OK, now it’s clear…clearer maybe

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

Now that the Harris/Decima polls has fallen into the line with the other polls, it is clear that those who proclaimed, as some did on the front pages of Saturday’s papers, that the Tories won the first week of the campaign, were wrong.

In the week before the election call, the Tories had an excellent run. In the week after the call they had a gentle decline. Most of the pollsters now agree that this happened though they differ somewhat on the pace and the extent of the change. From my perspective, this is also a more satisfying conclusion because it fits better with events as we all experienced them. The Tories had at best a mixed week, and they looked better than they otherwise might because the Liberals have not yet emerged as the inevitable alternative.

This is a huge problem for the Liberals, who can normally expect to be treated by the media as the principle alternative when the Conservatives are in power. For the most part the media so far have tended to view the election as the Tories against everyone else rather than as mainly a two-way fight, with other parties snapping at the heels of the real protagonists. (The only recent exception was the run-up to 1988, when the NDP led the polls going in.)

This time, the NDP is faring quite well, especially among women, but has not yet closed the gap on the Liberals sufficiently to convince the media to treat them as potentially the new alternative party of power.

In fact, the Liberals do seem to be tumbling out of contention in some parts of the country — notably B.C., Manitoba and Saskatchewan — where they have traditionally been competitive. In much of the West, Layton and Harper are the lone gunslingers, just as both of them would probably prefer.

However, I think there is actually some sign that former Liberal supporters in Ontario have reacted to the possibility of their very own regional party — yes, the former natural governing party of Canada —  being displaced, by moving back to them, saving the Liberals from collapse at the national level.

My personal hunch on the Greens is that they may not yet have seen the benefits of last week’s debate-on-the debate and the attendant attention it drew to their leader, Elizabath May. Deciding to vote Green is a bigger jump that moving to one of the familiar parties, so the Greens may have attracted a lot of tire-kickers, who will soon drift away. On the other hand, there are a lot more people on the lot now, and some of them may still just need a little more convincing before they buy. In other words, it is worth watching to see whether the Greens get a bump this week, even though last week was their big one.

What’s going on in Quebec? Reading the papers, you’d think Duceppe was having a terrible campaign. Talk about friendly fire. But so far he’s doing better in the polls than he is in the papers.

Is this a “Seinfeld election” — about nothing. That’s what people were saying at this stage in the ’05-’06 campaign. A betting person would definitely put money on the Tories to win.  But if we really do end up where we started, there will nonetheless be a couple of parties who have had the scare of their lives, and a couple of others who will feel they had a historic opportunity that they failed to seize.

I, for one, will be seriously surprised if that happens.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

It depends who is talking . . .

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

The front-page election stories in today’s Globe and Mail and National Post offer contradictory perspectives on the week ahead in the campaign.

The Globe says:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper will sharpen his attacks on Stephane Dion stating today, as new polls show the Liberal Leader is failing to connect with voters or talk about the issues that mean the most to them.

Meanwhile over at the National Post:

The Conservatives said yesterday that they are refocusing their primary aim on the NDP and the Green party, citing them as a bigger threat to their re-election that the Liberals.

Worth checking back later in the week to see who was right.

In the meantime score one for those nameless senior strategists who know all and are only too willing to tell, providing of course they are given anonymity so no one can hold them to account.  

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

Campaign confusion?

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

There is a fascinating story in today’s New York Times by reporter Adam Nagourney that looks at the impact the fractured media landscape is having on the Presidential campaign – to the point of campaign managers no longer being confident about what strategies and tactics work and don’t work. Some of it at least seems transferrable to the campaign here as well so it is worth reading. 

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

tcnorris

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

After a hiatus, the estimable (but mysterious) tcnorris has resumed blogging on polls and the election campaign.

Check it out.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

An Obama in Canada?

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Karim H. Karim

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama frequently says that his story is only possible in the United States. It seems reasonable, given our vaunted multiculturalism and employment equity policies, that we should be able to make a similar claim for Canada.

Sadly, visible minority representation in the federal parliament lags far behind their numbers in the population, despite their energetic involvement in Canadian electoral politics. According to research conducted by Jerome Black and Bruce Hicks, they comprised 7.1% of all MPs elected in 2004 – which was less than half their percentage in the population. 

Immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa comprise the bulk of newcomers to this country. Given these trends, Statistics Canada projects that visible minorities will form a fifth of Canada’s population by 2017. But the issues relating to immigration generally remain under the radar during elections. Politicians avoid the topic studiously, and the media usually follow their lead. This is surprising given that a number of the key seats in urban areas have significant proportions of immigrants.

A series of studies have shown that recent newcomers have significantly lower rates of income, despite higher educational and skill levels than earlier immigrants who arrived from Europe. It appears half a century after John Porter alerted us to the “vertical mosaic” that stratifies Canadian society, his description is even more apt and now has a racial dimension. This does not bode well for race relations in this country and should be of concern to all parties. 

There was a hint that the media may be waking up to this issue. CBC Radio 1’s campaign coverage had three major immigration-related items in last week. Anna Maria Tremonti and guest host Jan Wong brought in a series of guests to discuss the participation of immigrants in politics in two separate editions of The Current, and The World at Six ran a feature story. This seems unprecedented for coverage during an election period, and is even more surprising that it should appear in the first week of a campaign.

But journalists are not yet asking politicians the hard questions about immigration and the lack of appropriate employment for visible minorities. It remains to be seen whether last week’s momentum will pick up or be buried under puffin poop.

Karim H. Karim is the director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Where there’s agreement/where there’s not

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

There continues to be a disparity among the three polling companies who are gathering nightly numbers: EKOS (where I am involved in the polling), Nanos, and Harris/Decima.

The disagreement is about how strongly the Tories are running. H/D has them in majority territory, Nanos a bit shy of that, and EKOS continues to have them tracking well away from where they would likely win a majority. EKOS will release new numbers tonight (Sunday) at about 9:0O p.m. ET.

Where there is agreement, however, is that the Conservatives are well ahead of the Liberals. It seems like it would take a considerable change in the dynamics of the campaign to erase this. The Liberals, meanwhile, in all the polls, continue to chart ahead of the New Democrats — not by a huge margin, but clearly ahead nonetheless. It is certainly too early to say whether this will hold.

And the Greens, for their part, continue to show well. The question for them is whether they can hold their vote as we get closer to election day. They are still well short of winning any significant number of seats because their support is broad, but thinly spread across the country. Will the newbie Green supporters drift back to the Liberals or the NDP to stop the Conservatives on election day? Or will the Greens start pushing into contention at the seat level and hold their vote? There is also a generational story here with young voters much more intensely attracted to the Green. They have tended not to vote in large numbers in the past, but maybe the Greens can create new dynamic, playing to a degree on the Gen-X and Gen-Y resentment of us baby-boomers.

Canada continues to be in a period of structural change in the party system, a change that began with the Liberal loss of Quebec in 1984, and has progressed in larger or smaller steps in almost every election since. This one probably won’t be any different.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Mr. Ordinary

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

For the second day running, the Ottawa Citizen has a fine political feature on its front page, this one by Don Butler about the political cult of the “ordinary guy”, which dictates that our political leaders, who practically by definition are extraordinary people, need to be made over as the schmoes  next door. Witness Harper the sweatered family man and Dion the cross-country skier and fisherman.

In fact both the leaders of our two major parties could be properly qualified as “intellectuals”, which nowadays seems everywhere to be a dirty word politically, perhaps with the exception of France.

In addition, Harper is that rarest of animals in political life, an introvert. Extroversion is so nearly universal a characteristic of political leaders that the media and the public hardly know how to handle it when one comes along who is not an extrovert.

I first met Stephen Harper when he was a Reform M.P., “class of ’93”. What was quite striking about him at the time was that unlike most of the new Reformers, many of whom came from the know-nothing school of populist politics (though I do not include Preston Manning in this), Harper knew and understood the ideas of his political opponents and the prevailing political orthodoxy. It was just that he disagreed with it.

It could be a thrill listening to him explain his viewpoints in precise counterpoint to conventional political wisdom. He was just so smart and, one might even say, learned.

But he was also quite obviously an introvert, and I would say quite shy. He could be awkward if the wall between journalist and politician were even briefly pierced. I remember walking across from Parliament Hill one day and congratulating him on either getting engaged or getting married — I forget which it was. What would have been an easy, relaxed moment with most politicians, turned out to be rather uncomfortable, as if I did not have the standing to intrude on his private life that way.

Most politicians make it easy for those of us on the journalistic side who sometimes are a little socially awkward ourselves. They are extroverts, and besides, because they love talking about themselves, and the role of politicians and journalists permits and encourages this, they do all the work that needs doing socially during our encounters. Not so Harper.

In later years, after Harper left Parliament for a time, I used to call him up fairly frequently to talk about political events. It was always stimulating; always an intellectual workout. In fact, I soon discovered that I preferred talking with him on the phone, because it spared us the uncomfortable moments of greeting and parting that accompanied an in-person interview, when you are supposed to just chit-chat affably.

Then, there was a hiatus of several years when we did not have any contact while I was in the Middle East with the Globe and Mail. By the time I came back he had become leader of the opposition. Unbeknownst to me, my son was enrolled in the same school his kids attended. As I was standing in the school yard on the first day of school, I had a tap on the shoulder, and there was Stephen Harper all dressed up in the sober blue suit appropriate to his position in life.

In an almost bewilderingly short time, we had each obviously run out of things to say. We could hardly launch into taxes or Canadian unity there in the schoolyard, and I found myself briefly considering “so I hear you are leader of the opposition now” as a conversational gambit. We stared at the tops of our shoes — something I remember well from my years as a student in England, but which actually doesn’t happen much over here, at least literally. 

I, for one, have no doubt that when he talked on the day of the election call about what being a father meant to him, he was sincere. I also have no doubt that it has been a difficult thing for him personally to serve all this up to us as political fodder, though the politician in him understands this needs to be done. And most of all, I wonder why the rest of us should care — why we demand this of our political leaders?

I can tell you, as many others in the Press Gallery can, that this is a very intelligent, thoughtful man. Of course we have also seen other sides of his personality during his years as prime minister — politically relevant sides of his personality, including his instincts for secrecy and control.

All these are worth considering as we go to vote.

But hasn’t history shown often enough that some great parents prove to be poor leaders and some great leaders are disappointments as parents? So what difference does it make as we consider how to vote?

After all, unlike me, most Canadians won’t even run into him at the PTA.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Majority/minority watch

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

The excellent Democratic Space website, which will launch its ’08 election site tomorrow, already has a set of seat projections up based on a poll of polls from the first half of the week. They give the Tories 146, Liberals 92, NDP 30, BQ 38, Others 2, and Greens a goose egg. A majority is 155.

Of course, the confusing thing is that since mid-week, one well-publicized poll from Harris/Decima suggested the Tories have been trending upward, while the EKOS poll, also released yesterday, had the trend going the other way.

As more polls are published in the coming days, which trend, if either, is correct should become more certain. So-called “rolling polls” blend results for several days, so if there is a trend, it takes a few days to become evident.

Every pollster will defend his or her own numbers as being correct. From a journalistic perspective, it is a good idea to understand something about sample size, methodology, and so on in order to evaluate competing claims. It is also a good idea, when the information seems to be conflicting, to reserve judgment, rather than throw great weight to one poll or another — even when, as sometimes happens, the storyline of one poll is much more interesting than the storyline of another.  

But from the Conservative perspective, as long as the question of majority or minority continues to be a matter of media speculation, it is not a good thing. In the last election, true, the Tories apparently benefitted a little from a “bandwagon” effect in Quebec as their numbers rose and they started to look viable there. However, there is an even more well-established pattern of at least some voters in English Canada pulling back from the Tories when they think they are closing in on a majority. Judging from the Bloc’s campaign, it seems they think that some Quebec voters may be susceptible to the same reflex this time.

P.S. Also take a look at Calgary Grit who explains how he does his “probabalistic” seat projections. 

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

The media and the Green Shift

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

A correction from today’s Globe and Mail:

A chart in yesterday’s newspaper on Stéphane Dion’s carbon-tax plan omitted the proposal to cut income-tax rates, to 13.5 per cent from 15 in the lowest income-tax bracket, and to 21 per cent from 22 and to 25 per cent from 26 in the middle brackets.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

The forgotten war

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Take a look at Chris Cobb’s excellent piece on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen today (which I mention despite not because of the interview it includes with my EKOS colleague, Frank Graves).

In the 2005-6 election campaign, there was virtually no discussion of the Afghanistan mission, although it very quickly became a dominant issue in our politics afterwards — and rightly so, given the Canadian blood and treasure involved. There was not a single question posed on Afghanistan in any of the leaders’ debates in the ’05-’06 election campaign, and, unprompted, the leaders generally gave the issue wide berth. The media, with a few noble exceptions, did little to fill the gap.

Whatever the virtue of the subsequent parliamentary resolution, which the Liberals supported, to pull out of Kandahar in 2011, it had the consequence of removing the issue of our commitment in Afghanistan from debate, at least so far as the government and official opposition were concerned. Stephen Harper’s apparent pledge this week to pull out of Afghanistan entirely in 2001 was clearly aimed not at provoking a fuller discussion but at further dampening the issue.

There is something wrong with our politics, including the role of the media, that we haven’t had the national discussion we should on our role in Afghanistan. Cobb’s piece is an excellent place to start fixing that.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.