are getting plenty of help from Liberal gaffes. They are also getting help from the news media who report fiction – like the race for second place or the importance of debates - as if it was fact.
What is really happening and what the news media often report are two very different things.
And what happens next week after all the voting is done, well that won’t look much like the media projections to date and it may well be a lot less dramatic than people are assuming.
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For those who loved the first volume of Boulder Publication’s compilation of Ray Guy columns, make sure you get Ray Guy: the Revolutionary Years.
The first volume ended in 1971 just at the tail end of Joe Smallwood’s reign. This one picks up in 1971, carries through the tumult of Sally’s Cove and then rocks through the 1970s, Come by Chance, the Marystown Shipyard, offshore oil, Baie d’Espoir, the Lower Churchill, John Crosbie, fuddle duddle, Fintan Aylward, Ed Roberts and all.
Get it now at your local bookstore or order online from Boulder. It’s a better use for 20 bucks than another compilation of columns by a far less talented writer at least one of which was cribbed from the Globe and Mail.
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Last week ended with a wonderful bit of insight into where televised political debates figure into an election campaign.
Before you go any farther into this post just stop for a second and think of all the media chatter last week about the debate, what the strategies were supposed to be and then what the fall-out was after the whole thing was over.
Now with that load of crap firmly in front of your mind’s eye, look at some of the results from Market Quest Omnifacts’ poll released last week. look at the bit about the election.
Only one third of those polled actually watched the debate. Some news media played up the fact that 36% thought Kathy won, 22% picked Lorraine and some small percentage thought Kevin Aylward came out on top. The rest thought no one came out on top.
What likely slid by most people was the fact that only about one third of those polled actually watched the debates at all. MQO then presented the picks as if 100% watched.
That’s a fine an example as you can get of how some pollsters mislead people when they ignore the undecideds in their poll results on party choice and tell you only what the decideds said.
You see, two thirds of those polled had something better to do than watch the debates.
That’s the real story for that question: 66% were combing their armpit hair or something else that was more pressing than listening to the province’s three party leaders discuss what they’d do if they got the chance to run the province for the next four years.
A mere 12% of those polled thought Dunderdale won the debate. Lorraine impressed the bejesus out of seven percent and Kevin picked up two percent of respondents.
13% thought neither of them won.
The debate itself was not some sort of major event for most people in the province. As a result, the debate itself was just one more thing they might see as part of the campaign’s communications alongside print ads, a brochure, radio and TV spots and stuff that is cropping up on social media.
You’d have to dig into some hard numbers on audience share for the broadcast to get a better sense of how the debate stacks up in impact compared to the others. Based on experience, your humble e-scribbler would say the debate itself mattered a lot less than other stuff including, incidentally, the media hype, torque, spin and general bullshit that surrounded it.
Include in that general bullshit the way Nalcor’s pollster reported the results:
When asked about the leaders’ debate, 34 per cent of those polled said they watched the televised leaders’ debate on Wednesday, September 28. Of those respondents who watched the debate, 36 per cent felt Kathy Dunderdale won the debate, while Lorraine Michael was seen as the winner by 22 per cent, and six per cent said Kevin Aylward came out on top. The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner of the debate.
That got into news stories almost word for word. Here’s the way the Telly reported it, for example:
Thirty-four per cent of those polled said they watched the televised leaders’ debate on Wednesday. Of those who watched the debate, 36 per cent felt PC Leader Kathy Dunderdale won, while 22 per cent saw NDP Leader Lorraine Michael as the winner, and six per cent said Liberal Leader Kevin Aylward came out on top.
The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner.
Nothing, as some famous politician once said, could be further from the truth.
But you can bet lots of people last week were misled into believing Kathy Dunderdale emerged the clear winner of the debate last week in the opinion of other ordinary voters. They’d get that idea as a result of the way the poll results wound up in the news fare.
And that message, carried by the province’s news media as if it were true, likely had a much bigger impact than Kathy Dunderdale’s comments on the night.
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Town and Toronto start with a “T”.
Some Townies can be like some Torontonians sometimes.
Yes, yes.
Settle down.
Hold it down with the other “t” words, like twit, twillick, and twaddle monger.
You are getting ahead of the story.
Townies, like Torontonians sometimes seems to think that all that matters in the world orbits the tight pucker of their collective arsehole.
The news media in this province are dominated by the townie-based daily crowd. Lots of things that happen beyond their usual watering holes in the downtown or their homes in the east end of Town can go sailing past them and hence their audience.
If you wanted an example of just how much gets missed, take this media commentary on a recent poll and what it supposedly means.
Like it or not, the bulk of the wealth in this province is in St. John's and that's where parties have the most luck raising cash. The Liberals had money problems long before they started musing about "diverting oil money" to rural areas (presumably at the expense of St. John's), and when Liberal candidate Danny Dumaresque slammed the idea of giving any extra cash to St. John's, the sound you heard (over the collective gasp of the endangered urban Liberals) was the thump of every chequebook in the capital city slamming shut.
A look at the most recent financial statements from the province’s electoral office shows pretty clearly what’s been going on in the province over the past while.
The picture isn’t pretty and it also is nothing like that paragraph would lead you to believe, either.
The provincial Conservatives rake in the lion’s share of the cash compared to all other parties, bar none. Government parties usually do in this province. People like to curry favour.
What’s noticeably different since 2003 compared to previous years is that the companies that give to the “in” party no longer give to the “out” parties.
There’s a reason for that and the reason is more likely related to the attitude the Tories have displayed to political pork and electoral districts than it is to the Liberals alienating the townie money pits.
No one should be surprised if donors quietly got the message that the powers that be would look unfavourably on donations to the other guys, in the same way voters have been told bluntly they needed to vote Blue if they wanted their grandchildren to know what pavement looks like for real instead of just in pictures.
Another noticeable characteristic of the Tory political cash is that it comes primarily from corporate sources, not individuals.
That’s been especially true for the people who have made quite a haul the past four years from the boom in provincial government capital works contracts over the past couple of years. The construction industry both in the province and on the mainland gave more than $230,000 to the provincial Conservatives in 2010.
The argument in that media commentary is that the Liberals haven’t been able to raise money because they have turned their back on townies.
Now if that were true, then we’d expect to see the New Democrats, who are pretty well all- townie-all-the-time, would have more luck with donations.
Guess again.
The Dippers get lots of small donations from individuals, most of whom live in and around Capital City.
But there isn’t really a lot of cash in their bank accounts.
What’s more, their biggest single donor is a Toronto-based union that for the past two years dropped 20 large on the NDP in this province. Before that it was a Washington DC union that ponied up 10K.
That’s because, as much as anything else, political cash is tied to at least three things.
First is incumbency. You have to be in power or likely to be in power to warrant attention from donors in these parts. That’s an old connection that the politicos themselves drew decades ago and the connection has persisted over time. There are companies all over the province, not just in Sin Jawns
Second is the political culture. Individuals don’t seem to give much to parties, relatively speaking, over time. 2010 is no exception. Take a look at the analysis by labradore and you can see the extent to which this is true.
And that’s likely because – third – the parties aren’t organized and interested in individuals. Old habits die very hard and parties like the Liberals and Tories that got used to corporate cash have just kept looking for corporate cash.
Besides, they, like the NDP, also aren’t built around individual members who actually run the party. It just wouldn’t occur to them to try and build the party on appealing to individuals to get out an participate. Even if it did occur to someone, they’d go at it half-heartedly if they went at it at all.
The fundraising problems the Liberals have come from some chronic problems over the last five or six years. The biggest one is basically a lack of focussed effort. That’s also what’s caused the lack of general preparedness and the problems in candidate recruiting as well.
On a local level, in some districts, they are doing quite well and likely will do quite well. Candidates have been raising money and they have volunteers and a momentum going. There might even be some surprises. That’s all taking place well outside of Sin Jawns, though, and as a result, the details won’t show up in daily media in the province.
Consider that to be the reverse of the NDP where their usual sort of campaign – not much cash or workers – comes across as amazingly gigantic in news reports because it is so close to reporters they can’t see the wider details.
And all that sort of skewed reporting and commentary is pretty much what happens when the frame of reference is the imaginary centre of a largely imaginary universe.
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Think of it as another form of poll goosing.
As an example of how news media can take a piece of information and make a false statement out it, consider CBC’s online version of the story about a poll released Friday by the same company that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation.
“Liberal support in free fall” screams the headline.
The first sentence is less dramatic:
A public opinion poll released Friday suggests that Newfoundland and Labrador's Liberals have lost even more ground leading into the last half of the Oct. 11 election campaign.
There’s even a graphic that uses the numbers from the news release. They show a drop of five percentage points in decided Liberal support, according to the poll.
The only problem for CBC is that the headline and the lede are false.
The combined margin of error for this poll and the one before it is more than the five point drop shown in the report numbers in the two polls.. Therefore, the actual numbers for the Liberals fall within a range of 4.5 or 5 points above or below the figures given.
This is why polls with such large margins of error tend to be useless for most meaningful purposes. And for detecting trends, you’d have to see a huge drop between polls – like more than 10 points - in order to get something that could conceivably be called a significant change.
What would free fall look like?
Well, certainly a hell of a lot more than what is shown. 10 points or more would be a likely candidate for such dramatic language, especially over the course of a mere 10 days or so.
It’s also interesting that while CBC mentioned a relationship between MQO and advertising company M5, they didn’t mention that MQO is also Nalcor’s pollster because it is owned by M5. The advertising company is Nalcor’s agency of record.
CBC also said MQO was “affiliated” with M5. That’s not even close to correct either.
According to the provincial registry of companies, the same three men are the only directors of M5 (above), MQO (right)and all the companies within the M5 Group.
MQO is owned by M5.
That’s factually correct.
“Affiliated”?
That would be misleading bordering on deceptive.
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Related:
The Telegram wonders why it is taking so long to install court security equipment at the province’s courthouses.
The signs have been up since early January.
“Public notice: Improved security to protect you. Your safety is our No. 1 concern.”
But more than a year after the provincial government announced plans to install a new security perimeter screening system at provincial court in St. John’s, it has yet to happen.
The story mentions the Court Security Act, 2010. That’s where they get the “more than a year bit.”
But the story of money spent and things not yet done actually dates from 2004.
The original Court Security Act slipped through the House of Assembly in early 2004 and then quietly vanished.
Never put in force.
No reason ever emerged why the justice department did nothing with it.
The 2010 version is just the 2004 bill word for word, plus a couple of minor changes that could have be done by amendment.
While the court security law never took effect that didn’t stop the gang in the courts from buying up the shiny new scanners a and wands.
If the Telegram looked for the purchase orders, they’d likely find the dates are from 2006 or so. The stuff has been sitting in storage – packing wrap and all – ever since then, or so word around the department goes.
Speaking of other things the Tories never got around to doing, check that 2004 link and you’ll find some other tidbits dating back to the last provincial election that they never got around to doing.
Like say the Sustainable Development Act, 2007.
And the Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act, 2007.
And a natural gas royalty regime.
Or the oil one too, for that matter.
There’s no greater fraud and all that.
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Traffic patterns are information that can tell you something.
The most popular post in this second week of the election is about an alternative for Muskrat Falls.
The next most popular was about the Conservatives’ major campaign message in this election: vote the right way or your grandchildren won’t know what pavement is, except in old movies.
It should tell you something that Danny Williams at least slapped his candidates on the wrist when they mentioned the connection between voting and government money. Kathy Dunderdale, by contrast, is slapping candidates on the back.
The third most popular post is about the same subject, in this case Tom Rideout’s warning that the Conservatives will likely pay a price for their orgy of pork-barrelling in the run-up to the election.
The fourth one is also about Muskrat and the option the provincial government and Nalcor didn’t bother to explore.
The rest are about the debate and a bit about the campaign.
Take what you will out of that, but there is something in the fact that traffic here is on the swing up steadily and the four top stories are what they are.
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The results of this poll by the pollster for the provincial government’s energy corporation show numbers well within the margin of error for the poll and as such, don’t reliably show any change at all from the results the company released in the first week of the campaign.
The Tories lead with 44%, a change of 2% of last week. The NDP are at 27% up from 23%. The Liberals are at 11% 13% * down from 16% with undecideds at 18% down from 20%.
The margin of error for the poll remains ridiculously high at 4.6%.
Don’t expect the conventional media to report the connections between the pollster and Nalcor, nor should anyone to report accurately on the figures and what they mean.
Instead, they’ll take the misleading approach favoured by CRA and MQO, pollsters for the provincial government and its energy corporation, and ones that fit a narrative they created before the campaign started.
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*Copying error: 13% is the figure in the MQO news release as the percentage of decided respondents who chose Liberal.
Thursday was International Coffee Day.
In a poll of American workers done by Dunkin Donuts and CareerBuilder, marketing and public relations professionals came out as the second most caffeinated class of workers in the United States.
Here’s the full list, via prdaily.com:
1. Scientist/lab technician
2. Marketing/public relations professional
3. Education administrator
4. Editor/writer
5. Healthcare administrator
6. Physician
7. Food preparer
8. Professor
9. Social worker
10. Financial professional
11. Personal caretaker
12. Human resources benefits coordinator
13. Nurse
14. Government professional
15. Skilled tradesperson (plumber, carpenter, etc)
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Some people were surprised the other night when Danny Dumaresque told the very small audience at a Board of Trade economic forum that:
I would have to say to the mayor of this great city that there are a hell of a lot more priorities outside the overpass that need to be addressed before we start forking more money over to the City of St. John's.
Some people thought his remarks were stupid.
Danny is anything but.
What Danny Dumaresque said won’t hurt him one bit in the Isles of Notre Dame and Danny knows it.
What’s more, what Danny said is true, at least for the people who currently dominate the Liberal Party. About 12 years ago, they started shifting the party focus away from the province as a whole to one that idealises an imaginary one.
Ruralism started to bloom in the brief period Beaton Tulk served as Premier. It’s not surprising that Kevin Aylward brought Tulk back to play a key role in the current campaign.
Ruralists believe – as the Liberals’ centrepiece policy for the current campaign states – that:
The fishery is our province’s defining narrative…Our fishery has been our past and the Liberal Party believes it will be our future.
It is not just the fishery, though. Ruralism, for all its romantic, reactionary beliefs, holds the fishery as the foundation of an entire culture with social and economic components.
The Ruralists flourished after 2003 and their philosophy was firmly entrenched after 2007. Despite Kevin Aylward’s fervent efforts to pretend otherwise during the debate Wednesday night, the party he now leads has written off anything east of Goobies.
To be fair, the Liberals aren’t alone in their Ruralist beliefs. The provincial Conservatives carried on with the Liberals’ Ruralist agenda. They kept the Rural Secretariat and married its assumptions with Danny Williams’ peculiar version of nationalism.
Again, not surprisingly, Kevin Aylward proudly declared himself a staunch nationalist shortly after he took over as Liberal leader.
At its miserable heart, though, Ruralism is really nothing more than old fashioned paternalism and patronage. Grit or Tory, all the Ruralists really want to do is use public money to keep people in some parts of the province dependent on political hand-outs and therefore firmly under political control. It’s a miserable, cynical ploy.
To make it clear that patronage isn’t just a favourite ploy for one party, consider that Conservative candidate Keith Russell made it plain enough on Thursday when he said to voters in central Labrador (via the Telegram) that
we have to be on government’s side to access government coffers…
Conservative leader Kathy Dunderdale repeated basically the same line while campaigning on the south eastern coast of Labrador on Thursday. CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates tweeted it:
Abandoning the Avalon Peninsula doesn’t mean the Liberals are doomed as a political party. They can still win plenty of seats and could well pick up a few this time around. They’ll likely stay as the Official Opposition. What they can’t do, of course if form a government. The Liberal strategy is as short-sighted in that respect as it is simplistic.
Its narrow focus means the Ruralist Party, as it should now be named, has had way more trouble than an opposition party normally would getting candidates in the last three elections. In 2011, they’ve had to turn, once again, to dragooning political staffers to fill out the last remaining slots in the candidate roster. The only thing Beaton Tulk didn’t do in his mad search for names for the ballots on the Avalon was hold a séance.
The Ruralist Party’s focus doesn’t mean they haven’t turned up some good candidates in the process. George Joyce in St. John’s West is the best of the three candidates running in St. John’s West by a long way.
In St. John’s Centre, newcomer Carly Bigelow has been kicking Shawn Skinner around.
During an appearance on Out of the Fog, she popped Skinner’s eyes a bit when she reminded him that Tory policy is to keep public service pensioners on fixed incomes with no increases and then double their electricity rates. He flipped but that pretty much sums up Skinner’s position. The truth really does hurt, as it turns out.
George and Carly could be easy choices St. John’s voters. After all, a vindictive, patronage-addled Conservative administration can hardly shag the district for funds in retribution for voting the “wrong way”. They don’t push pork into townie districts anyway, at least not like the do outside the capital city, so Sin Jawns voters have the opportunity to pick candidates on merit, rather than by party colour.
The Liberal Ruralists aren’t the only ones with problems in Capital City.
In St. John’s North, both the Conservative and New Democrat candidates are running headlong into the problems with their platforms.
An NTV profile of the district on Thursday evening’s news noted that the district has a very large percentage of people on fixed and low incomes. Plenty of public service pensioners live there so incumbent Bob Ridgley must be having a hard time explaining Tom Marshall’s cavalier dismissal of their demands for a modest increase in pension payments now that the government has $4.0 billion in cash laying about.
Add to that the Tory plan to use the cash to double electricity rates instead and you have a very tough pill to shove down voters throats. If you are a Tory that is.,
Meanwhile, Sin Jawns New Dem Dale Kirby is having an equally hard time. His party backs the Dunderdale plan to force the people of St. John’s North to pay to ship discount electricity to Nova Scotians.
And then there’s the public sector pensions.
Not a peep in the NDP platform about it at all.
Kirby must be having a devil of a time explaining how the NDP party president and his colleagues didn’t think those pensions might be an issue. Talk about treating seniors with the respect they deserve.
Pensioners can take some cold comfort with the knowledge they weren’t the only thing Kirby and his colleagues didn’t know about. They missed entirely the contracts that prevent them from introducing their new crude oil tax that was supposed to pay for some other campaign promises.
And if that wasn’t enough, there was another glaring Dipper gaffe in St. John’s.
Liberal Drew Brown is running an uphill fight in Signal Hill-Quidi Vidi against an entrenched NDP campaign that knows which way every blade of grass votes in the district. He’s another candidate who’d be far better than the incumbent.
But facing all that didn’t stop Brown from picking up on a glaring oversight in the NDP policy book: the party of supposed social responsibility has no platform plank on replacing the Dickensian-era HMP that happens to sit in Lorraine Michaels’ district:
“The existing infrastructure at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary is still abysmal, despite the findings of the 2008 ‘Decades of Darkness’ report on the state of the provincial corrections system,” Brown explained. “I find it really surprising that no one is talking about it in this election, especially considering the federal Conservatives’ forthcoming crime legislation is likely going to result in an increased number of prisoners going through the system.”
The Liberals plan to begin work on replacing the prison – and aggressively lobbying the federal government to cost-share the project – within weeks of forming the government.
“Without safe and effective prisons, our system of justice here in Newfoundland and Labrador is seriously weakened. Better conditions for the prisoners aside, the facility workers themselves deserve a safer workplace than the one they currently have,” Brown added. “It’s a government facility – the working conditions for employees at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary should be held to the same standard as any other government institution.”
Wowsers.
So at about the half-way point in the general election, one party - the Liberals – have voluntarily surrendered a huge chunk of the voting population to the other parties. They’ve left some very good candidates to fend for themselves.
Another party has just missed the boat entirely on core issues in the one region of the province where they are supposed to have such amazing support and affinity.
this is not a townie versus bayman thing, as much as some people might like to paint it that way.
It’s really about political parties that operate with limited political vision.
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Tory candidate Keith Russell must be in a desperate battle to win his seat.
He’s trotted out the old patronage card in a bid to boost his chances. The district better vote the right way, warns Russell or else no megaprojects for Labrador.
Here’s how the Telegram reported his comments:
we have to be on government’s side to access government coffers…
Candidates who trot out the truth of the way the Tories have been handling things like road paving over the past seven years usually get slapped down not for what they said but for saying it out loud.
Wonder what Kathy Dunderdale will do to Russell now that he has voiced the threat implicit in the Conservatives’ campaign pork-fest.
Incidentally, the Telegram notes that Russell – who used to work for the Innu nation – testified at the joint review panel hearings and raised concerns about the Muskrat Falls megadebt project. The Telegram didn’t do Russell’s testimony justice, but that’s another story.
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Snappy comments help get news coverage.
Some people call them sound bites.
Like this one from the leader’s debate, highlighted by CBC:
She did, however, have a feisty comment for Aylward when he challenged her on the PCs' approach to the fishery.
"Your slogan is 'we can do better,' you can hardly do worse sir," said Dunderdale.
She’s right.
The Liberals would be hard-pressed to do worse than the Tories when it came to managing the province’s fishery.
From the FPI fiasco to the idea of re-starting the Fisheries Give-Away Public Cash Board to keeping people splitting fish for Third World wages, you’d be hard pressed to do worse than the Tories have done.
That’s not what Dunderdale likely meant but it was the hapless politician said.
It’s typical of the sorts of basic cock-ups she makes a lot.
But in politics you only have to be better than the alternatives and in the debate she looked better.
The Liberals and NDP can hardly do worse than that, either.
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So now you’ve either seen the debate or read some of the media coverage about it.
Here’s a question for you:
While you’re thinking about that for a second, let’s just review a few things.
Elections are about choices.
Candidates want you to pick one among them.
The ballot question is why you should vote for that one candidate as opposed to the others. The question should be stated in a way that distinguishes one candidate from all the others. Political campaigns ought to be structured to reinforce the basic choice – the ballot question – over and over.
If you are still wondering about this – and that would be a bad thing for the parties – let’s just begin by figuring out which parties want change and which parties want things to stay fundamentally the same.
After all, in an election where there is an incumbent, the basic question is change versus more of the same.
Take another few seconds, if you need to.
Okay.
Time’s up.
So what was the answer?
Let’s start with the easy one. The Tory message is the classic incumbent one: stay the course. Kathy Dunderdale wants you to vote for the Conservatives because things are good and they will get better. Tories made a change and now you need to stick with the course that brought the change.
Kathy Dunderdale said it at the beginning of the debate and she said it at the end. her comments in between supported the proposition by pointing out the good things she and her friends have done and all the bad things the others did or would do if given the chance.
In her television spots, Kathy Dunderdale says she thinks every day about who put her in her current job. Well, it wasn’t ‘we”, but that didn’t stop her from using the magical persuasive construction of talking about joining with her: “together, we…”
Plus, she respectfully asked for your vote.
She hit her marks every time.
So what about the other two?
Well, it’s a bit of a trick question really.
Parties other than the incumbent should be advocating change.
But if you thought that in this election you’d be dead wrong.
The NDP message was “it’s time.”
Time for what? We’ll, Lorraine wasn’t really sure. it might have been it’s time to give the NDP a turn at the wheel but her heart really wasn’t in it.
Lorraine Michael spent a lot of time in her opening remarks telling people what they - the people - thought.
No need: they already know.
She talked about how the NDP had listened and would do something. people were looking to her for some idea where the NDP would go that was different from where things are.
But when things got going, Lorraine reverted to the default NDP mindset of being a supplicant. Take the discussion about a seniors advocate. Lorraine talked about it as a nice idea. Kathy got away with saying: we have no objection to that. There was the implicit idea behind her comments that Lorraine should come talk to her after the election so the Premier could think about it.
And when Lorraine wasn’t doing that she was criticising the Tories.
Lorraine’s attitude and the general vagueness of her message confirmed that the NDP want the Tories to win. They have already conceded that they don’t really want change.
Ryan Cleary was right.
And that brings us to Kevin Aylward and the Liberals.
His opening remarks were the first shot to make a simple, clean statement of the ballot question. Instead, he spent two minutes talking about the other guys. He talked about their ideas and their actions.
And throughout, he spent his time criticising.
That’s what opposition politicians do. They criticise.
They don’t push ideas of their own and force the other guys to respond on their terms.
They don’t set the agenda for discussion.
Neither Lorraine nor Kevin set the agenda.
They didn’t even try.
If you look at the election platforms of the parties you can see the same thing. They don’t distinguish themselves. They give you variations on a theme.
For voters, the message was clear: better to stick with the crowd you do know than the ones who already told you that where the province is going is just fine.
And if you want to know the extent to which the Liberals and NDP love where the province is right now and what the Tories have been doing – with a few exceptions - consider which parties in this election want to talk about Danny Williams.
Kevin Aylward said the other day that Danny did some neato things. Heck, Kevin Aylward loves Danny so much he was trying to get Liz Matthews to run for the Liberals in her father’s old seat of St. John’s North.
When confronted about their crude oil tax and tearing up agreements, Sin Jawns North New Dem and party president Dale Kirby invoked the sacred Old Man. Lorraine would pull a Danny, sez Dale, and not stop until the job got done fighting Big Oil.
At the economic forum on Tuesday night, the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats actually spent more time agreeing than disagreeing on anything.
While the Dippers and Grits are talking about yesterday’s Old Man, Kathy Dunderdale accepted their premise that she will win the election.
Dunderdale claimed the title of leader Kevin and Lorraine offered her and passed herself off as the agent of change during the debate even though what she is really talking about is more of the same, too.
The debate - as it turned out - was nothing more than a continuation of the message track each of the parties has been following since Day One.
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Kathy Dunderdale says:
"[Joan Burke]'s not intimidated by Mr. Aylward, nor should she be," Dunderdale said …
but then the sentence finishes with:
…during one of a series of stops in St. George's-Stephenville East.
Joan’s so not intimidated that the party leader made a series of visits to the district.
Kathy Dunderdale says she doesn’t see the need for a leader’s debate on Muskrat Falls:
We're not hearing it and our candidates are not hearing it door to door. It is not an issue…
And it is so much not an issue that the provincial government’s energy corporation has been flogging it anywhere and everywhere they can and it features prominently in the Conservative election platform.
The actions do not match the words.
Disconnect.
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From the Globe and Mail:
“If commodity prices were to fall back – apart from Canada, of course – it would be a pretty good thing for most of the world because it would put purchasing power back in consumers’ pockets,” Mr. [Roger] Bootle said Monday in an interview in Toronto before an annual conference organized by Capital Economics.
Commodity producers would be hurt by lower prices for their raw materials, but accelerating growth in Canada’s largest foreign market, the United States, would boost demand for exports of Canadian goods and services, he said. “You’ve got a bit of a two-way pull there.”
Bit like the trigger point, eh?
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The Telegram quoted Kathy Dunderdale on Tuesday:
"We have to find the cheapest way," she said today while campaigning on the west coast.
"Muskrat Falls is that way unless somebody else is able to prove to us the analysis is flawed."
Someone send her the link to “Classical Gas” for starters.
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Debates matter but not in the way some people think.
For starters they have nothing to do with knock-out blows. That’s a media invention they use along with horse-race reporting in order to cover campaigns. it’s a simple enough idea full of potential drama, but the fact is that debates are seldom if ever about the telling blow or the fatal wound to a campaign.
The evidence speaks for itself. In the past four decades, only one American presidential debate produced a significant switch in a candidate’s polling numbers.
In Canada, there have been a couple of points that stand out – Mulroney and Turner in the 1980s – but for the most part, people would be hard-pressed to find a debate moment that dramatically lifted one campaign or destroyed another in a national election.
Strategy is about deploying assets as part of a co-ordinated plan to reinforce your strengths and exploit your opponents’ weaknesses in order to win.
Debates are part of the tools strategists in a campaign use.
Period.
Everything else is for the punters and for amateurs.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the three political parties will take part on a raft of debates. The parties will decide which to take part in and who to send on behalf of the party based on a bunch of factors.
The leaders often don’t turn up for anything other than the NTV televised debate. That is the major event that offers plenty of free advertising – via news coverage in the run-up and especially in the time afterward. The debate gives the leader a chance to stream prepared messages and toss out a couple of lines that may snag some media attention.
These days debates like the NTV leaders’ gabfest are about as risky as breaking wind. The parties spend so much time negotiating the rules in order to avoid running any risk that anyone can do anything. The whole thing is theatre and campaigns work hard to agree upon a format that protects their main player from anything even vaguely approaching a campaign-losing gaffe or death blow by an opponent.
Risk?
Confrontation?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Other debates offer similar value – for their advertising spinoffs – and unless the event has some sort of amazing potential previously unforeseen in the history of human civilization, major parties will send substitutes.
A health care forum will get the party’s health care critic or rising star. One on the economy will get the finance critic or the development guru to give him or her the chance to score a bit of a profile.
The fact that Lorraine Michael is attending all the debates tells you, by the by, just exactly how thin the NDP candidate pool is and how important it is for them to get as much free media for Lorraine as they can. Campaigns with cash and other resources don’t need to pack everything into the one candidate and a minivan.
As for Aylward and the Liberals you really have to wonder two things. First, you have to wonder why the Liberals sent Aylward to debate health care when they have a couple of subject matter experts as candidates. Second, you have to wonder why the Liberal backroom gang left Aylward in the Board of Trade session until the last minute so that the last minute substitution of Dumaresque looked foolish. Hint: he didn’t pull out because he suddenly noticed Kathy wasn’t there.
If the number of debates proliferate in future campaigns, they will get to be like the begging letters from every special interest group on the planet. They will become yet another incredible drain on resources that serves only to give the interest group some free publicity, convince their members the group is working, or both.
The punters and the media pay attention to them – think about Danny’s begging letters to Ottawa – but the letters usually get pro forma statements of the party platform rather than personalised attention.
In general, campaigns will send someone along to a debate unless the thing is a drain on resources and can be chopped without costing anything. Even the risk of a couple of hours of bad news stories can be worth it if the debate does not serve the campaign’s strategy.
Starting in 2003, the provincial Conservatives made it a policy to refuse to take part in any district debates, full stop. They did that largely because avoiding these small events cuts down on the potential that one of the lesser lights in the campaign firmament trips up in his or her own ego and takes the campaign off its pre-planned message track for a day or two.
And every other claim about debates is for the punters, the amateurs and people with airtime to fill.
It’s like the idea that somehow the election outcome is a foregone conclusion, Kathy Dunderdale needs to stand pat and the debate is a big deal for Kevin Aylward and Lorraine Michael in the battle for second place.
The idea there is a race for second is entirely a media fiction.
It doesn’t exist.
Never did.
The NDP got a huge boost from the media in the election run-up. But the editors and producers were just looking for a convenient – read simple - narrative they could build a story thread around.
They ate up the NDP’s federal election boost and then, when a couple of polls appeared to show a surge in NDP popularity provincially, off reporters went to the horse-race.
But look at what the NDP actually turned up with in the days since the campaign began. They obviously have no money. Their radio spots are the stuff of a St. John’s municipal election campaign – done badly on the cheap - not the usually polished and effective NDP provincial election fare. The backdrop for the platform launch was a painted piece of sign board propped against a wall.
Lorraine Michael traveled outside St. John’s once so far. That was to one of two seats outside Michael’s own seat where the Dippers stand a chance of any success. She might make it to Labrador but the party simply lacks the money and organization to mount a campaign that threatens to do any more than grab headlines.
And don’t forget, the NDP are only polling around 18% – at best – in any of the recent polling. That’s only slightly better than the 14% the NDP garnered in the late 1980s when they held two seats in the province.
Nothing points to any radical NDP anything, least of all the chance that Lorraine Michael might pull off a magical Jack Layton and vault into the opposition leader’s job. Lorraine ain’t Jack by a long shot and the provincial NDP aren’t their federal cousins.
People say there is a race for second even where there isn’t one for the same reason some politicians talk about “a go forward basis” or “files” or “piece” this and “piece” that. They think it makes them sound like they know what they are talking about.
So when you watch the debate tonight, err, if you watch the debate tonight, ignore the political analysts. If you hear words like “risk”, “race for second place” and so on blow raspberries at them and laugh.
Just watch the three leaders. Notice what they say, how they say it and how often they say it.
Then on Thursday, we can have a chat about the campaign strategies of the three parties and what is really going on out there in this dull-as-dishwater affray.
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Kathy Dunderdale sends messages using Twitter.
Herself.
Using her own two hands.
Someone who has spent about 60 years in this province - give or take – and who has been a prominent municipal and provincial politician before being yanked out of pseudo-retirement to become Premier should know how to spell the names of places in the province.
We are not talking Quirpon here.
We are talking the lush agricultural valley on the province’s west coast or as Kathy tweeted it this morning:
Cod Roy.
Two words.
Maybe she thought she was logging into the multiplayer version of Call of Duty using Danny’s leftover screen ID.
Maybe she was so overcome by the beauty of that part of the island that she fancied herself a Scottish-Newfoundland freedom fighter.
Maybe she thought she was the king of the fish.
Or maybe – and we are just just spit ballin’ here – Kathy doesn’t write her own tweets.
Maybe she has someone following her around, Crackberry in hand ready to spit out something from her boss to make it look like the amazingly transformed KD herself is telling us about yet another “beautiful” place she has been in the “beautiful” province in order meet all the “great’ people after her morning “run”.
Yes, folks, it is the Twitter conundrum.
The brand new image the nice advertising people invented for you demands you send twitter messages even if you couldn’t be bothered and so the campaign or the Premier’s Office sticks some junior joe or jane with the job all the while praying that joe or jane doesn’t blow away the cool facade by tweeting garbage.
Either that or Kathy herself had to consciously insert a space and push the shift key a second time on her computer or Crackberry to transform “Codroy” into two words both starting with capitals. The simple typo would be the errant extra space, after all. Whoever typed that thought it was two separate words.
Which is more likely?
You decide.
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