Target Practice for the NDP and Conservatives: HST Campaign
The NDP launched a campaign last Friday with a radio buy, website, web ads, a joint federal-provincial leaders news conference in Ottawa and probably mailings and/or print ads, all focused on the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) votes being held this week in Parliament.
What was unusual about this announcement, at least compared with past practice, is that they named the ridings they're targetting (opens video; fast-forward to 1:05): 10 Conservative-held ridings, 5 each in Ontario and British Columbia (see below).
The move appears designed to meet multiple simultaneous objectives:
Once it was decided to target Conservative seats, the choice of ridings could be reasonably guessed by looking at the list of the NDP's best Conservative-won seats in 2008, by vote-share, for both Ontario and British Columbia. The party has held all but 3 of the 10 at some point in the last 20 years federally. And Leader Jack Layton personally attended the nomination meetings of 5 of the 8 currently nominated candidates, according to my notes, and many of these communities were also visited during the party's spring task forces on the recession and recovery, so they've evidently had the seats in mind for some time.
Where the 2008 margins were large in BC, they often represented Liberal voters who stayed home or switched to the Conservatives (as suggested in an earlier analysis of BC voting patterns), and short of those Liberals returning home, the NDP needed a new strategy to shrink the Conservative vote in those ridings.
In Ontario, they've picked their only unheld seat in the northwest, and four seats in southwestern Ontario who've been hit by the decline in the manufacturing sector, and where the party had reasonably strong local campaigns in 2008 and has strong local candidates in place. While the party's vote dropped somewhat across southwestern Ontario in the last election, I did notice a lot of movement back and forth between the NDP and Conservatives in the southwest during the daily tracking polls of a number of pollsters over the course of the campaign.
So, by an incrementalist narrow-margin approach to targetting seats, not all these would be next on their list. But one thing long-time stalwarts of all parties learned in 1993 is that hot-buttons and a desire for change can make large margins melt away. We may not be there yet, but political veterans also know not to wait for opportunities to appear, they work to create them and to be ready to maximize their advantage.
As a sidebar, it's also nice to see that 3 of the 10 ridings being targetted by the NDP have nominated women candidates (and 2 of the 3 are aboriginal women candidates). On the other side of the balance sheet, 3 of the Conservative MPs being targetted are women.
I'm trying to assemble a comparable list of ridings that were targetted by the Conservatives with their long-gun registry ads and mailings on policy towards Israel, for future posts in this series. If anyone can point me to such lists, please do get in touch.
What was unusual about this announcement, at least compared with past practice, is that they named the ridings they're targetting (opens video; fast-forward to 1:05): 10 Conservative-held ridings, 5 each in Ontario and British Columbia (see below).
The move appears designed to meet multiple simultaneous objectives:
- first, obviously is to raise the party's concerns about the shift in the tax base from business to consumers being accelerated by the HST, and to urge public action to block its implementation
- second, they are trying to recast their own positioning on taxation, and raise questions about the Conservatives' positioning as tax-cutters, amongst the group of voters who swing between their two parties: primary resource and secondary manufacturing workers and retirees who are being squeezed in the current economic climate
- also they may want to demonstrate, after the Conservatives targetted opposition-held rural and remote ridings with mailings and radio ads about the long-gun registry vote, that two can play the same game; and also to
- build support and local organization for their early-nominated candidates in those ridings (and perhaps give a bit of support to neighbouring first-time incumbents)
- take the opportunity to mute the future usefulness of strategic voting strategies against them by demonstrating that their vote and potential support doesn't only switch between the NDP and Liberals, and
- subtly try to recast the public debate on this issue, and no doubt others in the future, as being between the NDP and Conservatives
Once it was decided to target Conservative seats, the choice of ridings could be reasonably guessed by looking at the list of the NDP's best Conservative-won seats in 2008, by vote-share, for both Ontario and British Columbia. The party has held all but 3 of the 10 at some point in the last 20 years federally. And Leader Jack Layton personally attended the nomination meetings of 5 of the 8 currently nominated candidates, according to my notes, and many of these communities were also visited during the party's spring task forces on the recession and recovery, so they've evidently had the seats in mind for some time.
Where the 2008 margins were large in BC, they often represented Liberal voters who stayed home or switched to the Conservatives (as suggested in an earlier analysis of BC voting patterns), and short of those Liberals returning home, the NDP needed a new strategy to shrink the Conservative vote in those ridings.
In Ontario, they've picked their only unheld seat in the northwest, and four seats in southwestern Ontario who've been hit by the decline in the manufacturing sector, and where the party had reasonably strong local campaigns in 2008 and has strong local candidates in place. While the party's vote dropped somewhat across southwestern Ontario in the last election, I did notice a lot of movement back and forth between the NDP and Conservatives in the southwest during the daily tracking polls of a number of pollsters over the course of the campaign.
So, by an incrementalist narrow-margin approach to targetting seats, not all these would be next on their list. But one thing long-time stalwarts of all parties learned in 1993 is that hot-buttons and a desire for change can make large margins melt away. We may not be there yet, but political veterans also know not to wait for opportunities to appear, they work to create them and to be ready to maximize their advantage.
As a sidebar, it's also nice to see that 3 of the 10 ridings being targetted by the NDP have nominated women candidates (and 2 of the 3 are aboriginal women candidates). On the other side of the balance sheet, 3 of the Conservative MPs being targetted are women.
| Riding Nominated Cons & NDP | Contest 2008 %Mrg | 2008 Cons | 2008 NDP | 2008 Lib | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Catharines, ON DYKSTRA, Richard (Rick) (M) WILLIAMS, Mike (M) | Cons-Lib 17.2% | 45.9% | 18.4% | 28.6% | |
| Elgin – Middlesex – London, ON PRESTON, Joseph (Joe) (M) DOLBY, Ryan (M) | Cons-Lib 24.9% | 48.4% | 19.2% | 23.5% | |
| Sarnia – Lambton, ON DAVIDSON, Patricia (Pat) A. (F) SINOPOLE, Crissy (F) | Cons-NDP 28.4% | 50.0% | 21.6% | 20.3% | |
| Essex, ON WATSON, Jeff (M) NATYSHAK, Taras (M) | Cons-Lib 10.9% | 40.0% | 26.6% | 29.1% | |
| Kenora, ON RICKFORD, Greg (M) CAMERON, Tania (F) | Cons-Lib 8.8% | 40.5% | 23.2% | 31.6% | |
| Cariboo – Prince George, BC HARRIS, Richard (Dick) (M) [none as yet; Bev Collins in 2008] | Cons-NDP 29.5% | 55.4% | 25.9% | 10.5% | |
| Kamloops – Thompson – Cariboo, BC MCLEOD, Cathy (F) CRAWFORD, Michael (M) | Cons-NDP
| 46.2% | 35.9% | 9.8% | |
| Surrey North, BC CADMAN, Dona Marie M. (F) SANDHU, Jasbir (M) | Cons-NDP 3.2% | 39.4% | 36.2% | 15.0% | |
| Pitt Meadows – Maple Ridge – Mission, BC KAMP, Randy (M) [David Murray is announced] | Cons-NDP 18.8% | 51.8% | 33.0% | 6.6% | |
| Vancouver Island North, BC DUNCAN, John M. (M) BELL, Catherine J. (F) | Cons-NDP 4.4% | 45.8% | 41.4% | 4.2% |
I'm trying to assemble a comparable list of ridings that were targetted by the Conservatives with their long-gun registry ads and mailings on policy towards Israel, for future posts in this series. If anyone can point me to such lists, please do get in touch.
Labels: 41st General Election, Conservatives, NDP, Target Seats
posted by The Pundits' Guide at
8:07 PM
9 Comments:
Alice
I recall reading in the 1970s that the Conservatives, perhaps using Decima, had a statistical approach to picking up target ridings that went beyond simply using previous election results. Census data on socio-economic charactertistics were used to find ridings that were similar to already held Conservative seats, but where the Tory vote was, for whatever reason, not much in evidence. They were using regession analysis to develop relationships, then use the relationships to find likely targets.
Is anyone else doing anything similar today?
Hi Rod,
Jeffrey Simpson's book "The Discipline of Power" discussed Decima's techniques, but that was for the period 1979-80.
In general it's the kind of technique you would use if you had a lot of resources (or a lot of graduate students, particularly in the 1970s, where data would have had to be manually keyed), but little on-the-ground knowledge.
With so few obvious seats to pick from, I'm guessing that common sense would determine the ridings, but statistical techniques would be most useful to identify areas to target within the ridings.
I have no doubt that the Conservatives are using every data-driven technique available to them. I doubt it's the Liberals' strategy at all, since they've tended to emphasize mass marketing approaches instead, although with their contacts in ad agencies, I'm sure they have access to any local data they might require. They've contracted out voter contact to party-friend phone bank firms, according to their candidate spending returns.
That's all I'm able to tell from the data.
I'm shocked that Oshawa is not on the list. The NDP has already nominated a strong candidate, who is already talking about HST on his website, plus the NDP finished second in that riding.
I was surprised not to see it there, but perhaps the Jurist has cottoned on to the explanation in this morning's blogpost. The argument goes that if this is target practice, then you need a few ridings as control groups.
In the alternative, if the party's goal here was to do development of next-tier ridings, then perhaps Oshawa was already deemed to have things well in hand.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
St. Catharines is an obvious target because it borders the NDP-held Welland riding (which includes the southern portion of the City of St. Catharines.
To follow up on my earlier post, St. Catharines is an obvious target, not because it is considered first or second tier, but because teh Tories came so close to winning the Welland riding in 2008.
Hi Anon, and thanks for your comment. I don't know the area too well myself, but understand that St. Catharines and Welland show some elements in common. I believe any ad buy that's going to help St. Catharines will probably benefit Welland as well, which is undoubtedly a significant side effect.
Does anyone else have any insights into this selection and/or this part of the country?
One possibility is that we will see a targetting of Oshawa that works from an entirely different theme.
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