Once a fringe party in northern B.C., Liberal surge recalls Trudeau-mania of 1970s
Alright, if you click above you can hear me giving some analysis of last night’s election.
Even though the Liberals lost in both Prince George ridings, they far exceeded expectations. For past decade, they’ve basically been fringe. Their support has hovered around 5 percent- third place at best, sometimes fourth, behind the Greens.
That changed last night — in the Peace, Matt Shaw received 25 percent and Tracy Calogheros around 31 percent.
To get a sense of how much growth that is, consider:
the Liberals received more votes in Prince George ridings last night than they have in the last three elections COMBINED.
In fact, you have to go back to 1974 to find that much support for the Liberals in this region — when Trudeau Sr. went from a minority to majority government.
So is it Trudeau-mania again? Probably to an extent. But it also helps that actual candidates put their names forward, instead of party fly-ins.
And what happened to the NDP? They traditionally finish second, and were favoured in some projections to win in the Cariboo.
This points to a few things. First, the unreliability of local-level data. It’s just not that easy to get a sense of support on a riding level — the numbers from last night were pretty off of what was being predicted.
Second, it calls into question strategic voting. You had every strategic voting campaign telling people to vote NDP to defeat Conservatives here, and in the end they got a pretty decisive third. How many people were even voting strategically? How many people who voted NDP last night only did so because of the strategic vote and would have voted Liberal otherwise? If that had happened, would that have narrowed the 2,000-vote gap between the Conservative and Liberal candidate?
UPDATE: THESE NEXT TWO LINES AREN’T TRUE, SEE UPDATE BELOW
And what happened to all of the NDP’s traditional supporters? Again, this was a bad finish for them.
Obviously some of the vote went Liberal. The Liberals also ate into Conservative support. Just as it happened nationally.
What does this mean for the future? Well, local Liberals are happy — they went from 5% to 25% and 31%. This puts them on the party radar. With those numbers, it’s possible Liberals could pull off a future victory in Prince George. And they have majority government to build support over the next four years.
So if you see visits from party leadership, could be scoping things out for future election prospects & possibly more machinery on ground.
UPDATE:
I had change to look at the raw numbers, and it turns out I misinterpreted the fall in NDP support. Even though they fell to third, they actually had a (marginal) increase in total number of voters. The Liberal upsurge can be fully attributed to the number of new voters in this election, plus the decline in support for the Conservatives. I mean, what actually happened is a guessing game, but ultimately, in raw votes, the Liberals made huge gains, NDP made very small gains, and the Conservatives and Greens lost supporters.
So even though Conservatives won the riding, the trend is a decline in support while the Liberals and (to a much lesser extent) NDP are making gains. We’ll see what happens next time.
