Prince Edward Island provincial election - April 3, 2023

[adma]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

[Hatman 🍁]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

And anyone with half a brain could've predicted that would happen too. Why she decided to run against PBB is beyond me.

[Benjamin Frank]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

And anyone with half a brain could've predicted that would happen too. Why she decided to run against PBB is beyond me.

I can only think it was for the immediate publicity hit. She doesn't even live in that riding.

She specifically chose to run against Bevan-Baker because she said she thought he was a weak leader of the opposition. So, it also doesn't make sense that she chose to campaign against another opposition party rather than the government.

Since she hasn't stepped down yet, I certainly hope that the PEI Liberals show her the door.

[Oryxslayer]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

And anyone with half a brain could've predicted that would happen too. Why she decided to run against PBB is beyond me.

I can only think it was for the immediate publicity hit. She doesn't even live in that riding.

She specifically chose to run against Bevan-Baker because she said she thought he was a weak leader of the opposition. So, it also doesn't make sense that she chose to campaign against another opposition party rather than the government.

Since she hasn't stepped down yet, I certainly hope that the PEI Liberals show her the door.

There's also just the unfiltered realpolitik long term strategy involved. If you know a government landslide is coming, then one perspective is that the best thing you could do for your party is try to use the landslide to remove the other opposition party. Then maybe in the next few years your party becomes the rallying point for opposition simply because there is no other.

Of course that failed in more ways than one.

[DL]

There's also just the unfiltered realpolitik long term strategy involved. If you know a government landslide is coming, then one perspective is that the best thing you could do for your party is try to use the landslide to remove the other opposition party. Then maybe in the next few years your party becomes the rallying point for opposition simply because there is no other.

Of course that failed in more ways than one.

Was the Liberal strategy really such a failure? The leader's personal defeat notwithstanding, the big story of the election was the Green party collapsing from 8 seats to 2 and now the Liberals are the official opposition with 3 seats. Presumably one of the three Liberals MLAs will become the new leader and by the next election the Liberals could be back in the game.

[Oryxslayer]

There's also just the unfiltered realpolitik long term strategy involved. If you know a government landslide is coming, then one perspective is that the best thing you could do for your party is try to use the landslide to remove the other opposition party. Then maybe in the next few years your party becomes the rallying point for opposition simply because there is no other.

Of course that failed in more ways than one.

Was the Liberal strategy really such a failure? The leader's personal defeat notwithstanding, the big story of the election was the Green party collapsing from 8 seats to 2 and now the Liberals are the official opposition with 3 seats. Presumably one of the three Liberals MLAs will become the new leader and by the next election the Liberals could be back in the game.

Yeah, but they didn't kill the Greens, which mean the opportunity was lost. Like both of the oppositions are battered and broken, but both are still standing with similar vote shares and seats. In that way, it doesn't matter who is LoTO cause the Greens and Liberal provincial vote bases are seemingly separate geographically. Extraordinary voter consolidation around either does not seem exceptionally likely in the near term, which means the Liberals failed. But who knows.

[adma]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

And anyone with half a brain could've predicted that would happen too. Why she decided to run against PBB is beyond me.

Except that because she's a freaking party leader, it would have been casually easy to presume that the *PCs*, notwithstanding their overwhelming province-wide polling lead, would have been the also-rans in the race.  Or at least, that there would have been more of a 3-way dynamic than there actually was.

Though one thing about the overall final result: in a province with a history of sweeps and near-sweeps, the fact that opposition parties managed to eke out 5 seats *must* count as some kind of pyrrhic victory given the polling odds against them.  (And even Cameron's disastrous leadership couldn't drown the Libs' ancestral E Island base; so, the ball's henceforth in their court even more than they could have imagined.)

[DL]

It wasn’t so long ago that the PEI Liberals had almost every seat and the PCs were on life support…

[adma]

It wasn’t so long ago that the PEI Liberals had almost every seat and the PCs were on life support…

But that's when PEI was truly electorally binary; that is, even apparent life support couldn't snuff out the Tories' status as the one available, viable alterna-option, should the electorate tire of the status quo.  Thus PEI was never fated to become a Lougheed Alberta-type one-party state.

Through the Libs re-attaining official opposition status and holding on to some of their ancestral base, 2023 *might* seem to portend a return to the binary comfort zone after 2019's Green-third-option flirtation.  (Or, the Libs finishing ahead of the Greens positions them favourably in the same way that Greens previously getting elected in PEI and NB positioned them favourably relative to the shut-out NDP.  Or for that matter, akin to how the NDP finishing ahead of the PCs in Ontario in '87 positioned them for the "Bob Rae surprise" in 1990.)

Plus, Bevan-Baker's seat is really a Bevan-Baker seat before it's a Green seat, and I can't necessarily see it staying in the fold in his absence.  (The other surviving Green seat--Charlottetown-Victoria Park--at least has "inner urbanity" going for it.)

[MaxQue]

I'm also wondering if there's ever been a major party leader/incoming opposition leader to bomb as badly in his/her individual riding as Sharon Cameron (14.7% for a distant 3rd)

And anyone with half a brain could've predicted that would happen too. Why she decided to run against PBB is beyond me.

I can only think it was for the immediate publicity hit. She doesn't even live in that riding.

She specifically chose to run against Bevan-Baker because she said she thought he was a weak leader of the opposition. So, it also doesn't make sense that she chose to campaign against another opposition party rather than the government.

Since she hasn't stepped down yet, I certainly hope that the PEI Liberals show her the door.

She has now resigned.

[DistingFlyer]

Here's a graph outlining how each party has done since 1966 in terms of both first- and second-place finishes.



In spite of their drop in votes (and MLAs), the Greens finished first/second in more ridings than in 2019 (from 19 to 20); the Liberals, on the other hand, only lost three seats but dropped way down in first/second-place finishes (from 15 to 6).