'Consider joining us': Andrea Horwath makes strategic voting pitch to Liberal supporters

Pondering wrote:

So Mulcair pumped strategic voting in BC, and now Horwath is doing it in Ontario (not a bad move) so I think it is time to stop accusing Liberals of pushing strategic voting. They may have done so in the past but not recently to my knowledge. The Quebec Liberals may try it this time around.

Point is, this is a political maneuver not a Liberal maneuver.

Couldn't agree more.

Quote:

Political maeuver Horwath is borrowing from the liberals.

Do you feel the Liberals own it because you believe they were the last to use it?

For good, bad or indifferent, the electoral left has, for years, promoted "Anyone but _____". 

Harper.  Harris.  Eves.  Ford.  Other Ford.  More that I can't even be bothered listing, it's so common.

How could you tell which one of the seats they won by?

Does the NDP have electoral reform in its platform? Because that’s the only way they can campaign this way and preserve any shred of integrity. IMO, Ford is an existential threat who would justify a real strategic voting campaign that went riding by riding to identify the best candidate to beat the Conservative. I don’t see that happening though. It’s certainly not what the NDP is doing. I would much rather vote *for* someone than against someone anyways. Let’s make this the last Ontario election where we have to “hold our noses”and vote for someone we’d rather not - whether that’s a Liberal when you are an ND (in the very small number of ridings where the Libs are still potentially ahead) or an ND if you are a Liberal at heart.

Agreed.  They're trying to be cute with the wording but this totally kills the vision they started off with.

Northern-54 wrote:

I would love to end strategic voting.   I would like to be able to vote NDP without having to worry about the act helping to elect a Conservative.

You can! Because here's the big lie behind every strategic voting campaign (and that includes Horwath's): single-group mutability.

It's a tempting lie, for sure. All one has to do is look at vote breakdowns and observe that if we merely add this party's vote to that party's vote, the outcome changes. But the inherent assumption there is that the add-on party's voters are up for grabs, whereas the victor's voters are carved in stone.

The NDP does this all the time, most notably with the Greens. If only those Green voters voted NDP, we'd win! Except that people who vote Green might not have voted if there were no Green on the ballot, or might be disaffected Liberals or Conservatives who otherwise would vote their previous choice of party.

Buying into "strategic voting" reinforces the idea that voters are owned by a particular party, and that only the indecisive are worth pursuing. It's insulting to the concept of democracy. I can't blame the ONDP for wanting to turn the old nemesis around on the OLP, and I'll be quite happy if the ONDP wins this election. But I won't say "A vote for Wynne is a vote for Ford". Voters are only responsible for how they vote, not how they might've voted in a hypothetical scenario where they could guarantee everyone else would vote the same way.

Also, you are right to a certain extend that SOME voters would not vote at all without the Green party.   But you are forgetting that some other voters, possibly even larger number, would have voted NDP or Liberal instead.    Strategic voting is real and exist because of a faulty electoral system.

I agree that the Green vote does not work that way.  I have talked to many Green candidates.   They seem to be the best at door knocking in my area.   The candidates themselves are a mixed bag.   I had one tell me that the best way to deal with big corporations causing problems in the environment was moral suasion.  I suspect that is not the official Green Party line but it means I would never vote Green.  And, I know that candidate's last choice if he were not to vote Green would be the NDP.

When it comes to NDP'ers, our primary strategic vote has always been, and I suspect, will always be, Liberal. 

Wynne's gambit made the whole NDP strategic vote call totally unnecessary.  Such a farce, both of them, on this

I do think Wynne's announcement actually HELPS the NDP, but the new OLP ads smearing the NDP as "job killers" do not.