A byelection — and a teaching moment

Let’s call it a learning experience — for everyone.

The provincial byelection in Spruce Woods, that is.

The byelection ended up in a narrow win for Progressive Conservative candidate, Colleen Robbins, who — at this point with preliminary results — won by 70 votes.

For the NDP, the lesson might be that with all the political power a government can wield, success is never a guarantee. With everything from strategic announcements before the byelection time to the undemocratic exercise of delaying a byelection call for strategic reasons — and leaving constituents without representation for months — the scales were certainly tipped in the NDP’s favour, at least towards having the best chance ever to take the riding.

Heck, having the vote in August in a riding with both urban and rural features (Brandon is at its centre) could even have kept traditional rural voters away, because they could be focusing more on agricultural needs than on a byelection that — face it — changes nothing in the makeup of the legislature.

It would have been a huge success, because the NDP have never won in the riding in its history — the seat was formed in 2011 — and lost the seat by more than 3,000 votes in the last provincial election.

Preliminary results show that only 6,008 out of 14,757 eligible voters showed up at the polls in the byelection — voter turnout in the riding dropped by more than 2,000 votes from the 2023 general election, from 56.5 per cent to just under 41 per cent.

In the process, popular support for the Tories dropped from 61 per cent to 46.7 per cent, while the NDP rose to 45.5 per cent from 29 per cent.

Perhaps the clearest indicator, though, is in the votes themselves: the NDP gained nearly 800 votes over their 2023 general election performance, rising from 1,936 to 2,735, while the PCs lost 2,181 votes, falling from 4,986 to 2,805.

To say the Tories are going in the wrong direction is an understatement.

The lesson to the Progressive Conservatives, even with a fresh leader in Obby Khan, is a simple one: what they’re doing right now is not working, because vote totals are going in the wrong direction. (Especially because near-meaningless byelections — meaningless at least as far as forming or toppling governments go — are the perfect place voters to deliver a protest vote against the direction a government is taking, without actually kicking that government out.)

And then there is the Manitoba Liberal Party. Perhaps the Liberals learned that they’re really only active as a spoiler right now. With 7.4 per cent of the vote — and a worldview for voters more closely aligned with the NDP than with the Progressive Conservatives — their 444 votes were significant in a couple of ways.

First, because if their votes had titled towards the NDP, the NDP would most likely have won the byelection. Second, because even in an election where the provincial government wasn’t the grand prize, their support cratered by almost half. In the general election, the Liberal candidate took 14 per cent of the vote, gaining support from 1,145 voters. In all, more than 700 Liberal votes disappeared.

The biggest lesson? One that political parties seem to have to learn over and over again: no matter how safe you think a riding is, nor how much of an effort you pour into it from the government side of the house, you take voters for granted at your peril.

The Tories will say they will take the win — the NDP will say they’re now competitive in some parts of rural Manitoba. But the only poll that counts will still be the one on election day.