Is Watts the best bet for Liberals to beat NDP?
The deadline to buy a membership in the B.C. Liberal Party and vote for the new leader has come and gone.
Now the six candidates are shifting to a new phase in the battle for the top job: registering all those new members to cast a ballot.
The Liberal Party brought in strict new rules for this leadership contest to prevent a repeat of the fake-member debacle of the last one.
In 2011, the party received stacks of dubious membership forms, including one for a cat signed up by the Christy Clark campaign.
Just last week, the judge in the case spawned by the “Quick Wins” scandal heard evidence about voting I.D. numbers being collected in “blocks” and used to cast “proxy” ballots in the leadership vote narrowly won by Clark.
This time, the party is doing random spot checks to make sure 30,000 new party members are legit, while requiring all members to go through the extra step of individually registering to vote for the leader.
Voting will begin on Feb. 1 and the winner will be announced on Feb. 3.
But, with the campaign entering its final days, only 40 per cent of the party’s members have bothered to register.
“Every campaign is working hard now to make sure their supporters actually register and vote,” said Brad Zubyk, an insider with the Dianne Watts campaign.
“It’s one of the big wild cards in the race: Voter turnout. How many people will actually register and actually vote?”
That could be a crucial factor for a candidate like rookie MLA Michael Lee, who appears to have signed up the most new members.
Lee has signed up lots of new Liberals in Richmond’s Chinese community and in the Indo-Canadian community in Surrey.
But making sure all those new supporters register and vote is a different story.
The Watts campaign faces a similar challenge, though the former Surrey mayor and MP hopes her supporters will be more motivated to get out and vote.
“The Liberal Party’s path back to power runs through the suburbs of Metro Vancouver,” Zubyk said.
“That’s where the NDP made their gains and it’s where the Liberals need to win those seats back. Dianne Watts can take back Surrey.”
The “electability” argument is the strongest card in Watts’ hand and you can bet her campaign will play it strongly.
“She’s won seven elections in a row in Surrey. She has a strong network of support in the suburbs. That’s what she’s known for and that’s what the Liberals need to win.”
It’s a powerful argument. But the first trick is getting members to register — and then to vote.