Voters may not be generous with Horwath
For Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, it doesn’t get any better.
At a mandatory leadership review Sunday, fellow New Democrats gave her a ringing 85 per cent endorsement — her best ever. The party is in the best shape since she became leader 13 years ago, boasting 40 seats and brimming with money, she reassured delegates.
But it better get better by June 2. That’s when all Ontario voters render their verdict in the coming election.
Now Canada’s longest-serving party leader, Horwath predicted she’ll finally be sitting in the premier’s office post-election. In her weekend pitch for support, Horwath rattled off the sins of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government and lambasted the legacy of the last Liberal dynasty.
“My friends, let me say it loud and clear: On June 2, I’m confident we will get it done!” Horwath told party delegates listening in via Zoom.
What she didn’t explain is why, if Ford is so hapless a premier, and the Liberals so lamentable, so many people still prefer them to the NDP? Despite Horwath’s bravado about the 2018 seat count, the reality is that the party is not where it needs to be on the eve of the 2022 election.
After four years in power, and two years of pandemic, Ford is in first place in most public opinion polls. The Liberals and New Democrats keep fighting for second, trading places monthly.
Put another way, the odds of Ford winning the most seats are 92 per cent, according to a Feb. 2 analysis by 338canada.com, the respected online survey of surveys. The Liberals have only a seven per cent chance of coming out on top.
The NDP’s prospects? Its chances of beating out the Tories for first place show up as zero per cent, according to the analysis.
What’s holding Horwath back? It is conventional wisdom, at NDP conventions, that their leader is the most popular politician in Ontario.
In fact, last month’s Léger poll puts her popularity at roughly the same as Ford’s: The premier’s “favourable” rating is 38 per cent, versus 40 for Horwath — a statistical tie.
Unsurprisingly, Ford’s unfavourable number is higher at 56 per cent. And yet fully 42 per cent of voters gave Horwath an unfavourable rating — leaving her, too, in negative territory in the popularity sweepstakes.
(Leger pegs the party standings at about the same as most other polls over the past year — Tories leading at 37 per cent, with the Liberals and NDP at 27 and 26 per cent, respectively.)
Why has Horwath-mania not come to Ontario? After all, NDP delegates keep voting for her to stay on — Sunday’s 85 per cent is an improvement over the 76 per cent she got from party stalwarts a decade ago.
Her Liberal rival, Steven Del Duca has lower popularity ratings and name recognition, and has yet to put forward any major policy planks.
Yet after only two years as leader, he is on track to win more seats, according to the projections.
Part of it is presumably the brand. While Horwath was preaching to the NDP converted on the weekend, Del Duca was cheerfully pitching to a meeting of the federal Liberals’ Ontario wing, hoping to profit from the national party’s continuing grip on the province.
The different strategies are instructive. Del Duca focused on Ford’s bungling with a promise to replace it with “competent” leadership — all the while ignoring the NDP.
Horwath, by contrast, devoted almost as much time to attacking the Liberals as she did the Tories — making the case that Ford was not entirely at fault because he inherited a mess from Del Duca’s Liberals.
“It would be easy … to lay the blame just at Doug Ford’s feet,” she mused, preparing to pivot. “Which brings me to Steven Del Duca and his Liberals.”
Mocking his claim that Ontario needs a “competent” premier, Horwath countered: “Between 2003 and 2018 … you were sitting at the Liberal government’s cabinet table” (Del Duca was a minister from 2014-18).
With the “social democratic solutions only New Democrats offer,” she exhorted, “we must win the election.”
Horwath’s targeting of Del Duca is a recurring crutch. In attack ads last year, the NDP showed an unflattering clip of the Liberal leader blinking into the camera while tying him to former premier Kathleen Wynne.
The strategy is to assign blame equally between Tories and Liberals, with the NDP blameless and virtuous. More to the point, it casts the current premier and his predecessor (Ford and Wynne — and by extension Del Duca) as two sides of the same coin — Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
That’s the phrase the NDP relied on in previous campaigns against its old rivals. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t.
So far it hasn’t got Horwath where she needs to get by June 2. For better or for worse.
In a column last month I mentioned that the latest NDP attack ad shows Del Duca blinking in slow motion. The NDP assures me it did not tinker with Del Duca’s blink rate. The Liberals say the clip is pulled from the start of a Zoom event while their leader was waiting for his cue to talk, but the NDP counters that all’s fair in the public domain.
Mea culpa, but I still think the NDP is culpable in its own way. The clip is undistorted, but it’s undignified. It’s not manipulated, but it’s manipulative. If I was thrown off by the ad’s conspicuous flicker and misstated the frame rate, it’s because I’m always suspicious of dubious attack ads that “frame” political rivals.
My friends, let me say it loud and clear: On June 2, I’m confident we will get it done!
ANDREA HORWATH