There are two things you need to remember about that new poll from Think HQ Public Affairs that suggests the number of Alberta voters who still approve of Premier Jason Kenney’s job performance has now sunk below 30 per cent.
First, it’s a survey of a sample of Albertans, not a sample of United Conservative Party members who will necessarily vote in the premier’s leadership review vote starting later this month.
Also, it was “in the field,” as pollsters like to say, between Mar. 29 and Apr. 1—so, before most respondents discovered that Kenney doesn’t even know how to gas up his own truck, which strongly suggests he’s never had to.
That happened on April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, when Kenney set off for a co-op gas station in Calgary to make a cute little video about how he was delivering savings at the gas pumps by temporarily dropping the provincial fuel tax to help Albertans cope with high fuel prices that had already moved back downward.
Kenney’s difficulties removing the nozzle from the big blue Dodge Ram he’s rumoured to not actually like driving were hilarious, resulting in some versions of the video being set to music, for example, the Seinfeld theme music, or Yakety Sax, theme of Britain’s venerable Benny Hill show.
Neither was intended to make the premier look good.
More seriously from a political perspective was the possibility that, like the late George H.W. Bush’s astonished public discovery of how grocery store bar codes worked during the 1992 U.S. presidential election campaign, working class Alberta voters might react the same way their American counterparts did when they learned their patrician president didn’t have to buy his own groceries, and maybe never had.
On voting day that year, older readers may recall, with a little help from independent candidate Ross Perot Americans sent Bush packing and gave the keys to the White House to Bill Clinton.
Now voters in Alberta—home of free-range truck nuts—have discovered that Kenney is a poseur, all hat and no cows—in addition to having been born a member of the Laurentian Elite. (Not that Oakville’s all that close to the Laurentians, but regular readers will know what I mean).
What do you want to bet if the poll had been done a few days after Apr. 1, like right about now, Kenney’s numbers would be even worse?
Now, someone in the Premier’s Office in Edmonton is likely thinking, he’s only one per cent below 30 per cent. But assuming this poll is right, that’s not really where a premier facing a leadership review on which the survival of his party’s government may depend really wants to be.
“With only a handful of days to go before the leadership review vote in the UCP Party, Premier Jason Kenney’s approval ratings have stalled below 30 per cent, and with his party trailing in the polls, most voters want new UCP leadership,” the pollster said in its news release yesterday.
And if that don’t sound like a Country & Western song, dear readers, I don’t know what does!
The public, it would seem, is set in its determination that the UCP needs a new leader—and, if it doesn’t get one, some of them are indicating they’re likely to vote for Rachel Notley’s NDP.
Sixty-three per cent of the poll’s 1,135 respondents said Kenney should be replaced. (By the way, only eight per cent strongly approved of his performance.) Only 22 per cent want him to stay for whatever reasons.
Worse from the UCP’s perspective, it wasn’t actually much better when respondents were asked their party preference. In that case, 62 per cent of the self-identified UCP voters said they wanted Kenney gone. But 32 per cent thought he should hang in there.
However, that may not account for UCP members who had their memberships purchased for them by someone else, and who may not even know they are party members. How those votes get counted will be the real story of the leadership review when the results are released on May 18.
“If a provincial election were held tomorrow, the NDP would win decisively,” Think HQ’s press release said. The NDP has 46 per cent of decided voters, with the UCP at 34 per cent and the Wildrose Independence Party stealing 13 per cent of the right-wing vote. As a result, Mr. Kenney will probably get around to calling them, as well as his own party’s right wing, “lunatics” soon enough.
“The lack of variation in Jason Kenney’s numbers over the past few months is a surprise and suggests voter impressions have just hardened on him,” Think HQ President Marc Henry said in the release.
Said Henry: “The UCP coalition in 2019 was resounding. Two parties, once split, came together to unseat an unpopular NDP government. The challenge for the ‘United’ Conservatives at this point is the 2019 coalition of voters don’t appear ready to support a party led by Kenney again. They are well back in the polls, the Wildrose Independence Party is a force (or at least at this stage a vote-splitting force), and voters aren’t especially motivated to give the premier another go—WIPA voters are particularly vitriolic toward Kenney’s leadership.”
Blaise Boehmer, a former senior communications staffer for the Kenney Government who is now director of corporate communications and public affairs for NATIONAL Public Relations told AlbertaPolitics.ca that “the die appears to be cast for Albertans.
“A number of announcements, including the balanced budget and cutting the gas tax, have had almost no positive effect on this premier,” Boehmer said. “That’s a big problem for a guy facing his members in the next few weeks, and voters in just over a year.”
The Think HQ poll uses the Angus Reid Forum’s online panel. Margins of error outside of Calgary, likely to be the most important battleground in the coming election whenever it happens, are pretty big, as large as 8.5 per cent. So don’t go betting the ranch on anything you read here.
These results are also at variance with some recent polling, most notably Alberta pollster Janet Brown’s clients-eyes’-only poll, partly leaked to media last month by UCP operatives, that showed if an election had been held then, the UCP would have triumphed with 47 seats, with 40 for the NDP. Actual percentage support for the parties wasn’t included in the leak, alas.
Brown did say her poll indicated that 60 per cent of Albertans disapprove of the job Kenney has been doing.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
