A week from today, we’ll know who Alberta’s next Premier will be.
In the meantime, we’re left trying to make sense of what’s going to happen by reading the various polls being leaked to Sun columnist Rick Bell. (For an excellent explainer on how to be a critical consumer of leaked polls, listen to this week’s Strategists pod).
Bell reports that Danielle Smith’s pollster says that it’s ‘almost impossible’ for her to lose. What’s interesting, though, is how close Smith’s pollster is projecting the race to be: a fifth ballot win with just over half the vote.
Yesterday’s Bell column didn’t contain much good news for the UCP. It was based on otherwise unpublished poll results from Think HQ, a government relations and public opinion research firm. I’m going to assume these results are credible, even though Bell didn’t share any details like, umm, the sample size.
What Bell reports is that the UCP leadership race hasn’t done much to improve the party’s electoral chances. When you ask Albertans if they are more or less likely to vote UCP with one of the frontrunners (Jean, Toews and Smith) at the helm, the net result is negative. And the worst performer is Smith, with 20% more likely, and 39% less likely. Smith’s numbers are even worse in Calgary.
So is there any chance that this affects the outcome of the race? Not likely. Most UCP members will have already put their ballot in the mail, as they have to be received by Monday to be counted. Party members can vote in person next Thursday morning, at one of five locations, between 8am and noon. It’s possible that these poll results might prompt some members to cast a last-minute ballot, but that assumes that there’s a sizeable group who haven’t yet cast a ballot. And Smith’s pollster, as reported to Bell, says 84% have already voted.
Over the past year, the UCP has made itself the party of rural Alberta. CBC analyst Jason Markusoff was able to obtain the party’s membership list, and shows how dominant rural members of the party are.
Different rules for the leadership race would have created different incentives for candidates. The pure one-member-one-vote rules the party is using create an incentive for candidates to sign up as many members as they can, even if they all live in the same part of the province.
The alternative would be a weighted one-member-one-vote, where the preferences of members in each electoral district would be converted to points allocated to each candidate. This is the system the federal Conservatives used in their recent leadership contest.
Under this system, the preference of a handful of members in an Edmonton electoral district would have equal weight as the preference of thousands of members in a rural district. While this doesn’t seem very democratic, it can help a party avoid selecting a leader whose appeal is limited to voters in only one region. It’s easy to imagine that a candidate like Rebecca Schulz would have performed much better under a point system than she has under the pure one-member-one-vote approach, for example.
The picture that Bell’s columns paint for the UCP isn’t pretty. While MLAs seem to be lining up to join Smith Cabinet, her hold on the party will be tenuous if she can’t improve her popularity with the electorate. And this will make it all the more difficult for her to move forward with her controversial Sovereignty Act.
Odds and Ends
Want to know more about Danielle Smith’s proposed Sovereignty Act? Register for this UAlberta panel to hear from Eric Adams, Jared Wesley & me.
If you haven’t already, read Duane Bratt’s twitter thread about the lawsuit Craig Chandler has filed against him, MRU and Cassandra Raugust. And then read this explainer about Anti-SLAPP legislation. (SLAPP=Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).