BC Election Day reactions

Christy ClarkBC Liberal Party  8,541  44.32% 

David EbyBC NDP  8,949  46.43%

142/147 polls

Eby 408 vote lead

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Christy ClarkBC Liberal Party  8,686  44.35% 

David EbyBC NDP  9,094  46.43%

143/147 polls

Eby 408 vote lead (no change since poll 142)

Becoming difficult for Christy to catch up

Christy ClarkBC Liberal Party 9,377  43.65% 

David EbyBC NDP  10,162  47.31%

147/147 polls

Eby 785 vote lead

It's over! 

Eby victory!

The wicked witch of Point Grey is dead.

Oh! She's been reincarnated as Leader of the Liberals!

 

If fucking Point Grey, one of the richest ridings in the province, where a 'reasonable' (i.e. old and small) one bedroom apartment can rent for 1,200/month and where the NDP hasn't won since 1991 can go NDP, what the hell is wrong with the rest of the province? And that is the million dollar question isn't it?

So who gets to walk the plank to provide her with a seat in the Leg?

She should have run in Quilchena when Colin Hansen didn't re-offer (a sort of reverse Gordo, if you will).

The final tally (and change from dissolution): Liberals 50 (+5), NDP 33 (-3), Green 1 (+1), Independent 1 (-3).

Liberal gains: Abbotsford South (from Ind.), Boundary-Similkameen (from Ind.), Cariboo North (from Ind.), Chilliwack-Hope (from NDP), Coquitlam-Maillardville (NDP), Delta North (from NDP), Fraser-Nicola (from NDP), Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows (from NDP), Port Moody-Coquitlam (from NDP), Surrey-Fleetwood (from NDP). 

NDP gains: Burnaby-Lougheed (from Lib.), Saanich North and the Islands (from Lib.), Vancouver-Fairview (from Lib.), Vancouver-Point Grey (from Lib.).

Green gain: Oak Bay-Gordon Head (from Lib.).

The NDP made some inroads into well-heeled areas of Vancouver but lost ground in suburban areas like Surrey/Delta and the Tri-Cities/Pitt Meadows/Maple Ridge area. The Liberals cleaned up in the Interior and most of the North. Basically, Clark got the 'Soccer Moms' and the 'Snowmobile Dads'.

Sorry BC New Democrats. This has to hurt intensely. So, lessons?

1. Underlining what we already learned from the last Alberta election - polling results can no longer be taken seriously. It seems like parties and the media paid a lot of money to get information that was worthless. Obviously somehow a lot of BC Liberal voters were missed or a lot of people with a weak attachment to the NDP that didn't bother to vote were included.

2. Overconfidence kills. Having looked at the polls from before the campaign it was easy to come to the conclusion that the NDP didn't have to do a whole lot to win and an intense focus on get-out-the-vote efforts would not be necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of voters just assumed an NDP victory and stayed home.

3. The 40% curse has not lifted and BC political wisdom has not been overturned. The NDP still can't win, at least in its present form, against a center-right party that consolidates its vote. This problem gets worse with the modest success of the Green Party.

4. A significant chunk of British Columbians are not yet ready to forgive the NDP its 1990s sins, whether those are real or perceived. It may take a new generation of politicians that are completely unassociated with that period before that happens.

Late chiming in here because I was at the NDP's party at Canada Place, then took time to read the thread before writing a response.

A few thoughts:

My initial reaction as the results started coming in was disbelief at how off the results were from the polls. I know that not all polls are accurste, but I couldn't fathom how every poll for over a year could be so wrong. I assumed that it was early results from polls with low voter turnout, and that the NDP's numbers would improve once polls with higher voter turnout reported. By 9:30 it started to sink in that the numbers wern't going to improve for the NDP. At that point I started to feel like I'd been lied to by a portion of the electorate, though that's not really a fair assessment of what happened.

The overall vote turnout was pitiful. Turnout declined about 3% from 2009, to 48%. Most of the decline was in the NDP vote, as uninspired left of centre voters stayed home. There needs to be a concerted effort on the left to address the low voter turnout, especially among youth, in future elections.

Conservative support collapsed to the Liberals by over half from the 12% peak following the "ethnogate" scandal. There seems to be two main reasons for this: 1) The inept campaign of cummins and the Conservatives, and 2) Fear of the BC NDP (stoked by the media). However, this is only a very partial explanation for the NDP's loss, as the last round of polling had the combined support of both the Liberals and Conservatives as less than that of the NDP.

The Greens got almost the exact same vote percent as the last election, but because they didn't run candidates in 24 of 85 ridings, they increased their vote in many ridings. Combined with the decline in the NDP vote, this split the anti-Libreral vote and allowed the Liberals to win in key ridings.

The NDP platform was exceedingly weak. The platform was stronger on the regulatory side than the 2005 and 2009 platforms, particularly on labour and employment rights, but was further to the right on spending. There was nothing on housing, nothing on transit, nothing on hiring more nurses, nothing on rebuilding the public sector back up from the Liberal's decimation of it. And despite all the hoopla around grants for post-secondary "job training", there was nothing in the platform to actually create jobs.

Dix failed to adequately contrast the NDP's plan with the Liberal plan. He failed to polarize the electorate around issues that might mobilize potential NDP voters to get out and vote. This was in part because of Dix's campaign style, but also in part the lack of real, substantive contrast between the Liberal and NDP platforms. The NDP's platform was only promising to undo a small fraction of the damage done by the BC Liberals over the last 12 years.

The NDP needs to give up on the idea that they're ever going to convince the business community and the msm that the NDP is "safe" enough that they'll stop spewing personal attacks and outright lies about the party and its leader. It doesn't work, and it just convinces a large number of potential NDP supporters that the NDP is not really on their side; which, apart from a very small number of issues, is basically true.

In spite of Dix's faults, he doesn't come across as a true centrist, but rather as a very slightly left of centre leader who wants to make life better for people, but who kept getting boxed in to a "this far and no further" approach because he doesn't see an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Should Dix step down because of this debacle, I fear the party will reach the conclusion that Dix was too far left, and I shudder to think what their next leader might be like.

I don't take the Liberal vote as a vote for pipelines and tankers to transport tar sands crude in terms of the actual transporting of the stuff. I do however think that a lot of the Liberal votes, particularly in the interior and the north, were for the jobs that were being promised in building pipelines and in LNG. This was the only job creation on offer in this election. It was also very much a vote based on the lie that the Adrian Dix NDP would kill all resource extractive jobs in this province.

We also have to realize that those of us in greater Vancouver live in a bubble of sorts and that at the end of the day, BC is a fairly right wing province. We have a large urban centre in the lower mainland that is relatively liberal, mostly centre-left to centre-right. We have a mostly progressive island. And then we have the rest of the province, most of which is rednecks, cowboys, and religious social conservatives, with a sprinkling of more liberal types here and there (Nelson and Grand Forks come to mind). As Derrick said in one of his posts, there are dozens of ridings in BC where a pylon running under the "Not NDP" banner could get elected.

I'm sorry but calling for the only elected leader to resign is a bit rich. I'm very sad and disappointed but I'm surprised to see progressives call for the head of the leader and the whole campaign team. We talk about generousity of spirit and being sharing and caring and when something like this happens, I got to say it, we talk like liberals - off with the leader's head.

every poll in the province was off, every single one, no matter the pollster and you think think that the team should have known better? Dix kept saying it was going to be close - well maybe their internals were telling them the polls were closer than what pollsters were saying.

I personally like to see Dix stay as leader.

And I'm disappointed in the outcome.

Wilf Day wrote:

GREEN VOTES MORE THAN LIBERAL VICTORY MARGINS in 12 ridings

Comox Valley:
NDP 38.44%

Liberal 44.69%

Green 11.48%

Conservative 5.40%

Boundary-Similkameen

Liberal 46.34%

NDP 39.28%

Green 8.74%

Pederson 2.06%

Popoff 3.59%

Burnaby North

Liberal 47.35%

NDP 43.15%

Green 6.86%

Marklund 2.64%

Coquitlam-Maillardville

Liberal  45.98%

NDP 45.44%

Green 8.58%

Delta North

Liberal 44.93%

NDP 43.43%

Green  5.84%

Conservative  4.47%

Shavluk 1.01%

Communist 0.31%

Fraser-Nicola

Liberal 44.89%

NDP 38.77%

Green 9.56%

Conservative 6.78%

Maple Ridge-Mission

Liberal 46.21%

NDP 39.66%

Green 8.62%

Conservative 5.51%

Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows

Liberal 45.79%

NDP 42.63%

Green 9.07%

Pratas 2.51%

North Vancouver-Lonsdale

Liberal 45.87%

NDP 40.23%

Green 9.11%

Conservative  3.52%

Libertarian 0.65%

British Columbia Party 0.32%

Communist 0.30%

Port Moody-Coquitlam

Liberal Party 46.85%

NDP 44.00%

Green 8.02%

Libertarian 1.13%

Surrey-Fleetwood

Liberal 45.65%

NDP 44.17%

Green 5.74%

Conservative  4.16%

B.C. Vision 0.27%

Vancouver-Fraserview

Liberal  47.15%

NDP 44.39%

Green  5.42%

Conservative  3.04%

I understand the BC NDP has favoured proportional representation since 2002 or earlier, yet never mentioned it during this campaign. An obvious mistake. 

 

So on the day after, 12 close seats went to the libs, and now BC will get pipelines and tankers galore up and down the coast - how Green is that? I'm disgusted.

So did people think it was "safe" to vote Green and thus inadvertly end getting the govt of corporate oil? Egads.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

The Conservative vote was only 5% at 12% the NDP wins a majority government. The NDP can't win in BC without a three way race.  The Liberals scared their voters into getting to the polls and the NDP offered more of the same but friendlier.  The youth vote is missing except maybe in Oak Bay.

Ah, Krop you just turned opinion into fact with "youth vote missing except maybe in Oak Bay". Considering Oak Bay is a rich Victoria community I would wonder how many youth actually reside in this riding that could account for that result. One could infer that rich and well to do Green supporters were more apt to vote Green than for the party of labour and poor and down trodden.

Personally I think it's agains the BCNDP interests to have Dix resign. I think that's exactly what the Opposition wants. The only leader who gets elected gets turfed?

Another thing, I think we so need to wait until the dust settles - really we do. Let's just say that big oil money, paid volunteers doing phoning in the lib camps, negative campaigning needs to responded to directly.

The NDP and progressive side sure can't win against every MSM paper calling for the Liberals to win. There backers with tons of money to burn and provided by corporate interests. Just blown away.

BC Liberals retain power in landslide win

Los Fiberals and their corporate backers won by a "landslide" of, what, 5%?  That's not a landslide - it's bad arithmetic! It was rigged from the get go.

This needs to be a lesson for federal NDP -- job creation trumps pipeline environmental concerns when framed either-or. Trudeau Liberals will certainly try the same tactics in the next fed election. Fed NDP needs to find a way to successfully reframe this issue.

cco wrote:

jas: Three ways, generally. You bribe or intimidate the voters (Tennessee, Quebec), you corrupt the scrutineers (Jordan, Greece), or you just blatantly fabricate the results at the top level (Iraq, North Korea). Which of these do you think happened today in BC?

I don't know, cco. I also would find it hard to believe in fraud with our system, which still relies on physical paper ballots and physical counting by people watched by other people.

But the "Comeback Kid"? After everything that's gone down with them? No way. I find that much, much harder to believe.

I'll admit that my choice early in the election was vote NDP or don't vote at all. But that's because I assumed the Liberals were out anyway. As did most everyone else.

Yeah, I mean, I love a good conspiracy theory, but pulling off that wide-scale a fraud would be a scam for the ages. Can you imagine how many co-conspirators that would require?

As skeptical as I am of Canadian democracy, it's not quite South Vietnam. The blame here lies with the voters, and I have to agree with H.L. Mencken that "democracy is the theory the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Let's remember this is a province that actually got the opportunity to change that FPTP system and didn't.

In a post-election survey of 1,000 B.C. residents, conducted by Vancouver polling firm Strategic Communications, 44.3% of those who voted for first-past-the-post in the referendum responded they are in “favour of replacing first-past-the-post with a voting system in which the percentage of seats a party gets in the legislature is more in line with their percentage of the popular vote”. For younger voters, those in the 18-34 age range, 52.8% who voted for first-past-the-post in the referendum said they support replacing it with a fairer and more proportional alternative. “In addition to the 39% who were ready to adopt BC-STV, this means another 27% of the BC electorate appear ready to scrap first-past-the-post for a fairer system,” said Arjun Singh, President, Fair Voting BC.

That makes 66% of BC voters in favour of some proportional system.

Which the NDP talked about taking action on. And choked.

This wasn't a failure of leadership or the failure of a single issue.

A few people nailed it: any explanation has to begin with the abyssmal turnout numbers and the complete deviation from polls showing an NDP landslide.

Do the math:

(A) New Democrats predicted to win in landslide
(B) Abyssmal turnout
--------------------------------
(C) NDP voters figured it was no thing, and stayed home

Which isn't to say that it's the voters fault, and the party did nothing wrong. I think there's a conventional wisdom out there that when people finally get tired enough of the government, they'll vote for the official opposition, so all the opposition has to do is wait. The wisdom is obviously wrong, but the NDP obviously bought it.

There's no specific solution, except that you have to make sure people stay mad at the government, and excited about you. Instead, it seems the BC NDP let people be bored of the government, but too bored about the alternative to get off their asses. So you get a boring result: government sleepwalks to re-election.

What's the POSITIVE reason to vote NDP, other than getting the Liberals out?

 

 

 

Francesca Allan wrote:

Thank you, 6079. I am really bummed about this and felt complicit. Everybody said the NDP were a sure thing in my riding (Victoria - Beacon Hill) so I felt free to vote Green. 

You voted with your conscience, and that's a good thing. I support anyone who wants to vote Green in a riding where the Greens have a viable chance. It's when the race is tight, and the Green candidate has no chance anyway that it'd be nice if people would consider voting strategically.

But yeah, to blame the Greens here is silly.