Election strategies becoming clear

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This article was published 22/08/2023 (790 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On October 3rd, just six weeks from today, Manitobans will elect a new government for their province. As the clock clicks closer to that date, the three major parties’ strategies are coming into clearer focus.

For the governing Progressive Conservatives, the campaign plan appears to be entirely defensive in nature. There are currently 36 Tory MLAs in the Legislative Assembly, meaning that they can afford to lose seven seats and still emerge with a majority of the 57 seats. They could even lose eight and still likely hold the most seats.

The only Tory-held ridings that could currently be regarded as being at risk are Assiniboia, Fort Richmond, Kirkfield Park, McPhillips, Radisson, Riel, Rossmere, Seine River, Southdale, Brandon East, Dauphin, Kildonan-River East and Selkirk. That’s just 13 seats that they have to realistically worry about defending, but most were won in 2016 and 2019 by large margins.

It won’t be easy for the New Democrats to convince Manitobans who voted for Tory candidates in the past two elections to switch to voting for an NDP candidate. Such a shift would require a massive ideological leap by thousands of voters, and that reality defines the primary goal of the Tory re-election strategy: hold onto the voters who voted for them in 2016 and 2019.

They plan to do that by convincing those voters that the prospect of an NDP government led by Wab Kinew is just too risky. Indeed, we are already seeing Tory attacks and advertising that accuse Kinew of having a secret agenda to raise the PST rate to 10 per cent. Surrogate social media accounts are reminding Manitobans of Kinew’s past legal troubles and violent conduct. The attacks will likely intensify in the coming weeks.

The Tories will also continue to remind voters of the failures of the previous NDP government — the longest health care wait times in Canada, the lowest scores on standardized tests of school children, a struggling economy and a broken PST promise — and warn that a Kinew government would repeat that legacy.

Finally, the Tories have attempted to use this summer’s spree of spending commitments to inoculate themselves from accusations that they place a higher priority on cutting spending than cutting health care wait times. They will, no doubt, argue that all those promises would be at risk of being cancelled by an NDP government.

With the NDP in no realistic danger of losing any of the 18 seats they currently hold, their focus is entirely on offence. They need to win at least 11 seats in order to form a majority government (12 if they want an NDP speaker). With only 13 Tory seats and just one Liberal seat being even remotely up for grabs, however, the NDP need to run an energetic, mistake-free campaign.

That’s not happening, at least not yet. While the Tories were making hundreds of millions of dollars in spending commitments throughout June and July, the NDP appear to have been on vacation. On most days, they had no pushback at all. They should have been making health care the only election issue on Manitoban’s minds, but their silence allowed the Tories to change the channel and drive the agenda.

That likely explains why one recent public opinion poll had the Tories and NDP tied province-wide, while another had the Tories leading by four points.

Having now attempted to inoculate Kinew from attacks about his past and his alleged scheme to hike the PST, the NDP need to quickly shove the focus of the campaign back to health care and education — issues on which the Tories are vulnerable — and make sure it stays there for the next six weeks.

With three seats currently, the Liberals’ goal is to simply be regarded as relevant and hope to win one or two more seats. They will likely continue to release thoughtful campaign promises, hoping it gets them positive media coverage, but their low-key approach puts them in danger of being trampled by what is really a two-horse contest.

That is a strategy snapshot with election day still six weeks away. With the exception of the Tories’ attempt to re-brand themselves as centrist spenders and the NDP spending most of June and July at the lake, it appears that the battle lines and talking points are drawn for the home stretch.

Deveryn Ross is a political commentator living in Brandon. deverynrossletters@gmail.com X: @deverynross