Honey! I shrunk the party!
Sharp-eyed denizens of the Twittersphere yesterday noticed a United Conservative Party (UCP) update that, presumably inadvertently, gave away a dramatic drop in party membership since the 2022 UCP leadership contest that put Danielle Smith in Alberta’s top political job.
“UCP membership is currently around 54,000,” said some guy calling himself Turkish Marksman who looks remarkably like the CBC’s Jason Markusoff. Mind you, Yusuf Dikeç, the silver-medal-winning Turkish Olympic pistol shooter, also looks remarkably like Markusoff, so there’s probably a simple explanation for this coincidence.
That’s “down from the 123,915 members for UCP leadership,” Markusoff/Turkish Marksman said on the social media application now known as X. It’s also “below Alberta NDP’s after their leadership.”
On May 13, actually a few days before Naheed Nenshi’s victory as NDP leader was announced, the Opposition party revealed its membership had jumped to 85,144 from slightly more than 16,000 at the end of 2023.
Personally, I find math hard enough to be a Conservative, but my calculation is a little more generous, to wit, that if 18,500 is about 33 per cent of the UCP’s membership, then that membership would be about 56,000 – so only a little below where it was three months before the August 2022 peak during the party’s leadership race that was won by Ms. Smith.
This factoid slipped out when UCP President Rob Smith, whose relationship to the party’s Take Back Alberta faction is unclear, bragged in the update that the “Injection of Truth” anti-vaccine revival meeting sponsored by the Calgary-Lougheed Constituency Association on June 22 “featured over 500 in the room and more than 18,000 watching across Alberta at various constituency association ‘watch parties’ …”
“That represents about 33 per cent of our membership,” he boasted, weirdly when you think about it, before going on to claim a huge YouTube viewership and argue this “helped the world know what it means to pursue the truth as a United Conservative in Alberta.”
Now kind of stuff seemed pretty unhinged on the night after the meeting, but in light of Smith’s slip – or strategic leak as a warning to the premier – one has to ask: Has Danielle Smith’s embrace of what former UCP leader Jason Kenney used to call the party’s “lunatics” managed to significantly shrink the United Conservative Party?
Since, as Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt sagely commented in response to Markusoff’s calculated observation, it’s “normal for party membership to drop after a leadership race … I found it more fascinating that the UCP continues to brag about its ‘Injection of Truth’ event.”
No kidding!
Because Smith’s update also mentioned that more 850 resolutions had been submitted for the AGM, Dr. Bratt wondered, how many “are related to re-litigating COVID restrictions?”
Almost certainly a lot.
Now, as Dr. Bratt quite rightly pointed out, political parties’ membership tends to peak before leadership contests and drop off afterward, so this may not be unexpected. Something similar can probably be expected to happen to the NDP’s numbers when the memberships sold during its leadership race start to run out.
Still, a drop in membership of 55 per cent or more sounds significant enough to make one wonder just how much Ms. Smith’s embrace of MAGA lunacy like the dangerous nonsense peddled at the Calgary-Lougheed meeting is driving sensible conservatives out of the party.
In other words, is anyone left but the anti-vaxxers?
According to Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid’s column yesterday, “the UCP is a roiling cauldron of discontented, angry members, topped by a more centrist layer that figures she’s doing quite well.”
But is that centrist layer now getting so thin you can practically see through it?
Meanwhile, Braid suggested, accurately in this case, this means that if Premier Smith wants to keep her job after the party’s annual general meeting in November, she’s going to have to bow down to the party’s lunatic fringe – if only because it’s not a fringe any more, it’s about all that’s left of the UCP.
Well, a lot can happen in a short time in politics and, as the late Lyndon B. Johnson famously observed in 1958 before he became U.S. president, “in politics you’ve got to learn that, overnight, chickenshit can turn to chicken salad!”
The reverse is also true.
If you don’t believe that, just take a look at what’s happened in the past few days in the current U.S. presidential race.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
