The Ground Game Counts #nlpoli

Two posts, quite a distance apart touch on the same basic political (science) issue:  the role of the local, get-out-the-vote effort in any political campaign.

What if they gave an election and nobody came? #nlvotes #nlpoli

Next Tuesday, the face of the province’s House of Assembly likely won’t change very much at all.

The new premier will take office following an election with what is on track to be a record low turn-out.

That’s got nothing to do with public opinion.  It’s got everything to do with the way the politicians re-engineered the law governing provincial elections in a string of changes made after 2003.

For starters, how long does an election campaign have to be? 

Well, according to the Elections Act, 1991, there must be a minimum of 21 days between the day the House is dissolved and voting day.  Historically, incumbent parties liked to call elections with the shortest possible campaign time.  But some elections have gone on for almost a month.

After 2003, the provincial Conservatives introduced changes that set voting day as the second Tuesday in October.  They could have the official campaign period before that for as many days as they’d like.  In 2011, they called it so that there was the minimum time to campaign allowed by law.

But that doesn’t mean there is actually 21 days of activity.

When the Tories picked the second Tuesday in October as their preferred date, they didn’t pick by accident.  They picked it so that voting day would always be right after the thanksgiving day weekend.

Clever boys and girls are they.  That automatically reduces the  period during which voters are paying attention to the campaign by at least three days.  No party is going to campaign on the holiday weekend, for fear of pissing off voters.  And voters who are travelling around to visit relatives aren’t going to be thinking much about politics as they sleep off a big scoff.

Take that 21 and knock off three.

We are left with 18 days.

Advanced voting takes place a week before the final day.  Lop off four more days.

That leaves you with a functional campaign period of just 14 days.

The election financing rules make it illegal for an individual candidate to raise funds before the election is called.  That makes it pretty tough for a candidate in a district to raise local cash for his or her own local campaign. They have to rely on the party.

For someone who might want to run as an independent candidate, it’s impossible.  Well, impossible unless you made millions on the lottery or by flipping your cable company.  For the average schmuck in the street, the rules are stacked against you.

To see how it works in practice, don’t look at the Liberals who barely tried over the past four years.   Look instead at the NDP to find out how those rules work.  Party president Dale Kirby told Randy Simms a few whoppers on Tuesday about fundraising.  He claimed they only had money for a few ordinary people.  That bit was true. 

The fib was the bit he left out:  the NDP’s major bankroll comes from one union.  The single largest contribution of anyone, to any party, bar none.

Kirby also left out the fact the NDP use the House of Assembly and the government money that goes with it, just like all parties do for the odd staffer here and there.

But a whole campaign, all year?  Only the incumbents can do that.  And rake in cash the provincial Conservatives have, especially from people who do business with the government.  The Tories are bankrolled by Big Oil,  the other Dale Kirby whopper.  The province’s construction industry chucks the most grease on the wheels of the governing party’s machinery.

Incumbents flush with cash, others starved of cash, and election rules that make it very hard for anyone who doesn’t already have a high profile from having been in office already to try and get known in a mere two weeks.

But the real loser in all this is the voter.  People don’t pay a great deal of attention to politics at the best of times.  They have other things in their lives. 

Election campaigns, and all the noise and commotion that goes with them are the means by which parties get their attention.  Elections are supposed to be when voters get to make choices based on information.

The only problem is that provincial elections in Newfoundland and Labrador are designed not to engage voters.  They don’t give anyone enough time to get involved.

And this time around they certainly don’t give much chance for the parties to send information around and canvass for votes.  A week before polling day and your humble e-scribbler has received exactly nothing in the mail from either of the three parties.  One candidate – the Tory – showed up on the doorstep last week for the first time since he first got elected.  He had a brochure that said little.

The Tory obviously knew shag all about Muskrat Falls than the bullshit he’d been told to say and had nothing to offer other than that. The Liberal hit the doorstep on Tuesday night.  No sign of the Dipper and odds are neither he nor a piece of literature will show up between now and the last day to vote.

One of the most common complaints this election is that people don’t know who their candidates are.  One voter-friend of the scribbler in St. John’s East was surprised to discover who the incumbent was in his district. 

Ditto for a few people in Virginia Waters who were shocked to know their member of the House before the writ dropped was none other than Kathy Dunderdale.

The other candidates across St. John’s are unknown, for the most part and none of them have sufficient time to get their message to voters before the first votes are cast.  And that’s even if you allowed them a full bank account and all their prep done so they could start canvassing on the first official day of the election.

Aside from structural impediments to campaigning that all three parties have endorsed over time, the three political parties have all decided to avoid creating any sense of interest or excitement in the electorate this time around. 

Advertising appears to be at an all-time low volume.  The parties have a social media presence.  But the three parties in this province seem to use it as a token of their hipness rather than as the tool for voter activation that it can be.  .

Of course, for the incumbents – especially the Tories - that’s a useful strategy.

For the opposition parties, it would be idiotic.  Well, it would be if we started from the premise that the opposition parties want to unseat the government party.  Sure they say the words about what they’d do if they formed government, but the opposition political parties seem to think they are incumbents too.  Neither the Liberals nor the NDP have done anything meaningful that would risk them winning the election and taking over government. They both seem to be contented with things as they are.

It’s an old refrain around here that the three parties have essentially the same platform and that they all agree the Tories should be re-elected.

The election has turned out to be proof of it.

And all that is the reason Kathy Dunderdale will take off based on one of the lowest, if not the record lowest turn-outs in provincial history.

You’d almost think they wanted it that way.

 

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The horrors of democracy

From a recent Telegram editorial:

Those same Republicans are now saying these heroes, many of whom suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, must stand aside until the country’s fattest fat cats get to keep their three per cent tax holiday. 

One could hardly imagine any greater depth of moral bankruptcy.

And from the news:

The US Senate on Wednesday approved a long-awaited multi-billion-dollar health package for emergency responders to the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001.
…
The legislation was to be passed later Wednesday by the House of Representatives and sent to President Barack Obama's desk for signature. The approval by both chambers of Congress would come on the last day before lawmakers head home for a holiday recess.

Moral bankruptcy indeed.

Democracy is a messy business but as this bill demonstrates, in a healthy democracy parties can reconcile their contending points of view in a compromise that works for all.  In the end, the health care bill passed the Senate unanimously.

The Congress also passed a bill repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that discriminates against homosexuals serving in the American military. And those are just some of the measures passed as the members head off to a Christmas break.  The legislators will be back in January, incidentally, hard at work passing laws and keeping the current administration accountable to the people whose money the government spends.

All that noise  that hurt the ears of the Telegram editorial board is, in fact, an essential feature of any democracy worthy of the name.  It is, to be sure, a very necessary and very natural expression of a thriving society where people can argue about ideas,  have strong disagreements and then find a middle ground that allows everyone to move forward.

Compare to the current goings on in Newfoundland and Labrador.  The legislature sits for a handful of days a year.  When it does sit, as in the eight day wonder just completed, the members spoke about a handful of pathetic bills that did little more than change the punctuation is some straight-forward bills.  They spoke about those bills – debate is hardly the word for it -  with some of the most incoherent speeches delivered in this or any other legislature on the planet.

At the same time, the governing Conservatives are busily working to avoid having any sort of open political competition within their own party for the Premier’s job recently vacated in an unseemly haste by Danny Williams.   These denizens of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms and politicians like Jerome Kennedy and Darin King are afraid. 

They are afraid not only of debate, perhaps, but of their own inability, ultimately, to bring people together.

They seem to be genuinely distrustful of politics itself.  After all, debate and reconciliation, are core features of politics in a democratic society.

Seriously.

The problem in 2001 that Tories are pointing to was not that the Liberal leadership produced differences of opinion.  Those differences exist as a matter of course in every group of human beings. The political problem for Liberals came from the fact that Roger Grimes hard trouble bringing people together on his own team in a common cause.

The Conservative effort to deliver a leader without an open competition will do nothing except point out that the Conservatives not only lack a suitable replacement for Danny Williams, they are desperate not to risk their hold on power.  What’s more, Jerome or Darin or Kathy know that they lack the leadership skills to reconcile the factions within their own party.  Otherwise they wouldn’t stand for a back-room fix.

And in the process, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians should be highly suspicious of whomever the back-rooms boys settle on to run the Conservative Party.  After all, how can the people of Newfoundland and Labrador trust them to bring people together in much larger causes than who gets to head the Tory tribe?

Politics is supposed to be adversarial and the more open the differences the easier it is for people to consider the various aspects of difficult ideas.  Consider what might have happened, for example, had the legislature done what it is supposed to do and forced the cabinet to explain and fully justify something like the Abitibi expropriation.

The job of holding government accountable is not just for the opposition. Government members have a role to play as members of the House.

Newspapers and other media also have a role to play in a healthy democracy.  Usually, the role is to question and to criticise those in power.  Yet instead of showing any enthusiasm for democracy, the Telegram editorial board is slipping into the same anti-democratic way of thinking it offered in March and April 1931.  At that time, the country supposedly needed a break from democracy and the Telegram was all in favour of it.

Simply put:  just as one could not be a democrat and support the imposition of an unelected government in 1931, one cannot support democracy and hold out the recent session of the legislature as anything other than the embarrassment that it is.
 
If, as the Telegram editorial board contends,  the most recent session of the United States Congress is a sign of moral bankruptcy and if  the House of Assembly is a repository of nobility and virtue by comparison, then let us all hope the province is very soon beset by every form of political debauchery the human mind can imagine.

There is, after all, something much more horrible than democracy.

- srbp -

The rent is too damn high

Politicians should know how to communicate their ideas simply, consistently and repeatedly.  Repetition is one of the ways you can ensure a message gets through and that it sticks.

Take as a fine example of these simple axioms none better than Jimmy McMillan, candidate for governor of New York.  Say what you will about McMillan’s political party, these edited clips of a recent candidate’s debate demonstrate how effect he is as a communicator. 

Get the message?

If you listen to any other bits of the debate, you’ll quickly realise the extent to which McMillan is a fringe candidate.  But when it comes to simply and effectively communicating his party’s key message, this guy is way out in front of the pack.

These clips running on the nightly news as part of a straightforward report would likely win the guy a ton of votes. If you don’t think it’s possible, just look at local politics since 2003.

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Process Stories, or real insiders don’t gab

A piece this week in the Hill Times this week conjures up images of a West Wing episode. The night of Jed Bartlet’s re-election, some guy turns up on the major networks purporting to be a Democratic Party insider. The guy claims he advised Bartlet on issues during the campaign that turned out to be crucial to victory.

Only thing is the guy wasn’t really an insider.  Rather he was a pollster Bruno Gianelli hired to do some polling in one part of one state.  The guy knew nothing but he talked a good game and the networks ate up his story.

The Hill Times story quotes an unidentified ‘Liberal insider” as saying:

"They can't win. If you go province-by-province and riding-by-riding, what does it give you? I know the spin will be that the cross-country tour elevated Iggy, and the long-gun and census stuff pulled Harper down, so now we're tied. But when the crunch comes and people are going to vote, I don't think—whether they had to fill in a long-form census or not—I don't think it's going to be a serious factor…".

Someone actually so far inside any political party as to know what the leadership team is actually thinking:

1. wouldn’t discuss it publicly, and,
2. wouldn’t talk the sort of pure crap contained in this article.

You can tell the “insider” is full of crap by this simple paragraph:

In Newfoundland, for example, if Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams "goes whole hog" and puts his support behind the federal Conservatives in the next election campaign, the Tories could win five of the province's seven seats, the insider said. Liberal MP Siobhan Coady's St. John's South-Mount Pearl riding and Scott Andrews' riding in Avalon are the most at risk.

Right off the bat, this anonymous character predicts the Tories would gain five seats in Newfoundland and Labrador, but only names two that might change hands.  Where are the other three?

Any person who actually knew what happened on the ground in Newfoundland and Labrador  - as opposed to the bullshit - wouldn’t claim for one second that Danny Williams could turn the tide and suddenly have everyone vote for a party Williams himself savaged not so long ago. 

The simple reason is that Danny Williams didn’t do it the last time.

All Danny Williams did in 2008 was strangle the Conservative vote.

Well, for the most part he strangled it.  In St. John’s East, Tories turned out en masse for Danny’s old law partner, Jack Harris.  The Liberal vote there collapsed as well, giving Harris a giant majority. Don’t count on that one changing hands back to the Conservatives.

In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, a sizeable number of Conservative voters actually rejected Danny’s instructions and turned out to vote for the New Democrat.  That’s right.  Even though Danny Williams’ cabinet ministers turned out for Liberal Siobhan Coady, a sizeable number of rank and file Conservatives in the riding actually made a choice for the New Democrat.  In other ridings they just stayed home.

But in SJSMP, they voted for the New Democrat as a protest over Conservative ministers actively campaigning for their hated enemy, les rouges.  Call it a hold over from the 1949 Confederation racket if you want, but Conservative townies tend to vote for the New Democrats rather than Liberals if the can’t vote for their own guy.

Put a stronger Conservative candidate in play and this riding might change its colours.  Then again, it might not.  If you apply the current poll configuration to old votes, the riding tended to vote Liberal more than Conservative more recently.  What usually made the difference in the old configuration was the solid blue voting along what is now known as the Irish loop.  Even losing coming out of St. John’s and Mount Pearl, the Conservative would go over the top as the Southern Shore went solidly Conservative.

One of the other key differences might be the New Democrat candidate. If the NDP run a candidate with a strong enough profile and the right messaging, he could split the blue vote. Yes, that seems counterintuitive for people who think of voting only in left-right terms – like the “insider” apparently -  but the distinction could be important in the next federal election.

Another factor to watch would be the impact of migration on the vote. The old Conservative stronghold in Avalon has moved to the metro St. John’s region.  Where they live now could have a huge impact on the vote in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl as well as neighbouring Avalon.

In 2008, the fight turned out to be a straight fight between the Liberals and the Conservatives.  You’d have to do a poll by poll breakdown to see where the Conservatives lost votes and where they picked up.  The New Democrats were a distant third, but they did increase their vote sizeably. They won’t have the Conservative Family Feud to count on this time and those extra 2400 votes the NDP gained last time might swing to one of the other parties.

None of that takes into account the value of incumbency.

Nor does it take into account the fact that in 2004 and 2006 – when Williams and his party actively supported Conservatives across the province – the best the Conservatives could do is win the same two seats they usually win. In 2008, though, Williams wiped out the Conservative vote and In St. John’s East in particular he may have locked that one in New Democrat hands for a while.  Conservative insiders –real insiders – are likely thinking that with friends like that…well, you know where that goes.

So that none of that looks even remotely like a scenario where the Old Man is going to hand his old enemy Steve five easy seats. And it gets even harder to see the “insider” scenario if you realise the farther one gets from St. John’s, the harder it is to elect a federal Conservative in Newfoundland and Labrador, even with the enthusiastic help of a guy whose strongest supporters are still found among townies.

Of course, the “insider’’ assessment only works on any level if you continue to think that Danny Williams remains as popular as he ever was, even within his own party.  As the insider aptly shows by his or her appearance of knowing things, appearances can be deceiving. 

The 2008 Family Feud did its most damage within the Conservative Party itself.  Even having Danny Williams call off the feud  or claim that he leads a Reform-based Conservative Party might not be enough to win back the enthusiastic support of Conservatives who voted Blue long before Williams was a gleam in his own eye. Those are the people he screwed with in 2008 and those people didn’t like it one bit.

Williams himself also hinted recently at internal political problems with his party.  And let’s not forget that earlier this year, someone dropped a dime on his little plan to scoot south secretly to have heart surgery.

To be fair, though, the one part of the scenario the Liberal “insider” didn’t mention is another one:  what might happen in one of the ridings if Danny Williams himself decided to take a shot at federal politics.

That wouldn’t change the federal Conservatives’ chances a great deal in Newfoundland and Labrador, but it would make the nomination fight in one riding a lot more interesting than it might otherwise be.

Wonder which riding it might be?

St. John’s East is already safely in the hands of his old friend and law partner. Odds are the Old Man wouldn’t run there.

But he does own a sizeable house in Avalon, the seat once held by his political nemesis, John Efford.

Hmmm.

The Old Man jumping to federal politics.

Maybe the Hill times wasn’t speaking with a Liberal after all.

Their assessment sounds more like what one would get from a member of the Old Man’s crew.

- srbp -

Paul Lane – bigger ambitions?

Is Mount Pearl city councillor Paul Lane  - described by the Telegram recently as a long-time Conservative  - going to seek the Conservative nod in the next federal election?

Might be.

He turned up on Crap Talk Thursday speaking as a concerned citizen.

His topic:

Lighthouses.

Clearly, this is a big issue in Mount Pearl.  They are afraid of losing their lighthouse on the wharf right next to the Rolls Royce marine engine repair facility.

All sarcasm aside – Mount Pearl is land-locked -  when a politico turns up talking about something not related to his current political office, odds are good he is laying the groundwork for a run at another office.

Since there is no provincial election coming up with an available seat, the only logical conclusion would be that he is looking for the Connie nod against Siobhan Coady in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.

Now that might be interesting if – as it now seems –  the Old Man will not be waging a jihad against his fellow Conservatives next time. That means all the local Tories who voted for Ryan Cleary purely as a protest over the Family Feud can go safely back to voting for their federal cousins.

That could be interesting in that the race would then be between Coady and Lane with Ryan bringing up the rear.   Ditto in a race where another staunch Conservative, like say Tommy Osborne, decided to get some pensionable federal time.

And for those who doubt the wisdom of the mighty political oracle known as Bond, just remember that everyone laughed at the prediction that Steve Kent would switch to the provincial Tories having previously supported both the federal and provincial Liberals and – if memory serves – the federal proto-Connies at one point.

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