Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The possible...

Amid the worry about split votes and Con majorities, there's a chance we'll see an NDP minority when the polls close. With numbers like these, it could happen.

On those numbers...there's a lot of teeth gnashing about how these number are splitting votes and killing the chances of Liberals getting enough seats to deny the Cons a majority. Well, when the Liberals are polling at 22% and the NDP is at 30%, the onus for strategic voting shifts from Dipper fans voting for Liberals, to Liberals voting for Dippers.

If you are a partisan Liberal, perhaps you could, for just one itty bitty little election, vote orange.

22 comments:

susansmith said...

It's more like tactical voting because strategic means there is a long term plan - hmm, maybe that's why all those strategic voting sites (cough - liberal vote for us sites) are strategic after all, and fire them up for just in time for another election.

Anyway, to not want to be engulfed by the blue menace I suggest that Libs tactically vote NDP - because we don't want to get eaten by the blue blob!

And I am doing tongue & cheek here!

Dana said...

Ignore this post and vote for whoever has the best chance of defeating the Con in your riding.

Snap out of it Boris.

Dana said...

Would some dipper fanatic please detail to me the members of an NDP cabinet and why their credentials are so much better than Libs or Cons.

Like in the next 8 hours.

Seriously.

I don't think you can do it.

Boris said...

Ignore this post and vote for whoever has the best chance of defeating the Con in your riding.

Heh ;) See my comment in an earlier post about herding cats. If you could even remotely get a critical mass of people to do that in each riding, I'd say sure, do it.

For now, just move as many votes as you can to the leading party and let it all shake out on the 2nd.

Uncommoner said...

You know, I wouldn't mind seeing an NDP minority government, especially with the Liberals as the official opposition.

To be honest, I don't much like any of the leaders of any of the parties. With the (possible) exception of Gilles Duceppe, I doubt I would vote for any one of them if they were candidates in my riding.

But I truly do loathe and despise Stephen Harper. If I believed that the local NDP candidate had a better chance of defeating the local CPC candidate, I'd vote that way in a second.

Sadly, this is Ontario and it seems far more likely that the Liberal choice might eke out a win and deny the HarperGovernment (tm pending) a seat.

I've seen Liberal governments and Progressive Conservative governments. They both sucked. I still remember Bob Rae and the backlash against him when his provincial government fell too.

But this is a time for all reasonable, rational Canadians to put aside their differences, band together and do their level best to run Stephen Harper, the Poltroon-who-would-be-King out of town on a rail. Enough with the bickering, at least until he's finally out of office and safely consigned to the history books.

I wish we had more reasonable, rational Canadians running our political parties.

ThinkingManNeil said...

People keep harking back to how badly the NDP ran Ontario when Bob Rae was Premier and that this will forestall any chance of the federal NDP gaining ground here, but I think one has to consider the possibility that Rae just didn't handle things too well while in office, and that Jack Layton has a different vision for Canada as a whole than Rae did for Ontario. Layton has pretty well stuck to his guns over the years while the same can't really be said of Bob Rae.

N.

Jeremy said...

Just a reminder... Jack Layton grew up with this stuff. He knows about government from a Conservative and a Liberal perspective:

Layton's grandfather was a Union Nationale MLA in the 1930s:

>...Gilbert Layton was elected to Quebec's legislative assembly in the riding of Montreal-Saint-Georges in 1936 as a member of the Union Nationale, a conservative party. He served as minister without portfolio in the government of Maurice Duplessis until resigning in 1939 to protest the Quebec government's opposition to conscription in World War II. He ran for re-election to the legislature as an independent candidate that year and was defeated.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Layton )

Gilbert later ran for Parliament as an Independent Progressive Conservative, but was defeated.

Jack's father, Robert, was a Liberal in the 1960s and 1970s, but elected as a Progressive Conservative in the 1980s and served in Mulroney's cabinet.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Layton )

Uncommoner said...

ThinkingManNeil,

As soon as I hit the button, I started to rethink the way I phrased that. At the time, and I was young back when Bob Rae was Premier, I heard him being slagged off quite a lot because my Dad was in CUPE (a civil servant all my life, barring the time he was in the Camerons and I was a toddler). My childhood was a little leaner because of that conflict and that recession.

But I don't disagree with what Bob Rae was trying to accomplish, by and large. I am and have been either extremely progressive on most issues, with a few where I am (sue me) traditional/reactionary. Much of his policy are things that, if I'd really been politically aware at the time, I would have approved. Instead, he was just one of the reasons that Dad was stressed out and our allowances stayed small and we didn't go to the movies or eat out much and Mom had to work part time. Everyone has a perspective on things, no?

I do think that the NDP under Bob Rae tried to do too much too fast in a brutal recession. Hence the backlash I mentioned.

Lindsay Stewart said...

seriously dana, you need people better than the cons for a cabinet? as for the libs, is there a cabinet post for dryden? perhaps minister of let's starve the bastards. or mcteague, minister of braods should shut up, stay home and make babies. then there's irwin cotler minister of israeli affairs responsible for new anti-semitism policing.

there's surely some lesser lights in the ndp but i for one would feel pretty damn good about a cabinet post for charlie angus, mulcair, maritn and davies. beyond that we don't know who would make up the rest of the caucus. same goes for the liberals.

we do know there'd be no ndp established office of religious freedom, no dmca style copyright law and no warrantless online surveillance, less of the roll over and tummy rub to u.s. "security" policy and a little more thought going into dashing off to spend lives in battle. of the three

Lindsay Stewart said...

hmmm... of the three available national options i am least queasy about the ddips. i can't wrap my head around how the abysmal performance of the liberals over the last five years in opposition would translate into anything like a decent government.

aardvark said...

Rae's attempts to achieve a reduction in provincial spending weren't that bad an idea. I experienced Rae Days, and tore up my NDP card as a result. Not well considered, but there it is.

Rae's biggest problem was being unprepared for government, compounded by a shallow pool of cabinet-capable MPPs. Chaos ensued. I still think he was badly treated by the media afterward.

My biggest fear for an federal NDP minority would be a repeat. I don't see much depth on the bench there, and a wave of placeholder candidates/MPs arriving from Quebec would not help.

Niles said...
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Niles said...

Here's a question. Either NDP or Liberal, do we believe they would actually work together more than the Conservatives have bothered on the CPOC's best day thus far? Doesn't matter what side of the House the two parties are on.

If the answer is yes, then I don't care. Neither of them is going to get a majority, so there will be push/pull/tug/tweak to undo the radical damage the Cons did and ally on pushing new programs forward.

There are *always* new people elected without experience. If experience is the only basis for good government, we should just treat provinces as farm teams and feed their politicians up into federal positions without silly things like elections. The NDP have good people. The Liberals have good people. The Bloc have good people. The Greens likely have good people. The Independents might be good people. The Conservatives have good people before the zombie drug is slipped into their MP office water cooler.

The Committees for *everything* will shift if the NDP and Liberals can take the government away from the Cons. Things other than holding-tantrums-out-of-the-Con-obfuscation-book might actually get done.

The Liberals have infighting going on between their red and bluedog guards. Should they actually end up with the brass ring, I guarantee the NDP will have infighting 2 days post election between the pink and the red sects. Maybe faster.

The only time any of that matters to me is if their sandbox egos trump this country. Is that it? Are 'heads-stuffed-up-their-insular-butts' egos and sect feefees going to be more important than digging everyone out from the bullshitstorm we've been in?

They're not allowed *ever* to lean on each other's actual experts?

The NDP came in second last time behind the Con in my riding. A far far second. If I thought there was the slightest chance the placeholder running for the ND this time could make it, I'd vote for him. Instead, I'm voting for the military historian who actually knows something about the world beyond getting people to pony up money. Why? Because even the strategic voting site has kissed this riding off.

I don't care that the nonCon parties say they can all form government by themselves. That does fu** all good if the only thing they accomplish is kneecapping each other so the Cons waltz up the middle, Harper wearing that smarmy smirk and declaring he has a mandate to turn us into the Free Market's hassock.

IF...and everything is still an IF, either the NDP or Liberals form a government, they might even bring in some form of voting reform. Britain is contemplating changing federally from FPTP to IRV system. That's the high-profile precedent Canada needs to legitimize vote change in the average mind.

To me, that's what has been informally asked of strategic voters already.

VW: sitingin. as in keep your eyes on the prize.

b_nichol said...

Hilltimes/Forum Research (n=3150) has more craziness.

http://hilltimes.com/dailyupdate/view/grits_set_to_lose_longheld_bastions_in_montreal_and_toronto_to_ndp_dramatic_new_forum_research_survey_says_04-27-2011

Although as they point out, it appears to be down to rock-solid seats in most places now, so there may not be much more in the number of seats, even if popular support continues to rise.

As someone somewhere suggested the other day, it's like a sugar and caffeine buzz just bubbling underneath a cautious optimism.

liberal supporter said...

Well I'd rather see Ignatieff win over Layton, but to paraphrase Maggie Thatcher's view of Gorbchev, "we can do business with him". Layton just doesn't seem to have the crazy in his eyes, or the wildly unrealistic view of the world I see from other leaders, and he actually has the most experience in political life of all the leaders due to his years in Toronto politics. I have never seen the man sneer at opponents, I think anyone disagreeing with him will at least think they got a fair hearing which is such a refreshing difference from the CPC and its "four legs good, too legs better" endlessly bleating chorus.

Since I am an unprincipled voter, I will vote for whoever can defeat the Harpergovernment. My riding had over 50% CPC in the last election. With the Liberals at about 28% and NDP at 10, it will be Liberal for me here, unless I read of polling that the local NDP is surging.

Given how inexperienced the Harper caucus was with government when first elected, I see no reason the NDP would be any worse. Likely they would be better, because I think they would be more willing to ask for mentoring from more experienced people should they think they need it, unlike the CPC hive mind.

As for the NDP in Ontario, I recall voting for them because I was tired of the Peterson scandals that conveniently blew up days before the vote. I then voted for Harris, because I was *really* angry, not because of Rae Days, but because the ungrateful union assholes were shrieking about how terrible it was, when in reality Rae Days preserved all the jobs but with less overall pay due to less hours, something you can build on and gain back in better times, unlike chainsaw Mike's fire-them-all based approach. I wasn't worried about Harris at the time, since as a provincial leader he couldn't do much of the socon agenda.

I'm really getting a sense that the criticism's of the NDP platform aren't really sticking, because everyone knows they won't be able to do everything they want once faced with the realities of governing. The CPC meme of a spendthrift job killing government just isn't resonating, given the CPCs own record of spendthrift job killing government.

We're not hearing much about a "hidden agenda" with the NDP, probably because there isn't one. Though I find some dippers to be annoying, I'd rather be annoyed by the foibles of a Layton majority than be frightened by a Harper majority.

theo said...

Liberal Supporter,
What part of Stephen Harper have you failed to grasp?

“Given how inexperienced the Harper caucus was with government when first elected, I see no reason the NDP would be any worse.”

Harper is a treasonous piece of work. You equate from day 1 how he operates to day 1 Jack Layton might?

I think you are very wrong. However, I am used to being disappointed. I still think you are wrong in your assessment.

Skinny in Toronto said...
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Skinny in Toronto said...

given the totally buffoonery of Harper's cabinet, I don't think it's a stretch to believe the ndp can put together a cabinet that could easily outperform Harpers.

From Bernier's leaving sensitive documents to whomever to Oda's misleading of parliament, it isn't like the bar was set very high.

Rev.Paperboy said...

i have already cast a tactical ballot in the advance poll in my riding, voting for the candidate most likely to unseat the local tory, who given the make-up of the riding is still very likely to win anyways. I hope all anti-Harper voters will do likewise, even if it means holding their nose to vote further to the left or right than they might under other circumstances.
The polls are still showing Harper in the lead nationally and a dead heat in Ontario - where all the seats are -the Libs slightly ahead of the NDP when I last looked. A three way tie in Ontario will give Harper his majority.
So think before you vote all you 905 suburbanites. Is it worth another term for Harper to know that you didn't "sell out" or "jump on the bandwagon" or that stayed home because you wanted to vote "for" something and not "against" something. I'm sure your self-satisfaction will feel very comforting when Harper cuts the per-vote subsidy and prorogues parliament the next time, or when he sells the CBC to Rupert Murdoch, or whatever his next outrage is.
Yes it may be herding cats to ask people to stop and think and weigh the odds locally, but it is what must be done if we are to pull back from the abyss.

Dana said...

Rev, I don't think there's anything that can be done now. The die is cast.

Libs and dippers both are going to wear this forever as far as I'm concerned.

There's no legitimate political reason whatsoever for this to have had to happen.

The one and only reason Harper gets to dismantle Canada is pigheaded, blind partisan idiocy.

I say right here and now fuck you to all NDP and Liberal partisans who stood in the way of a cooperative anti-Harper strategy.

You are dead to me. Dead.

Lindsay Stewart said...

well we might be dead to ya dana but neither you nor i nor any of the headless strategic voting chickens could predict how this campaign was going to shake out. casting your curses upon us is the tantrum of the daft. i'm no partisan but i refuse to vote for the next worst party and a candidate that i don't like or trust. so i suppose you could tuck your fit of pique straight up your tootin' pipe for what it is worth. besides, the "strategy" you're screaming for never reached the general public. where the votes live. it just fucking well did not exist beyond the blogs and social media realms of the overly engaged. so whoever wins come the vote will have been elected by the voters that turned up. sometimes a strategy fails BECAUSE IT IS A BAD STRATEGY.

Lindsay Stewart said...

oh. and if by chance your sky is falling, die is cast gloom turns out to be wrong... you can go sit in a corner with the rest of the whining fucks that did as much or more to sow disharmony and confusion with your barking and bullshit. you'll have done nothing to earn a slice of celebration. at the outset of this campaign there was little likelihood of change. the liberals did not have and do not have popular support. they do not have a leader that many people actually like or want to get behind and the dips were pretty much written off as terminal fourth placers, by me as well as by most other observers. the writ dropped and it looked to me and anyone else that had a clue like a race between some form of harper minority and the dread majority. now it looks very much as though the majority is off the table.

so that's lesser of evils no. 1 from there who knows what might happen. if nothing else, the political landscape has seen a sea change and there is a renewed sense of hope in the land and a bit of amazement and greatly increased interest. people are actually talking about the crazy election and that doesn't bode well for harper. huge advance turnout... also not a positive for harper. but we're dead to you, those of us that vote against your prescription. and it doesn't seem for a moment that you have considered that your stupid fucking "strategy" might turn out to be wrong. dead fucking wrong.

after all, the only way to determine the supposed best candidate for defeating harper in any riding will be based on polling data and guess work. how current and effective that data will prove to be is a question. how accurate or even remotely likely that data will be on a riding by riding basis is pure speculation. in other words, the strategy is a tissue of guesses.

in my riding the liberal would be the "best" choice according to the stupid fucking strategy sites. but the liberal lost last time out, didn't bother to campaign in the core of the riding, again. and by a visual estimate, the ndp signs on lawns are an overwhelming favourite. what does the precious strategy tell me? sweet fuck all. but by all means, ride the long leggedy pony and pox up all our houses. i'm voting for the candidate i met at my door, the only one that bothered with my neighbourhood, who impressed me and whose party i like best. i hope like hell he wins. i hope like hell that harper goes down in flames. that's the best i can do and it's the best i can expect from my fellow voters. that's my strategy, like it or lump it.