The Liberal Party has seen a remarkable turnaround in its fortunes in recent weeks. Following Chrystia Freeland’s resignation a month ago, the Conservative lead had reached an all-time high of 25 points. In our latest polling, however, that advantage has narrowed to just 11 points, with the Conservatives leading 39 points to 28. At 17 points, the NDP is in third place, and their declared intention to bring down the government does not appear to have produced any benefits.
I voted NDP, I’m almost certainly going to vote NDP again, but unfortunately the NDP needs a leadership shake-up too. Singh is not able to to take the party anywhere, he’s a great person and he should stay on as a MP, but he’s not exciting to anybody in the other parties and the NDP has felt stuck for a decade now.
The NDP has been stuck much longer than that through little to no fault of their own. The media spun Rae days into such a monster that very few of my elders will even consider voting NDP and they vote in much higher numbers. While I agree a new leader is a good idea, they would have to succeed at either erasing Bob Rae’s memory or drastically increasing voter turnout to do any better than they are now. I say this as someone who has voted strictly NDP for the past 20 years and volunteered for them in the last two elections.
The saddest part is I have yet to encounter a Canadian who complains about Bob Rae that was actually affected by Rae Days. When you read into it, Rae Days were a fair attempt at keeping people employed during tough times. I am completely convinced that any other party would’ve done a much worse job with that situation.
For any Canadians on the fence with their vote, please consider the NDP. We all spend the majority of our lives working and the NDP is the only party primarily focused on improving our work lives. The rest of their policies are pretty decent and they’re open to a good suggestion if you have ideas. While red and blue continue to simp for oligarchs, our orange friends simp for unions. Also look into how much of Trudeaus policy was improved by the NDP forcing changes to bills before they would vote for them. I am convinced they are currently our only option for real progress in this country and I hope you can be convinced too.
Can I just take a minute to vent about this data viz
They have used a spline like a hobby spline and not a smoothing spline on that chart. It is a major pet peeve of mine when people use these curves to “interpolate” and make data look prettier. If you are interpolating points on a chart you need to choose a curve that actually fits through all the points, and is smooth.
There are points on this chart where the data inverts by over 90° and goes backwards, so you have more than one y point on the same x axis. You can’t tell where the data points are and these curves absolutely cannot represent voting sentiment. A scatter plot, or regular line plot would have worked perfectly fine, but instead EKOS who should be good with data has created these mangled to fuck charts…
Another downfall of these types of curves is they can create bends where no data is, which means they tell a story that has zero basis in reality, but it makes the first derivative smooth. That same effect can create curves which extend outside of the data range, but that’s not an issue on this particular chart.
The Libs and NDP have a lot of ground to make up with the male demographic (I’m not talking about conservative chuds or the Dick Cheney-courting “swing voter” strategy employed by the US democratic campaign).
I think that awareness of working class issues is the first bar to clear. The next is to stop letting Conservatives dictate the framing of every issue (which right now is “every Liberal is Trudeau”). Third is the candidate will really have to show how the Liberal party will change for the better, instead of touting Trudeau’s record (he got stuff done but with Biden this was another of Harris’ campaign mistakes).
