Don’t write off a fifth NDP victory

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2016 (3483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The polls are awful. They show the NDP could get less than 25 per cent of the popular vote and about a dozen seats in the 57-seat Manitoba legislature. Premier Greg Selinger, they tell us, is deeply unpopular even though he survived the internal party revolt a year ago. And, if that is not enough, the NDP, the pollsters also tell us, is losing the women’s vote. While a fifth NDP mandate may not be entirely impossible, it is looking more and more unlikely.

This seems like an open and shut case, but appearances can be deceptive, and this one is so on many counts. Most fundamentally, the political ground is shifting beneath our feet and it favours a politics that addresses inequality; reflects and celebrates the diversity of the electorate, which, in Canada today, means nothing if aboriginal people are excluded; and does not shy away from an intelligent use of the state to promote growth, a broad-based prosperity and provide essential social services, pre-eminently health and education.

These are the policies Bernie Sanders is offering the U.S. electorate, that Jeremy Corbyn is offering the British people and the Liberals were more successful in offering Canadians than Tom Mulcair’s NDP. Of the parties in the fray in the Manitoba election, only the NDP is offering these policies consistently.

The polls have not reflected this. Indeed, polls today have a better record of being wrong than right. And it’s not just the electorate becoming volatile; if that were so, polls should be able to accurately predict this volatility. Across the western world, like all firms, polling firms are cutting costs and trying to do more with less.

Unfortunately, this really means doing even less with less. Low-quality polls without the requisite analysis required to grasp fundamental shifts failed to predict the scale of the Liberal victory last October and the scale of the Sanders and Donald Trump phenomena south of the border. The interactive voice response polls predicting the bad numbers for the NDP and Selinger are the low-cost, robocall version of polls, reaching only those with land lines, and they’re more likely to end up with respondents who have some steam to let off. How representative such polls can be is anyone’s guess.

The NDP emphasizes its experience with good reason. Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari has experience of running a student union, and yes, a campaign, to date, badly. The Progressive Conservative leader may be more experienced but is distinctly uninspiring. One could not help thinking at the time that at least some of the energy behind the attempted right-wing coup in the NDP was coming from conservative forces in Manitoba despairing of their own leadership.

The disarray of the right is not confined to Manitoba. The GOP is undergoing its trial by Trump, the British conservatives have their Brexit brouhaha and the Canadian conservatives are in for a long Harper-induced decline.

By contrast, anti-austerity forces have done rather well. The Scottish Nationalists swept Scotland in the last British elections, winning all but two seats as the only party offering an anti-austerity program (English, Welsh and Northern Irish voters had no such choice). Sanders is doing rather well despite being a self-proclaimed socialist in a country where it has been a bad word at least since Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Recent elections in Greece, Spain and Portugal also demonstrate there is undoubtedly a constituency for left politics.

Here in Manitoba, it is the NDP’s to lose.

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And all this is not to say the NDP cannot lose it. The NDP could run a lacklustre and timid campaign that fails to mobilize its supporters in the only way that is effective — not through social media and other low-cost (but also low-effect) ways but through face-to-face contact and meetings that offer solidarity and accountability. NDP candidates could fail to emphasize the right elements of the government’s record. They could win women’s, workers’ and aboriginal peoples’ votes in insufficient numbers by failing to emphasize the NDP’s record and plans.

The NDP could fail to demonstrate to business, as the Liberals did in the last election, that it is the only party that can guarantee employment and business growth in government, that the neo-liberal slash, cut and burn policies are no longer able to deliver either, and that only an economic strategy that is able to spend and tax judiciously can actually do what it takes to get and keep growth going.

Only by avoiding these pitfalls can the NDP take advantage of the underlying shifts that are moving politics towards it. And if it does not, any other government will be faced with the consequence of this shift.

Radhika Desai is a political science professor at the University of Manitoba.