Loss feels like victory for Horwath’s resurgent NDP
Party captures 33% of popular vote, 40 ridings
When Andrea Horwath took the stage in Hamilton for her concession speech, to rousing cheers of her name, she gave what sounded jarringly like a victory speech.
Having lost in three previous elections as NDP leader, this was her moment, a loss so victorious that it would eclipse all the others.
The perpetual opposition party (save for the outlier Bob Rae days in the early 1990s) was ready to embrace its bright new future as the opposition party. And not only the opposition, but the official opposition. Horwath gave that a firm thumbs up.
“I love you too,” she told the assembled masses Thursday night. Having just won the Hamilton Centre riding she has held since 2004, Horwath said she was “deeply humbled” at the task handed to her by Ontarians, and for good reason.
She had nearly doubled her party’s seat count to 40. But when she said “From the very start of this campaign, people wanted change. I could not be more proud that we offered a positive vision: change for the better,” and threw her arms in the air to punctuate this campaign slogan, there was a sense her tone was more jubilant than the moment demanded.
“Andrea Horwath is looking rather happy given that Doug Ford’s PCs actually won this election,” tweeted CBC Queen’s Park reporter Mike Crawley.
“Ontarians have responded like never before,” Horwath said. She meant the NDP’s 33 per cent of the popular vote and 40 ridings is the best showing in a provincial election since Rae. She did not mention the NDP appeared to be tied in the polls with the victorious PCs just a few days ago.
New Democrats may have “rejected the politics of fear and cynicism,” as Horwath put it, but Ontarians in general did not.
Other New Democrats were more plainly horrified by the dawn of the Ford mandate, and were taking little solace in the familiar role the party will be playing — always the critic, never the minister.
Laura Kaminker, for example, who lost to the PC candidate in Mississauga Centre, tweeted out thanks to her NDP supporters, “but no thanks to the majority of Ontario voters, who believed a lie and voted against their own interests.”
Electoral defeats can sometimes be victories. Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner, for example, can afford a sort of scrappy underdog glee, now that he has outperformed expectations to win a seat in Guelph. But the NDP had a real shot at government, and the party blew it like the opening scene in a Frosted Flakes commercial.
There was a sense of missed opportunity, that after the first couple of debates the NDP had a real possibility to win.
Greg Lyle, owner of Innovative Research Group who tracked campaign polling closely, said the New Democrats faced a “fundamental brand loyalty challenge,” in that they had to win “all of their own identifiers, a big chunk of the unaligned and a significant number of defectors.”
The other two parties have wider bases and, in theory, could get most of the way to victory just by rallying their own natural supporters. But for the NDP, this was an outreach game.
To have any hope, the party needed to not only run a perfect campaign, but also for the other campaigns to melt down, which did not come to pass.
“What happened at the end is both the Liberals and PCs came up with messages and ads that firmed up their bases against Horwath’s appeal,” Lyle said. “There was always a limit there.”
Horwath’s party was in a similar situation to the federal NDP under Thomas Mulcair in the 2015 election against Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper, Lyle said, in that there was a plausible road to victory, but their potential support was conflicted by ideology.
Horwath had not positioned herself like Gary Doer, the former Manitoba NDP premier whom Lyle compared to former “New Labour” British prime minister Tony Blair, in that he acknowledged and fed his base while pitching broadly to the middle class. The average Ontarian might be well disposed to Horwath as an alternative to the other options, but most are of the basic view that equality should be sought by fostering opportunity rather than redistributing income.
“You’re asking people to disagree with a pretty fundamental tenet,” Lyle said. “That’s always the limiting factor for them.”
By the time in late May that Horwath pitched to the core left and publicly disavowed back-to-work legislation in the case of strikes, the average voter was deeper into this limiting conflict. And when that failed to boost the numbers, New Democrats had to put their elbows up, and risk spoiling their positive narrative.
So as the other parties failed to melt down, the great imagined NDP victory never came. Now Horwath has another four years to audition for premier, this time with greater resources and influence, and with no likely challenge to her leadership, given the rare achievement of her second-place finish.
“It is a victory. It’s not a spin,” Lyle said. “No New Democrat has done better since Bob Rae… To go and shoot the messenger would be crazy.”