Colby Cosh: To kick out the likeable one: analyzing Alberta's electoral mindset
Jason Kenney's UCP is enjoying an enormous lead in voter-intention polls, but his favourability ratings trail those of the premier
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Does the United Conservative Party, which is substantially the creation of Jason Kenney, have a Jason Kenney problem? This is becoming a topic of conversation in Alberta as a spring election approaches. Over the weekend, the Edmonton Journal’s Keith Gerein discussed new polling numbers that confirm the existence of a voter paradox in the province: Kenney’s UCP continues to enjoy a truly enormous lead in voter-intention polls, but the UCP leader’s personal favourability ratings are worse than those of the New Democratic premier he is trying to oust, Rachel Notley.
Does the United Conservative Party … have a Jason Kenney problem?
In particular, he is less popular within his own party than Notley is within hers; he is less popular than her with undecided voters and those committed to other parties; and he seems to be less popular overall in Calgary, where the election will be decided. (The UCP continues to enjoy something like a 20-point lead in voter intention in Calgary.) The new numbers come from the Mainstreet polling agency, which spent much of last year apologizing for a calamitous misreading of the 2017 Calgary municipal election, but other polls show the same thing.
And if you are a wacky nihilist who doesn’t believe we should listen to pollsters at all, try this: visit the United Conservative Party’s website (unitedconservative.ca). The front page lists a number of upcoming election readiness events and local candidate meetings. There are news releases about nominations and about the party’s (genuinely impressive) recent fundraising success. There’s an About menu with party policies and the names of the board members. There’s a link to a page about the UCP caucus, which, if you follow it, has a photo of Kenney in a grid with other MLAs. But it would not in fact be too easy to figure out, using this page, what the name of the leader of the UCP is.
It would not in fact be too easy to figure out … what the name of the leader of the UCP is
So, yeah, there’s a problem, and everybody in all of the parties seems to be aware of it. The New Democrats’ emerging electoral strategy is obviously to try exploiting Kenney’s weaknesses while running their own leader-focused campaign. Alberta election officials are investigating the machinations of the UCP leadership campaign that brought Kenney to power, and the NDP’s media proxies are trying to exploit that gently, while reviving Kenney’s past, long since renounced, as a young ultra-Catholic social-conservative zany.
The official investigations revolve around the short-lived candidacy of former Wildrose president Jeff Callaway, who dropped out to endorse Kenney, and who received some puzzling donations while he was still in the race. For now you have to use your imagination, and really work at it, to turn this into Jason Kenney’s Watergate. (It helps if you mumble phrases like “stalking horse” and “dark money” to yourself.) The NDP hope is that the 39 per cent of UCP membership who voted for someone else in the UCP’s first leadership contest will still be harbouring enough resentment to fill in the blanks.
But, after all, roughly 100 per cent of the United Conservatives were people who supported uniting Alberta’s conservatives and living with the result. Jason Kenney’s problem is, on the precipice of the election, the kind of problem one might like to have— a lot of people intend to vote for you despite misgivings about your leader, in order to kick out the likeable one.
Political lore suggests that favourability ratings are more of a leading indicator than vote intention numbers, which provide only a snapshot of the moment. (It’s always a “snapshot” in newspaper talk, for some reason.) But I’m afraid that’s the kind of political rule that applies until it doesn’t.
Everything non-quantitative about Alberta’s political mood suggests that Albertans are in the throes of a revolt over core aspects of their identity. They are being challenged from without over the moral legitimacy of a fossil-fuel economy on which many or most of them have built lives, careers, and all the appurtenances of a civilization. (To beat a familiar point to death: even if you don’t work in the patch and never have, you are probably here in Alberta because of it, one way or another.)
Everything non-quantitative about Alberta's political mood suggests that Albertans are in the throes of a revolt over core aspects of their identity
Notley works as hard as Jason Kenney to affirm that legitimacy, but suggests by what she does as premier that fossil fuels need to be tamed and transcended. Kenney’s message is one continuous roar of “To hell with that!”
Probably every newspaper column ever written should end with the words “It is really a little more complicated than that,” and it is. Personalities matter, and there is a fine line in politics between authenticity and trustworthiness. But it is not as though Rachel Notley does not have authenticity concerns. She spends an awful lot of time condemning the memory of Ralph Klein, perhaps the last politician Albertans liked as well as they like her, while exploiting the financial position he created for Alberta. She has been able to run a countercyclical Keynesian policy in Alberta because Ralph had already handled the hard part that involved that derided virtue, austerity. There are plenty of Albertans who voted for both these people. But this is a sales pitch she can’t make, and won’t.
• Email: ccosh@postmedia.com | Twitter: colbycosh
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