Alberta General Election - May 5th, 2015

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308 projection: tiny PC majority even with 31%.

That Alberta Liberal seat projection looks a little high, given the disarray I sense out there...

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Does everything think Wildrose is going to implode?

Dunno about *implode* (that's more like what the Alta Libs have done for however long); but it's certainly interesting that Wildrose and Brian Jean have been a bit of an enigma compared to Rachel's NDP thus far.  It's like whatever "leading" it's been doing, poll-wise, has simply been an extrapolation from their being the main/only "competitive" non-PC option last time...

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For all the present disapproval, I suspect that Prentice will come across substantially "leaderlike" in campaign/debate mode--well. more likely than a Kim Campbell super-boner.

But again: among the competing leaders, *Brian Jean* is the present big enigma.

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Re Prentice: I wouldn't go so far with the "hard right" (or doomed-to-free-fall) label as DL does, but he's probably the most boardroom-technocratic premier Alberta has seen since Lougheed, if that makes sense.  Which *could* be a plus, when it comes to projecting (esp. come debate time) a steady-hand-on-the-tiller a la McGuinty (or even Harper).  But all the same, his "red Toryness" is more by present-day federal Con standards; and esp. after the WR caucus poach, I'd agree that he's not as becoming a stop-WR left/moderate vote-park as Redford was in 2012.  Nor has he the folksy charm of a Stelmach or Klein--if anything, he reminds me more of the kind of "electable" direction Danielle Smith was *trying* to turn WR into before the bozo eruptions upended a "sure thing".

In fact, if *any* of the present leaders (the jury still being out on Brian Jean) has so far proven a master at Klein-like crowd-drawing "folksy charm", it's Rachel Notley.  So as much as one'd like to paint Lib/NDP a losing proposition in Alberta, it's different when we're dealing with "Notleymania"--without her in charge, yes, the NDP might be doomed to their requisite 3 or 4 or 5 seats in Edmonton; but with her, it's different--and perhaps to Alberta voters, worth the risk of "throwing" an election to Wildrose over.  (And if it seems so implausible because Alberta seems so monolithically right wing--well, remember how the Rob/Doug Ford voting base in Toronto came to be the kinds of all-too-often-underclass multiracial ethnoburbans that otherwise ordinarily support Lib/NDP.  Politics is funny that way.)

Completely different election dynamics in Alberta. Remember that the fed Harper Cons had MASSIVE vote majorities in virtually all AB ridings in 2011? NDP and even Liberal/AB Party are poli losers provincially with that underlying poli dynamic. At the end of the day. No doubt.

BTW, I would categorize Prentice as more of a "red tory" or "blue liberal" along the lines of Frank McKenna for example. Not a stereotypical social-con, right-wing federal CPC type. In fact, Prentice comes across, to me at least, as someone who is very similar to Peter Lougheed.

And bringing over WR MLAs was just a poli strategic move - which obviously has not worked out - and perhaps even back-fired -  to date.

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As others have assuredly already noted, the 2012 PC coalition was very atypical, full of many centrist/centre-left voters wooed by Red Tory Alison Redford in opposition to a firmly right-wing alternative.

And it helped that the Liberals under Raj Sherman (the main resource for such voters) were already perceived as "sickly" relative to previous elections.  Whereas the NDP "held its own", and doubled its caucus from the previous election.

What's *really* interesting to consider is that were *all* the Prairie provinces presently having concurrent provincial elections, Alberta might well wind up with more NDP seats than either Manitoba or Saskatchewan.

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In 2012, the PCs 'borrowed' tens of thousands of votes from Liberals and New Democrats to stop Wildrose.  I don't think progressive voters are in a lending mood this time.

Liberals might be best hope for borrowing.

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Based on city-wide polling, given a proportional swing the NDP should be around 70% there.

Then again, in practice, when there's a wave happening, the bigger swings can often be in the hitherto "no-hope" ridings, while the already-helds can see shallower swings...

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Yeah--re "Red Tory support", remember that Notley has all of her spectrum pretty much to herself, no Wynne-Liberal "left-poaching" factor, etc...

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In general, the NDP holding government at the provincial level tends to hurt the party in that province at the federal level. In 2011, the two provinces where the NDP did not improve on their 2008 vote share were Manitoba and Nova Scotia, the two provinces with NDP governments.

It depends on how "healthy" said governments are, though--by comparison, the relative stability of the Romanow regime allowed the ill-fated Audrey McLaughlin feds to weather the 1993 storm better in Saskatchewan than elsewhere.

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This is actually (relatively) bad news for the NDP. They should be winning Klein and Stony Plain if they aim to form govt. Take in with salt as usual.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/elections/alberta-votes/alberta-election-6-ridings-where-the-pcs-are-faltering-in-the-polls-1.3047764

But, pre-debate.  And keep in mind another potential byproduct of the debate: Brian Jean's weak performance leading to second thoughts about Wildrose...

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And nobody's shilling on behalf of Wildrose, either.  (After Brian Jean's debate performance, why *would* they?)

At this point, the pipeline issue's too "inside baseball", anyway.  Though I still wouldn't discount a "sobering up" upward bump in the PC vote.

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I'm not so sure if this is an "Ontario 1990" situation in the making, if only because the notion of an NDP government hereabouts jibes more with the "prairie populist" tradition.  IOW expect something more sensibly Sask-like than chaotically Ont-like...

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Again, it wasn't so much a poll fail as it was a huge last minute shift in voting intentions. Such a possibility could happen again, of course.

Maybe the biggest hint of any such current potential poll-fail/last-minute-shift is in the Leger poll showing the PCs at 30--just saying.

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It's not just since 2008 though.  I think it's a common understanding that progressives in Alberta have backed the PC party for some time now to stop anything further right from governing.

Except that from the fall of the Socreds in '71 to the rise of Wildrose in '12, there *wasn't* any such truly threatening "further right" force--except, maybe, the Western Canada Concept blip-that-wasn't in 1982.

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I'd also wonder about the possibility of certain "left-PC" types jumping to the NDP (Lukaszuk, for one)

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Has anyone here addressed the fact that WR was shut out in Calgary proper?  (Interesting given how a lot of pre-election projection, at least early on, was showing them sweeping most Calgary seats--I was *always* skeptical about that)

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Jeez, these NDP numbers in Edmonton are stunning - usually the only time you see any party in a western democracy winning by such a lopsided margin is in cases where a whole city is dominated by an ethnic minority - you could see Barack Obama winning African-American areas of Chicago with margins like that - or anglo parts of Montreal giving the Quebec Liberals margins like that over the PQ in provincial elections. But its extraordinary to see such a swing in a place as "middle of the road" as Edmonton

Actually, you forgot something--these kinds of lopsided margins have been pro forma in Alberta federally under Harper (y'know, Conservative 70something while everybody else struggles to hit 10%)