What'll take to move the NDP from its current 20% in the polls to 25% in the next election

Cueball wrote:

Fascinating, really. I have some trouble catching up with what seems to be the endless game of "ideological chairs" (you know the game where everyone takes a position in an ideological chair and then one chair is removed every round, until there are no positions left and everyone is left standing around and looking foolish?), but I get the distinct impression that if I started a conversation about the problems with the NDP position on health care, i would suddenly start finding out how good the NDP was at protecting the fundamental human rights of Palestinians.

Why not pick a chair and sit it, before the next Liberal leader comes along and sneaks it off to the back room and starts polishing it up for presentation to the public? Just a thought.

Nicely put. I particularly like the description of everyone left standing around looking foolish (and confused). Politics as a shopping list of issues comes from a social view that thinks shopping lists are a higher form of consciousness.

Eclectic approaches are like that, aren't they? Georgi Plekhanov (and Hegel before him) did a fine job of showing the harmfulness of such philosophical and/or political approaches. Hence the title of Georgi's book: The Monist View of History. Of course it may be too much old school socialism (Marxism) for many.

Remind - I'm not particularly interested in the critique of the NDP from the right. Those seem to me to be mostly about removing anything and everything of value from the NDP. You'll have to look elsewhere for that ... if you care to look.

Maybe all Parliamentary parties have this eclectic game of ideological chairs.  In which case Cueball's critique would apply to them all and not just to the NDP. Part of the problem with our system of politics is the mockery of the appearance of choice. Voters sense this and they withdraw from voting altogether - a problem which the current parties have no idea how to solve. Perhaps it is because they are the cause of this problem.

Nbeltov, given some of your more recent commentary here, I no longer perceive you to be "left" of anything. And if you and others such as yourself, believe you are, then I am happy to be not so "left". Because there is not 1 damn thing tolerant, equity seeking, or progressive in said positioning.

double post.  I just bought a new comp and made the switch from a mac to a pc.  never had a problem before but noticed this was happening to a lot of other babblers.  Hope this doesn't happen every time I post.

And they never offer us a realistic alternative. It's just boo-hiss NDP. And it wears thin after a while.

N. Beltov, what do you think about the fact that two political parties have monopolized federal power in Canada for about twice as long as the Sovs ruled the USSR? And one of them looks a lot like the other once elected and vice versa. Apparently that doesn't concern you nearly as much as the NDP does. Thoughtless cheerleading is for supporters of the two old line parties. We're just trying to achieve a little democracy in this country not the perfect revolution. Perfect revolutions just don't happen.

Whatever you say, N.B.

N.Beltov wrote:

Actually, Remind, anti-NDPers probably could care less about this thread. Which is pretty well the way I feel about vague, mean-spirited personal attacks.

Am sorry you took that as a personal attack, as it was not meant to be. Perhaps that is why you perceived it as vague?

....was being very honest. As for a good long while, I was re-evaluating my support for the NDP based upon  some people's commentary here, thinking to myself if these people are  a snap shot of who supports the NDP these days, what the hell am I doing supporting them. I mean really, who wants to vote for a party that is full of people who talk out of both sides of their mouths in respect to FN's and women's equity rights solidarity, and are really only interested in keeping status quo alive.

Finally though, it became clear that said people were not the ones who actually were NDP supporters, in fact far from it.  And this revelation in itself was a relief.

There is nothing by way of a personal attack in this realization, as that is all I was comenting on. Just as others such as your self commentate on what you perceive pro-NDPers as.

I like to think we could, with help from the central,  run a strong ground campaign as well as air. Ideally a 308 riding campaign that can get at least the 10% necessary for the rebate in each and every riding, and, at the same time,  go for a win in 50 to 100 "priority" ridings.  We are looking to some bell curve distribution, say the middle 60% of ridings (180?) average 25%, of the vote, the top 20% of ridings (the winnable 60?)  average 40%, with the bottom 20% of ridings (60?) averaging around 10%. Given a lot of dynamics including the rising tide raies all boats lciche  we have to raise at the bottom and the middle as well as at the top.

This could be tied in to the ongoing discussion on party financing,  revenue sharing, $2 a vote et all but I am curious about other things. The Hamilton ridings  are ready to go if need be.  Jow is everybody else?

There are a number of paradoxes of NDP national campaigns that complicate things:

(a) Strategic Voting: In rural BC, Edmonton, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Industial Ontario, a pro-strategic voting message will deliver seats to us. In Toronto, Saskatchewan, Montreal and Newfoundland, an anti-strategic voting message will cap our seats or lose seats.

(b) City vs. Country: We tend to elect members in the very highest- and lowest-population density ridings with negligible representation in mid-density districts. We hold the downtowns of cities and we hold ridings like Western Arctic, Churchill, etc. Aside from high levels of CBC listening, these districts have little in common.

(c) Minorities: While our party has gone to the greatest lengths to win the support off ethnic and racial minorities, we have little to show for it, except in provinces where our party governs. It is only in BC and Saskatchewan and Manitoba that we have been really successful in building a non-Anglo or non-white base.

In my view, this means we need to make some major choices. We need to choose which areas of the country we are going to advance and which areas we are going to attempt just to defend our incumbents.

I think we should push either for a strategy that focuses our efforts at expansion on the periphery of the country while trying to hold our incumbents in Central Canada. I think that this strategy should emphasize the following:

(a) Strategic voting to block the Tories with messages crafted based on real poll data and representation in provincial legislatures for regional media markets

(b) A populist "the two big parties have let you down" message that describes the Harper government as a betrayal of the Reform Party legacy (rather than a continuation thereof) and attacks the Ignatieff-Harper coalition

(c) Recognition of South Asian and aboriginal issues in Western and Northern media markets

Populism plays well in the West and badly in Ontario; strategic voting helps us in the West and hurts us in Ontario. And there is no middle ground on questions of strategic voting and populism. You either run a populist campaign or you don't. You either tell people to vote their conscience or you tell them to vote strategically.

If we run a populist, anti-government campaign, we will not be setting ourselves up to expand anywhere in Ontario except for, at most, half a dozen seats in the North and Southwest. If we run a campaign that highlights our moderation and managerial competence, we put seats like Beaches-East York and Parkdale-High Park back in play at the expense of the four western provinces. We need to choose between these priorities because there is no real middle ground.

If we exhort people to vote strategically in Tory-held seats, we will pick up seats in BC, the Prairies and Nova Scotia. If we exhort people to vote their conscience, we may gain seats in Toronto and Montreal but we will do so at the expense of seats in the West. Again, we actually have to choose between these two messages. There is no middle ground.

"Arbitrarily"?

My observation regarding the zero-sum nature of strategic voting discourse in Canada's NDP is based on decades of observation. Don't tell me you haven't seen the same things.

"Strategic voting discourse" is a synonym for Liberal spin in my books.  The more I plumb the data, the more convinced I am that its main accomplishment (perhaps even objective) is to discourage NDP voters from voting at all.  It doesn't encourage Liberal voters to switch to the NDP in very many places.  It might work with folks who are NDP-Green switchers, and indeed in seats where the NDP suddenly becomes competitive, we've seen the previous Green vote abate to the NDP's benefit.

A lot of people are analyzing this based on parties' shares of the vote on a riding-wide basis.  Once you start to peer down into the poll-level results and also look at who stayed home, there is not much Liberal-NDP switching going on.  You're in Toronto now, which is perhaps one of the few places that does take place.  But as with so many other things in our country, what happens in Toronto cannot be generalized to the country as a whole.  In many places outside the lower mainland in BC, in order to win seats, we actually need the traditional Liberal vote to return home from the Conservatives who they supported last time.

Bookish Agrarian wrote:

I agree with OO.   I would add your understanding of Ontario is pretty lacking and rather Toronto-centric.

Okay. What precisely did I say that was wrong?

Can you name more than six seats that the party doesn't already hold in Ontario that a more populist "throw the bums out" campaign would deliver? How many such seats are outside of the North and Southwest?

As I said, Stuart it might be effective as a message *to* Greens (about half of them, anyway).  I doubt it's effective as a message TO Liberals in very many places.  Edmonton-Strathcona is typically the only seat ever mentioned as an exemplar, but I maintain that it's the exception that proves the rule.

It's usually used by Liberals *to* NDP supporters.  And when NDPers use it, it's often heard as a rationale for voting Liberal, since everyone believes the Liberals are second everywhere they aren't in first (even if that's manfestly not true), and so they hear "strategic voting" as an exhortation to vote Liberal.

Anyways, I'd rather use an election campaign to build a mandate for something, rather than have people vote against someone they hate more.

To build higher than 20%, the party is going to have to recruit fantastic candidates, get pre-election organizing a lot earlier in their target ridings, and spend a lot more money in their target and next-tier ridings.  Keeping the central campaign focused on a number of pocket-book issues is different than running a "populist" campaign, but the kinds of things we've been working on in the House and elsewhere seem like about the right mix to me.

I fully expect us to be targetting extra seats in the Avalon peninsula, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Montreal and western Quebec, Toronto, southwestern Ontario, Kenora, Saskatchewan, Edmonton, BC, and northern Canada.  There are enough seats there that we should move past the Bloc at the very least.

Quote:

Oh, and MLP, while I'm generally in favour of electoral reform (MMPR to be precise; not STV so much), it's a very very boutique issue that only appeals to a small number of folks, and is not vote-determining for very many of them at all.

Well, "a small number" is relative, I'm sure a Conservative or a Liberal would use the same term to describe the quanitative appeal of the NDP and I've seen elections where quanitatively more people voted for electoral reform than voted for the NDP.
Democracy should be the issue in Canada right now. This is obvious both from the flagrant disregard for it by the Conservative and Liberal elites and the growing disillusionment with the electoral process and it's representatives shown by the public at large. Electoral reform is a significant part of this larger issue.
The reality is that despite the depressing state of democracy in Canada, we don't have a credible and respected critic.
I think the opportunity was there for Layton and the NDP however that hasn't happened and if you listen to why outside of hardcore NDP partisans, they have no credibility, it's because their commitment appears to be completely self-serving.
The debate was an opportunity for the NDP to challenge that criticism and build credibility. Instead they cemented that perception.
Topp's decision completely ignored public perception and he was right to apologize. Ignorance of public perception is really inexcusable at that level. And the NDP wouldn't have reversed their decision if they weren't paying attention to the polls which showed how their collusion with Harper and the networks played with women and other key NDP demographics.
I thought May was good in the debate, she brought up a lot of key issues that the other leaders were trying to avoid. It'll be interesting to see what happens next time, Iggy certainly is more likely to take the Harper position and maybe the NDP will be comfortable siding with the Cons and Libs.

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  He

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way. 

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who is running

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who is running the Green

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who is running the Green Party is