NDP Leadership 66

I was thinking that too Hunky_Monkey! It's not exclusively a sexist expression, using douche as an insult. There is another part one might want to clean, in which case a douche can always be in fashion!

(Is this going to be my favourite thread of the bunch? Perhaps!)

Resisting Santorum related comment.

"leg up" reminds me of dogs and hydrants.

Our Math teacher in highschool told us for tests to not be tardy and to not to make any careless mistakes - with apologies extended to H Careless and J Tardy (two classmates).

RE: Learn four languages, negotiate treaties, defend rights, become an MP. Still get asked if you're a 'serious' candidate. #nativeguyproblems

True - especially a media who thinks that you are Inuit because you grew up in Northern Quebec!

The good news his daughter wanted to share with him couldn't have been all that important or we would have heard about it. Just hope that Saganash is over his cold before the next debate - that would be good news enough.

writer wrote:

The media has never shown much understanding of the NDP, and has shown much contempt. The media is riding through the next few years, sure that the NDP will tank and that the much more familiar and comfortable Liberals will regain their status.

Very true. Bob Rae comports himself very good and is very good and getting on the bandwagon just in time so that he can pretend to be driving it, but he has also gotten a lot of support from the media. Personally, I hope that the Liberals stick with him (and don't really see anyone else ready to take the leap - Justin won't) - let him wear his own record in Ontario and have our new leader compare and contrast him with Tommy Douglas!
Dewar has impressed Charlie Angus for planning to be the first leadership hopeful in London Ontario - then again, Angus was on P&P asking the Tory guy to go up to Attawapiskat to see things for himself - and pointing out that he can't possibily say anything for sure if he hasn't been there. Thus, Angus is apt to give Kudos for showing up.

Is anybody else going to be in London Friday morning?

 

On another matter, I'm finding it a trifle odd that the Dewar campaign is expending (ie wasting) so much energy trying to freep the Skinny Dipper survey.

Malcolm wrote:

Flight from Kamuraska, you might find it easier to make your case if you used a little bit of substance to offset the rage and vitriol.

No one has seriously disputed that Mulcair is likely in the strongest position to consolidate the gains in Quebec.  It does not follow from there that the election of any other candidate would result on a complete wipeout.  Indeed, that conclusion asumes that Quebec voters are petty and parochial - not a key mesage I'd suggest to the Mulcair camp.

Unlike the Orange surge last May, the leader will almost certainly be less of a factor in 2015.  It may well still be the most important factor, but the candidates (in particular the incumbents) will also be another factor under consideration.  Whereas 2011 saw us running one incumbent and a handful of highish profile challengers, 2015 will see us running 59(ish) incumbents plus (most likely) a few more highish profile or even star candidates.

Curiously, Peter Stoffer and Yvon Godin managed to survive the loss of Alexa McDonough as leader.

And BTW, not agreing with your superficial certitude does not mean someone isn't interested in winning.  It's a bullshit attack campletely devoid of substance or integrity.

 

Honestly you could run Jesus Christ himself against Peter Stoffer out here and he'd still get 50% I think Alexa had little to do with that and what I've seen of Godin it's the same

mabrouss wrote:

Honestly you could run Jesus Christ himself against Peter Stoffer out here and he'd still get 50% I think Alexa had little to do with that and what I've seen of Godin it's the same

That would more or less be my point.  Now the two of them are unbeatable.  But in 1997, they were upset winners riding Alexa McDonough's coat tails.

Apart from Mulcair, nearly all the NDP MPs elected in 2011 in Quebec were elected on Jack's coat tails (and maybe Mulcair's).

In 2015, most of them will stand or fall on their own merits.  (Conceding, of course, that electing Mulcair as leader is likely to make it slightly easier.)

Flight from Kamuraska's claim that the election of any candidate other than Mulcair will result in the near complete devastation of the NDP in Quebec is idiotic bumph.

Malcolm wrote:

Apart from Mulcair, nearly all the NDP MPs elected in 2011 in Quebec were elected on Jack's coat tails (and maybe Mulcair's).

Maybe. I'd argue that Françoise Boivin, with 62% against the Bloc incumbent's 15% and the Liberal's 14%, was elected on her own (note that she supports Topp). The same is likely true for Nycole Turmel, who was a big name in Gatineau, who got 59% against the Liberal incumbent's 20%. They both got a higher percent than Mulcair himself.

Next was Pierre Dionne Labelle from Saint-Jérôme, well-known locally, who got 55% against the Bloc incumbent's 28% (note that he supports Saganash.) Interesting sidenote: on his Facebook page on January 1 he posted:

Quote:

Françoise Boivin a écrit: En passant mes ami(e)s, Pierre Dionne Labelle est selon moi le meilleur orateur à la chambre des communes. C'est aussi un chansonnier et un poète. En fait, c'est un chum. Merci la gang pour tous vos bons vœux.

(Françoise Boivin wrote: By the way my friends, Pierre Labelle Dionne is in my opinion the best speaker in the House of Commons. He is also a songwriter and a poet. In fact, he's a "chum". Thanks, gang, for all your good wishes.)

He replied "Merci Françoise. Venant de toi, c'est tout un compliment. On va les avoir à l'usure!" (Thanks Françoise. Coming from you, that's quite a compliment. We'll have to convince them(???))

Next was Manon Perreault in Montcalm, who got 53% against the Bloc incumbent's 30%. Again well-known locally, she had been a municipal councillor from 2002 to 2009. Before being elected to parliament, as a person living with restricted mobility, she worked as an administrator and trainer with Kéroul, an organization promoting tourism for people with disabilities, and Handami, a regional association for people with disabilities. Perreault became a paraplegic following an equestrian accident in 1993 when she was 28. (She's supporting Mulcair.)

Next is Christine Moore, a nurse who had run twice before in Abitibi—Témiscamingue where she was somewhat known. She got 51% against the Bloc incumbent's 32%. (She's supporting Saganash.)

Alexandre Boulerice also got 51%, and is supporting Topp.

Jean-François Larose also got 52% and is supporting Niki Ashton. Alain Giguère got 50% and supports Topp. A pattern?

Wilf Day wrote:

Maybe. I'd argue that Françoise Boivin . . .

 

Um, Wilf me lad.  There's a reason I said:

Malcolm wrote:

Apart from Mulcair, NEARLY all . . .

Wilf seems to be making the point that Mulcair has relatively fewer supporters among the Quebec MPs who were elected with the greatest majorities.

If this is so, the other side of the coin is that he predominates among those Quebec Mps who are more electorally vulnerable.

Perhaps this to some extent reflects their perception of which leader will best help them retain their seats.

The post below is from the thread What a Good Strategic Poll Looks Like in the NDP Leadership Race. I am copying it here both for the relevance to the leadership race, and because I have a long standing interest in discussing theses questions; therfore do not want to see that thread end up discussing them ONLY through the lenses of opinions about leadership candidates and their campaigns.

 

 

Although this is for the leadership race, this survey is the kind of thing that is needed for the NDP to 'push the envelope' or 'move the goal posts' of electoral politics.

If you really mean to do it, and not just pay homage to the pretty words, moving the goalposts is risky business. Because by definition, it is about taking voters in your supporter universe to places and opininoins where they are not at the moment. Where they could be, but are not at the moment.

And if you are going to do that without heedlessly paying a stiff price, with not even any long term rewards, you had better go out there and test in the real world the parameters of where people are ready [and not] to move to.

In the NDP, when its just words about going to new places, we don't go there.
"Someday."

[Maybe]

And if you try to travel to riskier territory on your hunches and gut feelings- no matter how much experience you have and how much you have talked and reflected on plans- the consequences are not going to be pretty.
The main risk is not that you end up going where you should not- although you do need also to check on that. If you do not do real research, you are going to miss both opportunities and problems in advancing the agenda you have decided you want to pursue.

Because the Topp campaign's survey is gauging NDP members, and the parameters of a leadership race, it is going to look different than testing where potential supporters might go with you. And there would be more research instruments for the latter. But the operating principles are the same.

For example: when this survey came out, Topp was already beyond the point of no return on commitment to the taxation policy element of his social equailty agenda. But the campaign still needs to know if that is resonating or likely to resonate. And if the feedback data is disapointing- what to supplement with? Etc.

 

ottawaobserver wrote:

Geez and you liked that survey when Niki was doing well in it, Malcolm. Anyways, the Mulcair folks are keeping ahead of them, so there's plenty of activity going around on it right now.

Actually, when the main opponent became Dewar over Nash, Mulcair won with a much larger margin...despite any freeping.

Edited to add: Since I went to bed, Peggy has freeped the pants off of both their sorry arses!

Beyond that, who wants to be the "default" option?

 It is a dangerous game to be playing, assuming people will support you just because there is no other option.  You want to give them a reason to or else you become complacent and leave open a gap for anyone to fill at a whim.  That's pretty much exactly what happened to the Bloc and the Liberals in Quebec to lead to our rise.  Everyone had gotten used to the "New Normal" of the BQ and Libs splitting Quebec in a 2/3rds to 1/3rd approximate ratio, bouncing around a little bit that they didn't see the shift coming.

I still haven't seen an explanation that spells out why Romeo Saganash as leader would result in losing seats in Montreal. I'm interested in knowing what this assertion is based on, if anything. 

Still, I am curious to know what the explanation is for why someone from Baie James, with roots in the area that run deeper than the creation of New France, whose riding encompasses *half the province* geographically, who lived in Quebec City for 20 years, and who has many connections to Montreal would be such a turn-off. I am asking to see the reasoning spelled out, as I am not living in Quebec. Nor are you, KenS. Very interested to hear from people there. The rest of us can run in silly circles, guessing. That is not something I'm interested in.

I am sure that the closer we get to the convention that there will be polls measuring the relative electoral strength of each candidate.

I am also sure that if those polls continue to show that Tom is our best electoral prospect that his detractors will continue to minimize them.

And they will use the same catchprases - name recognition, choir, blackmail, sky is falling, etc.

Not to mention that I have yet to see any real polls. So I have not had a chance to minimize them.

'Sky is falling' reaction is to a Tom walks on water narrative based on evidence thinner than polls.

KenS wrote:

Curiousity question: are we likely to ever see a reliable poll of leadership candidate strength?

That would have to be on members only- and I think would have to have a bare minimum of 600 respondents... more likely 1000, to get results that in a field of 8 are not useless when the MOE is taken into account.

Am I the only one getting tired of having to give statistics lessons?  A poll with 600 respondents will more than suffice if we are looking for a maximum 4% MOE at 95% confidence, REGARDLESS OF THE NUMBER OF CANDIDATES!!!.  Indeed, if there are more candidates the proportion of respondents for each will be LOWER, leading to a HIGHER degree of accuracy.

In other words, let's say there was a candidate that had only 5% support.  The standard error (1 sigma) would be sqrt[p(1-p)/n] = sqrt[0.05(0.95)/600] = 1.78 %.  To have that at a 95% CI (i.e. ~2 sigmas, 19 times out of 20), we multiply the SE by about 2 to obtain 3.6% MOE - LESS THAN THE ERROR FOR CANDIDATES WITH A HIGHER LEVEL (proportion) OF SUPPORT. 

Out of the 7 who came in with Alexa, only two survived the next election. I think they are also the only 2 who showed themselves to be good constituency politicians in that time until the winnowing next election.

The 59 in Quebec look better than that on average. But the dynamic is going to be the same.

The best next Quebec campaign in the world is not going to save all the MPs who do not get it togther- whether on their own and/or with organizational help from the party.

Hunky_Monkey wrote:

And not all 59 MPs are great. Some are excelling... some are doing ok and growing... and some leave a lot to be desired. Same with any large caucus regardless of political stripe.

This should go without saying.

But it's not 'theoretical'. We have seen this before. The 1997 Alexa coatails Atlantic breakthrough produced a more modest version of MPs who had no expectation of winning. Peter Stoffer was among those. Whatever people here think about Peter, he learned very fast and is a very capable politician. Some of the others were duds or worse.

***Geek Alert***

1)Margin of error says nothing about polling ACCURACY. It is an estimate of statistical precision, which is a very different thing. It is not at all uncommon for polls with small margins of error (i.e. high statistical precision) to be inaccurate - sometimes spectacularly so. Larger sample sizes can result in higher precision, and higher accuracy, by permitting study designs that are stratified around a number of identified factors related to potential biases in the results. Results that are subsampled from larger stratified studies with different objectives can be highly inaccurate.

2) MOE as expressed in most polling studies is a maximum estimate and is based on the standard error of a result of 50%. Any result greater or less than 50% will have a smaller MOE, and the effect is larger the further the result is from 50%.

Just to simplify matters a little for those of us who don't deal with these concepts every day, here is how to calculate the margin of error:

 

 

A simple worked-out example can be found [url=http://homepages.wmich.edu/~bwagner/StatReview/Binomial/binomial%20ci.ht....

Get back to me if you have any questions.

 

Brian Topp landed another big endorsement today: Lorne Calvert. Mulcair has said he wants to govern like Calvert and Doer. I still haven't fogiven Topp for his baseless attack on Mulcair, trying to compare Mulcair to Charest and saying Mulcair would take the NDP to the right with not a shred of evidence offered to back his statement. Team Topp also said near the beginning of the campaign that Mulcair could not generate support outside of Quebec, how is that prediction panning out?

KenS wrote:

Translation of Greek:

Decent MOE is a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for poll accuracy.

Precisely.

i think that many of you folks making some of these assumptions are transposing your experiences and expectations in other parts of canada onto a polity significantly different from anywhere else in the country.  quite apart from never having visited, you've never sat around a dinner table, you don't spend your summers on the magog, you don't have any friends or co-workers from saint jerome or east montreal, you didn't go to school with kids from chateauguay and saint lambert.  you haven't been servers in restos or cafes, you don't watch quebec television or listen to rad-can.  essentially, given the deafness to the quebec reality and assuming that every one of us wants the ndp in power, i can only guess that you're basing all of your assessments on the odd article that you happen across (almost always excerpted from the english canadian media), a few polls (ask gilles duceppe about how useful those are even a month out of an election), the odd post on rabble here, and a few simplistic assumptions about voting behavior.  and then you're calling my anaylses vitriolic and simplistic.

so here's why i think the way i do about quebec (putting the rest of canada aside for now):

1) broadly speaking, it has been a truism for some time, roundly and soundly accepted by virtually everyone in the province, that the quebec people are profoundly unsatisfied with the current state of political discourse, they're apathetic generally, and specifically, they don't feel represented in the current structure of party competition.  this is a general statement, and it holds true for a majority of the low to middle information voters out there, though not necessarily for the very high information voter, and certainly not for the activists.  on the one hand, this is why we've seen such absurd splintering along the sovereignist axis, and on the other hand, why you'll see individual quebec mps making choices that run against both their personal electoral interests and the best interests of the party both in quebec and canada (supporting ashton or saganash, for instance).

2) quebec voters are extremely attuned to identity.  it's present in every single aspect of daily life in quebec, and as much as reasonable accommodation has proved attractive to the media as a flashpoint, the basic and overriding issue is the french language.  it's the touchstone, and it manifests itself in different ways in different discourses.  in some iterations, it's economic, in some it's purely cultural, in others, it's racial.  different strands in quebec society feel empelled toward different lines.  anyway, for the purposes of parsimony and topical relevance, this is why dewar was never even remotely on my radar: he can't even jump the first hurdle.  and still, there are significant differences between communicating and connecting along these different lines and iterations, across the various segments of quebec society.  jack sort of lucked out, in that, the quebec people didn't really look at him all that much outside of the campaign window, and most people liked what they saw in him personally.  the accent was good even if the french wasn't; the platform didn't matter so much; the media was calling him quebecois; he had mulcair on teevee and radio every single day, all over the province (to the point that i'm pretty sure most people just assumed that jack spoke french as well as mulcair, and that he had roughly the same background, which he obviously didn't).  the next leader will be the de facto quebec voice in canada's parliament, and a major presence in the quebec public discourse.  this is someone who'll be spending a huge amount of time in quebec over the next three years, and it's critical to the ndp's success in quebec (and thus, our success nationally) that the leader connect with the various segments of quebec society that jack sort of lucked into.

3) now the candidates.  ashton has no hope of doing any of this, basically, she's too young and way too different from what quebecois expect in a politician.  i'm very much primed to her message, and still even i don't find her compelling or charismatic, she's a poor speaker in french and she's a full generation away from being effective in the province.  dewar's appalling french disqualifies him immediately.  saganash has some very weird baggage with oka and that, but beyond it, he's been an opposition figure his whole life, he's not a maka kotto type, he's been a confrontational, somewhat anti-quebec (qua integral polity) activist for his entire career.  topp alternates between smirky, uncharismatic, devious and overly earnest - he's just not ready for prime-time.  cullen's french disqualifies him.  the less said about singh the better.  nash, i don't know.  she could go over well, i can't know for sure, but my visceral reaction is that she doesn't have that personal magnetism.  mulcair, he's already the most popular politician in the province.

so that's where i'm coming from.  one can put it into terms of mulcair saving quebec seats or whatever, but the real issue is that we just don't have anyone near as trusted by the quebec people to safeguard their interests, across all segments of society.  in effect, he's the guy.  jack's breakthrough in quebec was astonishing for how wide-ranging it was across francophone society, how many different sorts of people jumped on board.  you types who feel like all we need is a social-democratic message and that the bq and lpc will just fade away, that's not at all how it works.