Summer Election, or Not

Precisely,ottawaobserver 

With our minority governments, we now go through this same silliness practically every Spring and every Fall, so we have that to look foward to in the Fall as well. I can hardly wait.

Ignatieff had his chance, read coalition, and has blown it The Liberals will now pay the price for his dumb arrogance.

Quote:

I'm starting to think that regardless of whether Ignatieff decides he wants to go to the polls, it's ultimately now Harper's decision.  There is probably still a deal to be made if Harper decides he wants to do it.  The thing is, all the other chess-players on the board have forked Iggy ... he loses something with either move, and then he still doesn't control the final outcome.

Well I have been predicting an election in the fall of 2010 since the last election.  I see no reason to change that yet.

ottawaobserver wrote:

So, Red Rover, basically your analysis boils down to reading the public domain horse race numbers now as predictive, and doesn't factor in any campaign effects, is that more or less right?

 

When it comes to election speculation...yes.  The Liberals always do what is in their interest and no one else's.  Looking at the polls and the bad economic data to come...it's in their interest to go right now.

Election outcome...less certain, but economic issues will dominate and the Liberals would have a 5-7 point advantage over the government to start.  Hard to see how they would not win a government in the next 50 days given that.  I guess anything is possible, but popular support rarely swings more than 5 points or during the writ period according to most studies.  There are always exceptions, but I can't see any party's vote increasing beyond their poll numbers by more than that amount, at least during a summer election.

"we would be the ones propping up the untrustworthy, ideological, mean, corrupt, wind-hating, oil sand loving, neanderthals. "

That's what the NDP did in 2005 when they supported the Martin government for six months - and people for forgave that. Every word in the sentence above describes the last Liberal government 100%.

Parliament is already scheduled to be prorogued - that's what happens when the house rises for the summer.

Stockholm wrote:

Parliament is already scheduled to be prorogued - that's what happens when the house rises for the summer.

Stock, sorry to disagree, but I believe you're not correct on the last point.  Parliament would be *adjourned*, but not *prorogued*.  That means if, in the meatime, something urgent comes up (like say an Ottawa bus strike), Parliament could be recalled to deal with it, without going through the opening of a new session and a Throne Speech.

Adjourning means ending the "sitting".  Proroguing means ending the "session".  It's two different things.  We are currently in the 2nd session of the 40th Parliament.  God forbid if the GG lets him prorogue again, there will be hell to pay!

YOu can add to that the Nova Scotia election where the NDP had a relatively modest 37-31 lead in the polls when the writ was dropped and they won 45-27%. It should also be noted that at this time a year ago most polls showed the Liberals under Dion to be almost tied with the Tories - yet after five weeks of being exposed to Dion, Liberal support crashed.

RedRover wrote:

When the other two parties say they won't support government - unequivocally - then Iggy is in the driver seat.

Kind of, but the tricky thing is that the Liberals have to stand up and vote first without knowing how the other two parties will vote after them.  So, it's a risk.  The Libs always prefer to go on an NDP opposition motion if possible, since then they get to count most of the votes first before voting themselves (because then the order is NDP-government-Lib-Bloc).  If it's a Liberal opposition motion the order is Lib-government-Bloc-NDP.  And if it's a government order, like votes on the supply bill, then it's government-Lib-Bloc-NDP.  No wonder Layton said he wouldn't be using the NDP day for a votable confidence motion.

So, less of being a bus driver, and more like being a band leader and having to look back and see if any of the band is following you.

RedRover wrote:

Thomas seems to be engaging in huff and puff.  What would he and Jack do or say if we suddenly became the ones propping up Harper and Iggy beat up on us every day over it? 

Mmm, good point.  But, Mulcair and Duceppe got out the door first, so Iggy is back in the same situation as Dion.  Also, if the NDP were to support the government they would be astute enough to actually get something real for Canadians in return for it (like EI amendments, not some ineffective "report card").

RedRover wrote:

A week ago, almost all the pundits agreed that the Bloc wouldn't risk their potential pensions or hard won seats.  Nope.  They're ready to go now.  Most everyone got that one wrong too I guess.

I've never underestimated the strategic chops of Duceppe.  His caucus may not *want* to go now, but they're already one-third renominated and have stepped up their fundraising.  They're ready to go if they have to.  As I said, "everyone" wrote them off prior to the last election, and "everyone" was wrong.  Wells' second rule of politics ("If everyone in Ottawa knows something, it's not true.")

RedRover wrote:

The next election, and this cannot be disuputed by anyone here, will be about the economy for most Canadians, and getting rid of Harper for many progressive voters Observer.  It really is that simple. I wasn't the one who said it originally, but I think I should remind you today that "it's the economy stupid." Truer words have never been said, and any campaign effects will occur through that lens - a Liberal advantage over the opposition parties, and for now over the government.

If Iggy doesn't pull the plug, then he would be making a colossal mistake.  He has the opportunity to do so now and his fortunes are quite unlikely to improve by late fall (see earlier my post), and CERTAINLY not next year after Harper gives out another $300 billion and announces every project six times starting in December.  Harper is lame and limping along until there is an uptick in some economic number to stop his slide in the polls.  If I'm Iggy why would I wait til he gets it?

I think you're right that the Liberals have enjoyed the perception of being seen to do best on the economy in the past, although if you look at the Canadian Election Study data from 2008, they were not ahead on *any* measure at all in the last election, and only came second on one (the environment, behind the Greens).  They were behind the Conservatives on economic questions, and behind the NDP on social ones.  If you think Iggy has engineered a long-term turnaround in those numbers in this short a time, of course you would argue what you have.  And I don't have any opinion research to the contrary.  I'm just saying it would represent a huge shift in nine months.  One of the key aspects of the recent NDP victory in Nova Scotia is that the NDP were ahead of the other two parties on the competence on the economy question.  That was partly the result of Dexter's personality, partly the result of long-standing policy work, and largely the result of the Conservative-Liberal record of mismanagement down there.

The major difficulty for the Liberals on this question now, and one Harper has been happily pointing out, is that they can't both be advocating more and faster spending on the one hand, and decrying the short-term deficit on the other.  Not without advocating some revenue measures.  Harper will try to exploit those contradictions with everything he has, and Ignatieff does not have the campaign experience I don't think to sustain the nuances of that contradiction for very long.

I do take your point about the jeopardy for the Liberals if they wait too long.  But that's the quandary they're in.  It's also risky for them if they go quickly and fail, since they would have greater difficulty recovering financially, having a much more expensive infrastructure to maintain than the NDP for example, and not to mention the inevitability of another leadership contest that would then ensue, given how you folks eat your young over there.

So I think you raise some interesting questions, but I think they have more than one potential answer.  Hey, at least politics is never dull around here (contrary to Wells' first rule, namely that "1: For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome").

OK, and to round out your reading list on this question, here I think David Akin probably frames the essential strategic question correctly, as being as much a stare-down between the Liberals and the NDP as anything else.  Pretty much what's going on in this thread.

LOL, Kinsella goes off base right from point number 1.

"The job of the opposition is to oppose. Period."

Then can he explain to us why exactly, the Liberals have opposed nothing, formed a coalition government with "reformatories",  who he admits have had no plan, no fiscal prudence, no anything? Does this not state that the Liberals, being the coalition partner with the reformatories, have no plan, no vision, and are stumblebums too? It most certainly does.

Now having said that, I think Iggy is going to go for non-confidence on Monday.

Dream Liberal candidates - name one Warren!

ottawaobserver wrote:

So, the exceptions would be: 1990 Ontario, 1993 Federal, 2006 Federal, 2006 Quebec, 2008 BC ... any others?

A far better BC case in point would be 1991, when the BC Liberals came out of nowhere and mortally injured the Socreds.

duplicate post

Thanks Red Rover, and I think that mirrors the finding of Angus Reid before the last election that 55% of voters reported making up their minds before the election.  It makes sense, because that group would be the partisans of each party, the so-called "hard vote".

The point I think some folks here were making in terms of the difference between elections where little changed on the one hand, and elections where a lot changed on the other, is that the government probably rarely changed in the first case, or else the decision was so decisively made pre-election that nothing in the campaign could change it short of a seismic unexpected event.

But Ignatieff's people want to go now because they believe that the government could change and could change decisively.  That must mean they are banking on campaign effects, because the horse-race numbers right now are effectively tied ... certainly they're not decisive enough for a majority government either way.

To me that means they either see something in the underlying numbers, have some kind of killer campaign plan, believe they have some hidden organizational advantage, or are just drinking their own bathwater and believing their own rhetoric about how much people hate Harper and love Iggy.  From the outside it looks like they're just so relieved to be united for more than five minutes that they're all ready to jump off the cliff together hand-in-hand.

To be clear, the NDP is a bit behind now in candidate search and fundraising, but also has the benefit of having been fully organizationally deployed in four of their key provinces over the first half of the year, and they run a very frugal operation compared with the Liberals.  If they say they're ready to go, they are, and if there's one thing they're not, it's slaves to the daily horse-race numbers and the usual suspect-pundits in the mainstream media, who have NEVER forseen a positive outcome for the NDP even before our very best performances.

But I believe it would be a big error for Ignatieff to misinterpret a narrow lead in the horse-race numbers as an endorsement to bring down the government now and force a summer election not nine months after the last one without any really good reason to do so.  It would play into everything the Conservatives are saying about him now (fairly or unfairly), and although I rarely buy the hogwash about "Canadians don't want an election", we certainly have seen one or two cases where that did come back to bite the person precipitating it.  If Iggy isn't careful, he could Peterson himself, with very unpredictable results [ETA:] for the country.

I was thinking IGGY was waiting for the bankers to call and tell him what to do over the week end, after they had their own little meeting to decide.

Funny thing about Iggy is that he will always be the 2nd forced choice behind Dion. He did not even have enough support to get himself elected leader, he had to be "appointed" which means he is a lamer duck than Dion even,  his own party does not have confidence in him, having chosen Dion, so what makes them think Canadians would accept him more than they did Dion?

I am certainly indicating to everyone I talk to this fact of more lame duckness than Dion.

Although it did just occur to me that maybe the handlers who are worried about how Iggy might perform on his first campaign think fewer people would be paying attention to his gaffes in the summer.  Who knows?

If Ignatieff wanted to go as soon as he saw the cover (80% implemented), or after reading the first several pages, then he would have been ill-advised to say so right away.  In fact either way he would be ill-advised to say anything last week. 

Wants to go - can spend two days polling, get organization quietly ready, etc...

Doesn't Want to go - can spend two days polling, cause chaos for your enemies, look as if you are in fact acutally reading it before deciding, etc...

I just don't know where he is going, but I would still think he has more to gain by going.

Boom Boom wrote:

Newman is discussing the new EKOS poll which is good for the Liberals - the head of EKOS says the Libs can pick up 50 - 60 seats from where they are now. But the poll is bad news for the BQ, which has them below their traditional floor threshold, and unlikely to support an election call.

Meh. The Bloc always polls badly between elections and everyone in the punditocracy falls all over themselves predicting their imminent demise at the polls. Then someone like Harper shoots themself in the foot, or Duceppe and co. manage to fall ass-backwards into some issue that resonates with the electorate, and suddenly the BQ, like the phoenix of old, rises from the ashes and gets its customary 40% of the Quebec vote on e-day.

The main reason, in my view, that it would be strategically wise for the Libs to pull the plug now and put us in an early election is that the longer the government's in office, the more time the Tories have to use their considerable war chest to win the 'phony war' - ie the pre-election air war. One of the reasons, if not the main reason, that Dion was such a flop as Liberal leader was that the Tories had almost two years to define him in the public's mind as weak, vacillating, a poor communicator, an environmentalist dilettante, and "not a leader". The Tories blanketed the airwaves with those ads to the point that by the time the election came, that image of Dion was so fixed in the public's mind that nothing he could do during the campaign would reverse it. The Liberals basically waited two years to properly introduce their leader to the electorate - by that time, everyone had already written him off. Dion and the Liberals made a classic mistake that bedevilled politicians like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis - they let their opponents define them before they had a chance to define themselves. The Tories are already cranking up the "Just Visiting" machinery to go after Ignatieff, who is still a relatively unknown quantity among most of the electorate. The Liberals have a golden chance to cut such attacks off at the knees by going into an election now and using the campaign to introduce the voters to Ignatieff on their own terms.

Finally, rightly or wrongly, many, many Libs are convinced that they have been cheated of the Crown the last few outings because of "NDP vote-splitting". One would think, therefore, that there will be a lot of pressure on Ignatieff to try and take advantage of the federal NDP's perceived current weakness.

Well, I just received an email from the federal NDP, and they appear to think there will be an election call within the next week.

yeah, like why not take an opportunity to drum up some donations!

"One of the reasons, if not the main reason, that Dion was such a flop as Liberal leader was that the Tories had almost two years to define him in the public's mind as weak, vacillating, a poor communicator, an environmentalist dilettante, and "not a leader"."

Dion was also a flop because all of the above was perfectly true. Dion was weak, vacillating, a poor communicator etc... even if the Tories had never run a single negative ad about him - all you had to do was see Dion in action toi draw all those conclusions!

remind wrote:

kylebailey260 wrote:

remind wrote:

Well, I just received an email from the federal NDP, and they appear to think there will be an election call within the next week.

Yeah....but that email goes out every time we're close to an election.....hell, its practically a form letter!

That was exactly my point, "close to an election" and they have not been wrong yet. :D

Don't know if you are being sarcastic, but the NDP have cried wolf on election scares and been wrong so many times! I remember a particularly egregious case, either in fall 2007 or spring 2008, where they had the offial campaign countdown calendar ("E-60") on the fundraising e-mail, and some text like: "don't wait two more weeks to start your pre-election fundraising because the campaign will already be on by then!" and it was totally bogus as the Libs or BQ caved to Harper yet again.  The NDP is very short on cash and they are trying to raise money in key areas like Nova Scotia and BC where there has been no federal NDP fundraising since December due to the provincial election campaigns (and in Ontario and Saskatchewan where there were provincial NDP leadership campaigns).

On a more substantive note, I have found the Quebec francophone media to be more astute and less hysterical in their political coverage overall.  Joel-Denis Bellavance in La Presse (link is in French) has a good piece from Friday on Iggy's strategy for the confidence motions next week.  The classic "anonymous Liberal strategist" quoted in the article says Iggy feels the government is incompetent and is not being straight with voters (duh) but is torn as to whether an election now is "in the best interests of Canadians" (Liberal code for "we're not 100% sure we can win").  There is the requisite speculation that enough BQ and NDP MPs will skip the vote to avoid an election even if the Libs vote non-confidence. 

But the most telling tidbits are near the end of the article, where the Lib strategist says he/she thinks Iggy won't trigger an election, but he has to deal with restive Ontario MPs who really want to go to the polls now and with Jean Chrétien who wants Iggy to bring Harper down right away.  Hence the weekend delay so Iggy can be seen as weighing the options and consulting all the right people, in the hopes that they won't blast him publicly when he caves to Harper on Monday.

Finally, Harper has a good preview of his messaging should Iggy actually find a spine and bring the gov't down:

De passage à Summerside, à l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard, hier, Stephen Harper a soutenu que la dernière chose dont le pays a besoin à l'heure actuelle est un autre scrutin: «Le gouvernement déploie tous les efforts pour s'assurer que les projets d'infrastructures démarrent au pays. C'est ce que les Canadiens veulent que nous fassions et c'est ce que nous allons continuer à faire. Personne ne veut voir renaître la coalition (entre le Parti libéral, le Bloc et le NPD). Personne ne veut voir les partis se livrer à de petits jeux politiques. Les gens veulent que le gouvernement et tous les partis politiques travaillent ensemble pour relancer l'économie.»

Translated: Voters want us all to work together to fix the economy.  They don't want the coalition to come back or parties to play petty partisan games.  Again, a ludicrious message for the 5% of us that follow politics closely, but it will be very effective for Harper among most voters, and yet another reason Iggy won't pull the trigger Monday.

BTW, I don't care if they're crying wolf or not (chances are they actually don't know what's going to happen either, but are getting prepared for either eventuality).  I'm just glad to see them in the field fundraising again, because it's the federal party's turn and there's quite a bit of catching up to do.  If an email marked URGENT does the trick, that's perfectly fine by me.  We'd sure as heck be criticizing them if they didn't raise enough money to run the kind of campaign we want, so I'm not complaining one bit.

Hee-hee, Ken.  I agree with Spector's analysis of this situation as well.  And if that's the case, then Harper will happily take the trip to the polls, rather than deal with the Bloc or us.

The question is what that leaves the NDP with.  Rob Russo from CP made the interesting point on Don Newman's show yesterday that everytime Harper says "coalition" it sticks more to the NDP than the Liberals (in English Canada, I think he means).  But Russo argued that the Conservatives can't afford to have the NDP vote in Ontario tank, or they're at risk of losing seats to the Liberals.  I would add that the coalition talk doesn't help him in Quebec either, but perhaps he thinks it helps the Bloc against the Liberals.

Also, I think the coalition bogey-man could lose a bit of its potency the second time around.

The Liberals are in complete denial about the risks of a summer call, by the way, if you are reading their blogs.  One of them even thinks it doesn't matter if they bring down the government because the Main Estimates have already passed, so it shows you they're barely following what's really going on and are just salivating because they're ahead in the polls.

Anyways, sharper minds that me are probably spending the weekend thinking about what to do, but it is an interesting puzzle to think through.