Tory leadership race down to final lap
BREAKING DOWN THE PATHS TO VICTORY FOR ALL FOUR CANDIDATES
JOE BIDEN CAN UNIFY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BECAUSE HE’S SPENT HIS LIFE FIGHTING FOR US. I’M HONORED TO JOIN HIM AS OUR PARTY’S NOMINEE FOR VICE PRESIDENT. — U.S. SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS
The race to replace Andrew Scheer as the Conservative party’s next leader is down to its final two weeks, but it’s still far from clear how it ends.
Although the race has mostly been thought of as a two-way battle between Peter Mackay and Erin O’toole, the rise of Leslyn Lewis as a strong contender has added a twist to how the ranked ballot could play out. The organizational strength of Derek Sloan may also have an effect.
Voting, which is taking place entirely by mail-in ballot, must conclude by Aug. 21. For the morbidly curious, there are already live video feeds of the ballot vault and various counting rooms being streamed on the party’s website. The results will likely be announced at an event in Ottawa on Sunday, Aug. 23, but party officials say that’s still subject to change if health guidelines or ballot counting logistics don’t allow for it.
A candidate needs 50 per cent of the vote to win. If nobody reaches that threshold, the last-place candidate is eliminated and his or her voters’ next choices are counted. There are plenty of possibilities for how the ranked ballot could unfold. If the race is close, the result will swing on who finishes third and how that candidate’s votes are redistributed. This means there could be three rounds of results before a victor is crowned.
National Post breaks down the paths to victory for each of the candidates:
PETER MACKAY
Strength: Frontrunner status
Weakness: The social conservative vote
Mackay entered this race as the frontrunner. He has the best name recognition, performs well in public polling, racked up the most Conservative caucus endorsements, and raised a lot of money early on. But his fundraising advantage has since vanished, and most party insiders think the race has tightened up between Mackay, O'toole and Lewis.
With his home base in Nova Scotia, Mackay is bound to run up big victories in Atlantic Canada. He's also expected to do well in the Greater Toronto Area. But Quebec, Western Canada and the rest of Ontario are more of a battleground, and Mackay will need a strong showing in these areas to pull away from the pack. It's no surprise that his campaign manager Alex Nuttall was tweeting from Montreal recently, where he's working on getting out the vote.
The problem for Mackay is that the dynamics of the ranked ballot work against him. Two of the four candidates — Lewis and Sloan — are supported by social conservatives, and all indications are that those voters are unlikely to rank Mackay above O'toole for their second choice. They will, for example, remember Mackay's comment from the fall that Scheer's election downfall was caused by the “stinking albatross” of social conservative issues.
However, it's also quite possible that social conservative voters only put Sloan and Lewis on their ballots, and nobody else. If that happens, and Sloan and Lewis are eliminated, those votes simply disappear in later rounds and the vote share of the remaining candidates are inflated, which helps the frontrunner. This is why trying to predict the ranked ballot is so difficult.
Assuming Mackay doesn't have enough support to win outright on the first ballot, he has two paths to victory: The first is that he establishes a big-enough lead in the first round that he can withstand losing vote share in subsequent rounds. This path will also depend on the social conservative vote mostly disappearing if Sloan and Lewis are eliminated, instead of second-choice votes flowing to O'toole. If that happens, Mackay could start out with a lead and just never give it up.
The second path to victory for Mackay involves O'toole finishing in third place, behind Lewis. If that happens, many of O'toole's voters could have Mackay ranked next on their ballot. It's possible that some O'toole voters are anti-mackay enough that they'll leave Mackay entirely off their ballot or rank him last. But most campaign organizers think O'toole's second-choice votes will largely go to Mackay, rather than Lewis.
The bottom line is that if the race is close, Mackay's best hope is to have Lewis finish ahead of O'toole and then hoover up O'toole's voters once he drops off the ballot.
DEREK SLOAN
Strength: Social conservative organizers Weakness: Narrow support base
Sloan, the fourth candidate, is likely to be a factor mostly due to the organizational strength of the social conservative groups backing him, but he remains a long shot.
Barring a shocking development, most insiders predict that Sloan will come in fourth on the first ballot. The question is how strong his vote is. Internal numbers from other campaigns have Sloan somewhere in the range of five to 15 per cent.
Sloan has been learning French, but he still struggled through the French-language Conservative leadership debate. This is likely to hurt him in Quebec, just as it will Lewis.
Sloan has run a hard-right ideological campaign targeting social conservatives. Brad Trost, a social conservative who finished fourth in the 2017 race, has described Sloan's voter base as more populist and anti-establishment. Because of this, it is possible that Sloan voters only list Sloan and nobody else, and things don't change much after he's eliminated.
ERIN O’TOOLE
Strength: Down-ballot support Weakness: Lewis's momentum
O'toole has used two main strategies during this leadership race: One has been to paint Mackay as a “Liberal-lite” Red Tory, making the O'toole camp the home of party members looking for a Mackay alternative. The other has been to position himself as a second-place choice for as many voters of other candidates as possible.
He has also been boosted by the endorsement of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, which is probably the single biggest endorsement available in this race. That helps make up for the fact O'toole has lost some of his caucus endorsements from the 2017 race, when he finished third.
O'toole's path to victory is to put in a strong showing on the first-place ballot, and then get pushed over the 50-per-cent threshold no matter who gets eliminated in the following rounds. O'toole hopes that Mackay voters will rank him above Lewis and Sloan, and that Lewis and Sloan voters will rank him above Mackay.
But the biggest danger O'toole faces is what happens if Sloan is eliminated from the ballot.
Many Sloan voters will probably put Lewis, the other social conservative in the race, as their second choice. If Sloan has more than 10 per cent of the vote and gets eliminated, and almost all of Sloan's support then flows to Lewis, that would give Lewis a massive bump in support in the second round of voting.
Could that support be enough to put Lewis ahead of O'toole? Or, for that matter, Mackay? At this point, it's anyone's guess. But it is a hugely important factor in this race. If Lewis is able to stay close enough to Mackay and O'toole on the first ballot, Sloan's voters could help Lewis leapfrog over her rivals, and possibly even into first place.
For that reason, O'toole's messaging has shifted over the past month to start targeting some of Lewis' support. When O'toole tells party members they should vote for someone who has a seat in the House of Commons and can be an effective leader from day one, he probably isn't talking about Mackay; he's talking about Lewis, who has never held elected office.
If O'toole finishes third and is eliminated from the ballot, much of his secondchoice support could put Mackay over the top. But if O'toole stays out of third place — with either Lewis or Mackay finishing third instead — he has a good shot at picking up enough second-choice support to win.