Thomson: Threeway race?
Early polls point to Alberta’s first three-way race
There are now half a dozen public opinion polls indicating we have a three-way horse race in the Alberta election with the Progressive Conservatives, Wildrose and NDP running neck and neck.
I remain unconvinced — but boy, I hope I’m wrong.
I hope I’m wrong that the polls are just indicating a post-budget hangover from grumpy voters. I hope I’m wrong that the polls are just plain wrong or are skewed toward angry people who are more prone to participate in automated polls.
I hope I’m wrong that these polls will raise our hopes for a real race and then dash them in the home stretch.
We still have three weeks left in the election campaign, and using these polls to predict the outcome is a bit like using a thermometer today to forecast the weather on May 5. But I live in hope. Imagine if the polls held firm and reflected a threeway race next week and the week after? Imagine if we were in the home stretch and nobody really knew what to expect?
This would be an election more exciting than the 2012 campaign, when the Wildrose was breathing down the neck of the PCs and it would be more of a nail biter than 1993, when the Liberals almost defeated the PCs. It would have more adrenalin than even 1971 when the PCs defeated the Social Credit to form government. Those were all two-way races.
This would be the first three-way race in Alberta politics, ever. Oh, be still my heart. Pollsters are warning us, quite rightly, that these are still early days in the campaign.
But there is one constant in all the polls, not only the past week but the past year: The NDP is leading in Edmonton.
You don’t have to be a pollster to see that. At an NDP rally at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre on Sunday, organizers had to set up overflow areas in the hallways when almost 500 people turned up, more than double the anticipated number, to hear party leader Rachel Notley speak.
“Albertans want a new premier and I’m here to tell you I’m applying for that job,” Notley said.
That was no slip of the tongue. Notley, the leader of a party with just four seats in the legislature at time of dissolution, is hoping to defeat a party that had 70 seats.
“I’m running to be premier,” she declared a week ago when she launched her campaign. “I don’t run to be second place.”
Of course, politicians run for second place all the time. Most of Alberta’s opposition politicians the past four decades have been happy to end up in second place as leader of the official Opposition.
In fact, when Brian Jean won the Wildrose leadership on March 28, he said, “I don’t look at a probability right now that we are going to form government in the next election.”
It might sound self-defeating, but it also sounds realistic for the Wildrose, a party still recovering from being eviscerated by December’s mass floor-crossing to the government benches.
Political strategists from other parties have quietly questioned Notley’s strategy of trying to form government, saying she is spreading herself and her party’s resources too thin by travelling the entire province rather than focusing on Edmonton.
Notley’s strategy is bold, if nothing else. The I’m-- running-to-be-premier declaration is Notley’s version of John F. Kennedy’s going-tothe-moon speech.
The Americans, of course, only had to conquer gravity and the vacuum of space. The NDP has to overcome Alberta’s political gravity that has acted like a black hole, sucking the light and energy from the opposition parties the past 44 years.
But Notley’s rhetoric has placed her in a unique position among the opposition parties. And it has inspired new supporters such as Gwen May, who I talked to at Notley’s rally on Sunday afternoon. A former resident of Fort McMurray, May is a lawyer on maternity leave who brought along her infant daughter.
She’s keenly interested in environmental issues, but what has turned May off the PCs this time, she says, is how they’ve handled the province’s finances: “It’s so embarrassing we are suddenly in a fiscal tight spot after oil has been at record high. It’s kind of disgusting.”
Voters such as May are channelling their “disgust” with the PCs into campaigning for the NDP. That sentiment, according to the polls, is making Edmonton a compelling battleground between the two parties.
But is the province turning into an exciting three-way battle that will capture the public’s imagination?
I doubt it. But boy, I hope I’m wrong. gthomson@ edmontonjournal.com