LESSONS FOR LIBERALS IN BEING OVERCONFIDENT

Party is strutting these days — but so was the NDP in 2012

When the B.C. Liberals gathered in Vancouver Friday for their annual convention, they did so in dramatically different circumstances than the last time they met in the months before a provincial election.

The Liberal convention in October 2012 was held against a backdrop of internal division and external dissatisfaction.

Opinion polls had the governing party trailing the Opposition New Democrats by 20 points. Premier and party leader Christy Clark was even further behind with women respondents, a finding much remarked upon by pundits, me included.

Those disappointing numbers translated into rumblings of discontent among the caucus of Liberal MLAs, only one of whom supported Clark in the party leadership 20 months previously. Clark would later say that weathering the dysfunctional dynamics of the caucus room was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Capitalizing on all this was NDP leader Adrian Dix, who’d assumed his party leadership within weeks of Clark and whose prospects looked as good as hers looked bad.

In a stick-it-to-’em display on the eve of the Liberal convention, the New Democrats staged a major fundraiser in the heart of downtown Vancouver.

Though the party seldom opens such events to the news media — lately they have been resolutely closed — the New Democrats let report- ers wander through the hall that Thursday evening to see who was contributing to the estimated $350,000 gross.

Moviemakers. New car dealers. Bankers. Salmon farmers. Hoteliers. Trial lawyers, pharmacists, dairy farmers. Even Enbridge, loathed by many a New Democrat for the Northern Gateway oil pipeline, had shelled out the required $3,500 for a table.

Into all this strode wouldbe premier Dix himself, with a good laugh line about the NDP’s temporary success in outpointing the B.C. Liberals at corporate fundraising: “Just when we’re getting good at it, we’re going to ban it.”

He also mocked the B.C. Liberals for opening their convention with what was billed as “Free Enterprise Friday.” New Democrats had thought of countering with “Theoretical Marxism Thursday,” said Dix, perhaps the only person in the room who fully got the joke.

Nevertheless, the Liberals put together a show of confidence when they convened in Whistler the following day. Laugh lines notwithstanding, Free Enterprise Friday provided a few signs that the frayed governing coalition was beginning to pull together and renew itself.

John Martin, a recent departure from B.C. Conservative ranks, delivered a testimonial against vote-splitting: “When the anti-NDP vote is pursued by more than one party, the NDP wins.”

He knew whereof he spoke. Months earlier he’d been the Conservative contender in a byelection in Chilliwack, finishing third with enough votes (25 per cent) to deny victory to Liberal hopeful Laurie Throness and elect a New Democrat.

In the coming general election, Martin would switch ridings, run as a Liberal, and get elected to the renewed government caucus alongside Throness, who in the absence of vote-splitting, was able to dislodge the NDP incumbent.

The day also featured a sparkling turn by Paralympian Michelle Stilwell, soon to be the winning candidate for the Liberals in ParksvilleQualicum, one of a number of newcomers who would help supplant the lingering resentments in the caucus room.

But the weekend’s most closely watched presentation was delivered by political organizers Don Guy from Ontario and Stephen Carter from Alberta. The Liberals started the session by eject- ing the news media, ensuring more coverage than if we’d been allowed to stay in our seats.

Both were specialists in rescuing governments in trouble, particularly Carter, who’d helped in that year’s pundit- and pollster-defying victory by Alberta Premier Alison Redford. (And yes, such glories are fleeting.)

Carter delivered the most widely quoted line of the convention when he urged delegates to pay no attention to pollsters, political scientists and pundits, whom he memo- rably described as “a holy trinity of incompetents.”

But where the 2012 Liberals badly needed the advice of a turnaround specialist, this time out they’ve recruited a guest speaker who’s helped reelect incumbents on a global stage.

He’s Jim Messina, a U.S.based political consultant and digital data expert whose particular specialty is analysis of social media to identify discrete slices of the electorate and, as he put it in an opinion piece in the New York Times Thursday, determine “what issue is most important to a particular undecided voter.”

Messina managed Barack Obama’s successful bid for a second term as U.S. president in 2012 and David Cameron’s victory in the United Kingdom in 2015. Messina also advised the now-departed U.K. PM on this year’s Remain campaign, which did not go so well.

In light of his winning one year, losing the next experience with Cameron, I wonder if he will say anything about a subject much on the minds of Liberals that I have spoken to recently: namely, the perils of overconfidence.

Those concerns were underscored recently when The Sun ran an opinion poll that showed the NDP leading. The first call to me was from a Liberal organizer who, far from disputing the findings, expressed hope that the paper would run more polls along those lines in order to shake up the sense of complacency in the governing party.

Four years ago, the party that was struggling to pull itself together, beset from without and within, and all but written off by the holy trinity of folks who don’t know what they were talking about — would come from behind and win the election.

And the party that was rolling in cash, comfortable with itself and widely expected to form the next government? It didn’t.

Where the 2012 Liberals badly needed the advice of a turnaround specialist, this time out they’ve recruited a guest speaker who’s helped re-elect incumbents on a global stage.