Alberta election 2023

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The Danielle Smith strategy is clear enough: totally write off Edmonton, hope you keep enough in Calgary, sweep everything outside the two cities to form a majority government. You can criticize this approach by making observations like pointing out that the Banff seat is a rural seat that is certainly not safe, but I've never liked this sort of seat-by-seat analysis when it comes to Canada, because we're dealing with the Canadian electorate here and anything is possible.

When you try to lay out the logic of Danielle Smith's approach, basically it's an attempt to make the province-wide vote total irrelevant: if we just win the seats we need to, this line of thinking goes, it doesn't matter what they do in Edmonton because we're not planning on winning those seats anyway. The problem is that for this approach to be successful, the party using it needs to have a substantially more efficient vote than its opposition. Given typical voting patterns in rural Alberta, it is, uh, difficult to imagine the United Conservative Party having a particularly efficient vote distribution.

So, then, unless you think that the NDP will win 75% of the vote across the whole city of Edmonton while the UCP nonetheless wins half a dozen Calgary seats, you're left with having to win more votes than the opposition. The polls suggest that passing the NDP will be an uphill battle for the government, and Danielle Smith's rhetoric doesn't suggest she's terribly interested in that. The right-wing posturing to avoid losing the base might be a good strategic move in order to keep the party afloat in the medium term, but from the standpoint of short-term tactics it doesn't make any sense. (In fact, letting right-wing fringe parties get 20% of the vote in safe rural ridings would go a long way toward making the UCP vote efficient enough to win a majority even without getting the most votes.) Maybe gas prices go through the roof again and change everything, but right now it's hard for me to see how Rachel Notley isn't premier in seven months.

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Travis Toews will not be running for reelection. I don't think it means he's out of politics, but if there is another Danielle Smith government after this election he will not be part of it.

My guess is that the NDP holds a geographical advantage and would win a majority if the vote were tied. There are some safe NDP seats in Edmonton, yes, but given the attention that the UCP has paid to securing its rightward flank I would expect there to be more rural seats where the UCP racks up the vote.

[Хahar 🤔]

Loath as I am to distract the Ontarians from their riveting discussion of dynamics in Ontario for the forthcoming federal election, I would suggest that maybe they can do that in another thread rather than making me think that there's actual discussion of the Alberta election every time I see there's a new post here.

Rajan Sawhney, who had previously announced that she would not be contesting her seat of Calgary-North East and would leave the legislature, has instead been adopted as the UCP candidate for Calgary-North West. Unlike her current seat, this new seat isn't necessarily an assured NDP gain—in 2019 the UCP candidate, frontbencher Sonya Savage, won it by 25 points with 9% going to the Alberta Party candidate—so Sawhney could end up in a situation where she's the most prominent member of the opposition benches not aligned with the far right.

[Хahar 🤔]

Sign watch:

In Cardston I saw no NDP signs (as one would expect) but the signs I did see were split between the government candidate and independent (formerly with the Wildrose Independence Party) Angela Tabak. I don't know if she's Mormon, which would explain things, but anyway I was surprised by how many signs she had. This area obviously has a history of supporting right-of-mainstream candidates, so maybe she'll do well.

In Fort MacLeod and environs I saw a surprising number of signs for NDP (maybe star) candidate Kevin Van Tighem. It doesn't seem plausible that he could win, but that area did elect the first NDP MLA in Alberta history. I know there has been some wacky stuff with the UCP nomination there being taken over by the far right, but most of the signs I saw were for the UCP candidate.

I wish I could have had the time to go into Lethbridge and see what things looked like there, but alas.

[Хahar 🤔]

The remarkable thing here is: only *3%* for "other"?  Boy, Danielle Smith has nuclear-binaried the race...

It was probably bound to happen anyway, the main third parties, the Alberta Party and the Liberal Party are running just 19 and 13 candidates, so they presumably have zero presence in the race.

It may be true that centrist parties would be a larger presence if someone else were premier and voters felt more comfortable with the potential that their votes might be wasted, but to the extent that Danielle Smith being premier has led to extreme two-party polarization I think the effect is less on the center and more on the right. With a different leader, you'd probably have fringe right-wing candidates polling in double digits in many rural ridings. Smith's strategy has eliminated that rightward flank, which will probably not do much to win more seats.