Ontario ONDP Leadership (March 2023)

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

Would love to see Wayne Gates as leader of the ONDP but I think his part of the party (blue-collar smaller city/rural) is waning.

NDP's small city support seems to be going the way of the Liberals' support in the rural southwest circa 2000's - as in, incumbent Dippers are able to hold on, but once the incumbent is gone, the riding is gone. Most NDP incumbents held on - Gilles Bisson, Faisal Hassan, and the Singh duo in Brampton being the exceptions, but those were special cases. The NDP's probably better off doubling down on the urban vote, but then again, that's probably a bad trade-off considering they already have most of the properly urban areas, and as for the suburbs, (most of) the 905 seems to have a severe orange allergy.

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

It's also far from certain that Ford-style blue-collar Toryism is eternal--as always, there's the "What Would Peter Kormos Do?" question out there...

It's not "Ford-style blue-collar Toryism" that's the biggest threat to the NDP, because I think we often overestimate how much of this is about Ford, and underestimate how much of this is part of a broad trend. For whatever number of reasons and theories that people can speculate on, small-town populists are almost universally shifting right, and big-city professionals are almost universally shifting left.

One could look at the 2020 BC election where the NDP won the PV by 14%, a blowout which saw them win in "bourgeois" places like Vancouver-False Creek and 2/3 North Van ridings which used to be hardcore anti-NDP during our lifetimes, yet still unable to flip places like Kamloops and Skeena. I bring up this example instead of Trump/Brexit/whatever, because the BC Libs under Andrew Wilkinson were far from "Ford-style blue-collar Tories", and John Horgan isn't exactly a Rolex-wearing woke champagne socialist.

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

It's also far from certain that Ford-style blue-collar Toryism is eternal--as always, there's the "What Would Peter Kormos Do?" question out there...

It's not "Ford-style blue-collar Toryism" that's the biggest threat to the NDP, because I think we often overestimate how much of this is about Ford, and underestimate how much of this is part of a broad trend. For whatever number of reasons and theories that people can speculate on, small-town populists are almost universally shifting right, and big-city professionals are almost universally shifting left.

One could look at the 2020 BC election where the NDP won the PV by 14%, a blowout which saw them win in "bourgeois" places like Vancouver-False Creek and 2/3 North Van ridings which used to be hardcore anti-NDP during our lifetimes, yet still unable to flip places like Kamloops and Skeena. I bring up this example instead of Trump/Brexit/whatever, because the BC Libs under Andrew Wilkinson were far from "Ford-style blue-collar Tories", and John Horgan isn't exactly a Rolex-wearing woke champagne socialist.

Kamloops is a bad example, the North seat didn't even vote NDP in 1996 and the South one was a perfect bellweather until 2017 (which means it rarely voted NDP). I also think Kamloops itself voted NDP, but it's cracked in two seats.

Sure, but in Kamloops-North Thompson for example, the Carole James NDP used to get just as many or more votes as the John Horgan NDP did in 2020 - even though 2020 was a much better election for the NDP. So it's not exactly an "NDP-turned-conservative" type of area, but the point is that the NDP did just as well in Kamloops in a 14-pt landslide (2020) as they did in 4-point losses (05, 09)