Alberta General Election - May 5th, 2015

[DL]

Calgary-Fort doesn't seem like the kind of area that would ever vote NDP.  That part of the city was one of the worst areas for Nenshi, for example.

Its actually considered a low income riding by Calgary standards and it overlaps with one of the seats that went NDP in 1986 and 1989

[DL]

The NDP did somehow win 2 seats in Calgary back in 1989 though:

Where could i get my hands on the Alberta election results from 1986 and 1989 - I have been googling like mad and can't find those

[DL]

Yes, that's what the most right wing province in Canada needs. FOUR left wing parties

In what way is the Alberta Party a "left wing party"? I heard they were a right wing offshoot of the Alberta Liberals and that Danielle Smith considered joining them.

[DL]

Another poll is out from Mainstreet Technologies - this one is IVR while ThinkHQ was online - results are almost identical. Among decided voters:

Wildrose - 31%
PC - 27%
NDP - 26%
Liberals - 12%
AP - 3%

In Edmongton the NDP is at an eye-popping 52% - 31 points ahead of the PCs!!
http://www.mainstreettechnologies.ca/wildrose-leads-ndp-gains/

[DL]

Laurie Blakeman had a chance to join the Alberta NDP when Notley became leader and she refused...now I'll bet she is kicking herself. With numbers like this she could easily be swept away as the "Orange Crush" flushes away all others in Edmonton - Quebec 2011-style!

[DL]

i predict the Alberta PCs will come in third in votes and in seats!

[DL]

In a three way dead heat no one has any reason to defect from one party to another because all parties have hope...in 2012 the NDP and the Liberals were each barely polling over 10% the entire campaign...we are one week into this campaign and three polls in a row have actually placed the PCs third behind WR AND the NDP - what's more likely to happen is that the PC vote continues to collapse as those PCs who hate the NDP more than they hate Wildrose shift Wildrose and those PCs who hate Wildrose more than they hate the NDP vote NDP - by May 5 the PC could be in the teens and facing total annhilation.

Also in 2012 Alison Redford was very appealing to Liberal/NDP voters in a way that Jim Prentice is not at all. Redford was seen back then as a left of centre small "l" liberal who had staged a hostile takeover of the PC party with the support of teachers unions and she was seen as PC in name only and really as a closet Liberal. Prentice is a very rightwing PC who is so rightwing that Danielle Smioth and most of Wildrose defected to the PC party as soon as he took over. His policies are literally identical to those of the Wildrose Party - which is not surprising since Prentice and Wildrose leader Brian Jean sat side by side as Conservative MPs and Jean even donated $10,000 to Prentice's PC leadership campaign!

[DL]

Prentice is basically "a suit" he is the Alberta version of Gordon Campbell or Mitt Romney

[DL]

New 1 Question Poll (for what it's worth)

NDP: 32%
Wildrose: 28%
PC: 19%
Lib: 12%
AB: 9%

Regional breakdowns

Edmonton

NDP: 44%
Wildrose: 24%
PC: 17%
Lib: 11%
AB: 5%

Calgary

NDP: 26%
Wildrose: 26%
PC: 23%
Lib: 16%
AB: 8%

Rest of Alberta

Wildrose: 33%
NDP: 27%
PC: 17%
AB: 13%
Lib: 10%

lol...

Don't laugh, I've seen phone poll numbers quite similar to that!

[DL]

~25% of people are undecided. My guess is most will go PC.

My guess is that most people who say they are "undecided" are actually people who will not vote at all...if they do vote - seeing the PCs in 3rd place means anyone who just wants to stop Wildrose will vote NDP not PC and anyone just wanting to stop the NDP will vote Wildrose not PC.

[DL]

Alberta Liberal voters overwhelmingly have NDP as their second choice...so do a surprising number of Wildrose voters

[DL]

New riding polls conform the NDP surge - the NDP has an 11 point lead in Calgary-Fort and a 25 point lead in Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview

http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/poll-suggests-former-alderman-could-help-ndp-break-22-year-drought-in-calgary

[DL]

Given that the NDP won Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview by 1% in 2012 - i will take widening the margin to 25%!!

[DL]

Mainstreet:

WRP: 32 (-3)
NDP: 31 (+1)
PC: 26 (+1)
ALP: 8 (+4) [reverting to the mean?]
AP: 4 (n/c)

NDP at 55% in Edmonton (31 point lead), but third place in Calgary and 2nd in ROAB.

I think a lot of polls are overestimating Liberal and Alberta Party support and that they will each get about HALF what this polls says (particularly what with having no candidate in so many ridings).

The PCs would get crushed seatwise with this kind of spread - the NDP would crush every single solitary PC in the Edmonton area and the PC would likely be left with nothing in ROAB - there are 25 seats in Calgary and with these numbers the PCs would be lucky to win half (12) of them.

[DL]

I'm curious Lotuslander. Why do you seem to have such an intense hatred of the NDP? It verges on "NDP derangement syndrome" - every single posting you have is filled with a mixture of rabid anti-NDP attacks mixed with some thinly veiled "concern trolling". What's the story? was your mother an NDP voter and she didn't love you? Did you get dumped by an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend for an NDP organizer?

[DL]

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...

In fact it could easily be more of a "Manitoba 1969" situation in the making. In that election the NDP under Ed Schreyer shocked everyone by going from 10 seats to 29 and winning government going from being a third party to first in one election. The NDP has since become the natural party of government in Manitoba.

[DL]

I think Ellerslie is very ethnic and low income - kinda an Edmonton version of Brampton or Scarborough

[DL]

Unbelievable - apparently ridings polls by Abingdon in rock-ribbed conservative suburban Calgary have the NDP leading in Calgary Shaw and a close three way race in Calgary Northwest

http://www.therebel.media/_exclusive_alberta_election_poll_shows_ndp_ahead_of_pcs

[DL]

I've seen that Pantheon chart retweeted all week - not sure when the data collection was

[DL]

Most people who are still undecided are people who will not vote at all

[DL]

Most people who are still undecided are people who will not vote at all

That's not what happened in 2012.

I'm not so sure about that. I think that in 2012 there were people who were "soft Wildrose" voters who shifted back to the PCs at the last minute - I think the number of people who would have told a pollster they were genuinely undecided right to the end was very small. What I notice in polls is that particularly when you get to the final days of a campaign and DK/NA is down to 10-15% (if that) the people who say they are undecided also a. either did not vote in the previous election or cannot remember who they voted for b. don't know where their polling station is c. don't know what leader they like best and don't know what issue matter most to them...d. they also often cannot name the leaders of the parties - it all adds up to the profile of a person who won't vote but due to "social desirability bias" will not admit to it.

In a good year, turnout in Alberta provincial elections if about 50% - and yet you never get anywhere near 50% of survey respondents saying they won't vote. In fact even if you add together people who say they are less than 100% certain that they will vote and people who say they are totally undecided on who to vote for - you are still no where near the 50% of eligible voters who will not vote.

[DL]

There is a myth that in 2012 the PCs won by getting vast numbers of Liberal and NDP voters to switch to the PCs, but the polling data doesn't back this up at all. If you look at polls over the course of the 2012 campaign the Lib and NDP vote was in the 10-12 range right from the moment the writ was dropped and never really budged. The NDP ended up going up 1% compared to 2008 and went from 9% to 10%. The Alberta Liberal support had already collapsed before the campaign even began from the 26% they had in 2008 to about 10%. I think that what happened was that two thirds of 2008 Liberal voters shifted to Wildrose at the start of the campaign because they just wanted to kick the PCs out and saw the Wildrose as being best positioned to do it. Those people ended up having second thoughts in the end , but they had already abandoned the liberals before the campaign had even begun.

[DL]

Actually I think its more recent than that - after the Pawley gov't was defeated in Manitoba in 1988 there was a two year period of no NDP provincial governments before Bob rae won in Ontario in 1990 and the a year later the NDP win BC and Saskatchewan

[DL]

The NDP has routinely won Moose Jaw and Prince Albert and The Battlefords in Saskatchewan and Brandon in Manitoba  How different are those towns from Medicine Hat, Lethbridge! Grande Prairie or Red Deer?

[DL]

If anything the polls today suggest that the PCs are losing even more ground and that Wildrose will come in second. This makes it immeasurably more difficult for the PCs to stage a 2012 style comeback