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:

1. 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
   
2. 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
3. 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
   
4. 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)
5. 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
   
6. subtly try to recast the public debate on this issue, and no doubt others in the future, as being between the NDP and Conservatives
   

At first blush it's a bold approach, particularly when most insta-pundits use narrow margins as a proxy for the winnability of ridings, and assume that an issue being raised potentially months or years away from an election will have no impact later on. [Not raising any issues until the eve of the election is another strategy, I suppose, but I'd wager it's even less effective.] Yet the NDP has apparently picked ridings where it placed third last time (4 of the 10 seats) or has large margins to make up in order to win.

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 10.3%	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