OK, people, with a provincial election expected next year, we are entering the season of polls and rumours of polls, and the results are so far, shall we say, murky.
At least three pollsters have been in the field in Alberta in the past few weeks.
Angus Reid Institute was busy polling from March 11 to 17 with an online sample of 434 adults resident in Alberta. ARI doesn’t appear to have measured voter intention in this poll, or if they did, judging from their online report, they didn’t tell us about it. Weird.
They did measure leader popularity, and according to ARI, NDP Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi with 33-per-cent support seriously lags Premier Danielle Smith with 46 per cent. “Both, notably, are viewed negatively by a majority,” the ARI analysis of its results said – 53 per cent disapproval for Mr. Nenshi and 52 per cent for Ms. Smith.
At the same time, ARI said, “more Albertans believe the province is overall on the wrong track (52 per cent) than the right one (38 per cent).” Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party owns that, presumably, although they can always try to blame Justin Trudeau, and probably will.
Pollara Strategic Insights used an online sample of 3,200 adult Albertans “recruited from a mix of the Leger and Dynata online research panels.” It was in the field from March 16 to 25, overlapping ARI’s survey by a couple of days.
Decided voter intention in this poll put the UCP at 49 per cent and the Alberta NDP at 42 per cent, with 9 per cent claiming they’d vote for someone else. But Pollara’s regional breakdown was significant: In Edmonton, it said, the NDP polled at 53 per cent, compared to 38 per cent for the UCP. In Calgary the NDP also led, although more narrowly, 48 per cent to 42 per cent. UCP support was in the lead everywhere else, 55 per cent to 33 per cent in the rest of the province.
Pollara tried to measure public sentiment about political figures, resulting in a confusing chart that suggests a lot more Albertans can’t stand Ms. Smith than can’t stand Mr. Nenshi, It’s on page 6 of the firm’s summary, so you can look for yourselves and see if you can figure it out.
Pollara also focused on sentiment in favour of Alberta separatism in its summary, saying, “27 per cent of decided voters in Alberta would vote to separate, a record-high over the five years Pollara has been tracking this.” This figure is very hard to believe, but its not inconsistent with earlier polls. It speaks, it is said here, to the power of misinformation and disinformation.
“While provincial NDP and federal Liberal/NDP voters are overwhelmingly against separatism (96%+ would vote to remain), provincial UCP and federal Conservatives voters are split,” Pollara added in its key findings.
Léger asked its online panel of 1,003 Albertans questions from April 3 to 6 – that is, over the Easter holiday weekend – which is, in your blogger’s opinion for what it’s worth, also weird. Its results were similar to ARI’s, but it did estimate voter intentions. To wit, that support for the UCP among decided voters was at 53 per cent, compared to 36 per cent for the NDP.
As for the two parties’ leaders, Léger said, its results showed Premier Smith ahead with support of 46 per cent compared to 35 per cent for Mr. Nenshi, with Mr. Nenshi moreover on a downward path and Ms. Smith trending upward from previous surveys.
“The public mood remains uneasy,” said Léger’s analysis of its results. Fifty-six per cent of respondents told the pollster they thought the province is on “the wrong track.”Only 37 per cent it was moving in “the right direction.”
Two other polls are widely rumoured to have been carried out in the same period, both said by people who have seen them to have a regional breakdown similar to the March 16-25 Pollara sample. However, they are done for private clients and are not accessible to we of the hoi polloi.
So what does this all mean? Well, not much at this point, I’d suggest, but maybe a couple of things.
If Albertans don’t like what the UCP is doing but still favour Ms. Smith over Mr. Nenshi by a significant margin, the obvious conclusion is that the biggest problem faced by the NDP right now is its leader.
Will that stir up a rebellion in the NDP ranks? Well, anything could happen if sitting MLAs start to worry about their job security, but it seems likely that the NDP is stuck with Mr. Nenshi through the next election.
Moreover, Pollara’s results don’t exactly indicate that Ms. Smith, her ability to gaslight her way out of any corner notwithstanding, is a coruscating advantage for her party either.
As for the regional breakdown in Pollara’s results, that suggests the temptation will be very strong for the UCP to use its majority in the Legislature to impose a Texas-style gerrymander on Alberta and cheat its way to a semi-permanent majority worthy of the soon-to-depart Hungarian premier, Viktor-Orbán.
I am inclined to think, by the way, that ARI’s analysis wandered into the weeds when it tried to suggest the choice of Avi Lewis, an actual committed social democrat, as leader of the federal NDP “will be a challenge” for Mr. Nenshi.
That could be, but it’s an opinion, not analysis, since Mr. Lewis’s leadership victory was announced on March 29, well after ARI was in the field. Moreover, Pollara’s analysis suggests that, UCP screeching notwithstanding, very few Albertans have much of an impression of what Mr. Lewis stands for.
It’s likely Mr. Nenshi’s image problem has more to do with his unwillingness to advocate clear policy changes than any policy ideas Mr. Lewis might come up with.
Indeed, if any of Mr. Lewis’s supposedly radical policy suggestions gain traction Zoran Mamdani style, it’s as likely to motivate Alberta voters who can’t tell the difference between the federal and provincial NDP as it is to discourage them.
It’s said here it doesn’t really help for the NDP to be afraid to advocate potentially popular policies that contrast with the UCP’s economic mismanagement for fear that someone, somewhere might criticize them. The UCP is going to attack the NDP as crazy radicals no matter what they do.
Nevertheless, cautiously refusing to offer positive policy choices that the UCP base might hate appears to be Mr. Nenshi’s inclination anyway. In truth, though, this was deeply ingrained in the Alberta NDP long before the former Calgary mayor came along offering to do what Rachel Notley couldn’t and bring Calgary into the Orange camp.
The fact is, the Alberta NDP never recovered from the Notley government’s Bill 6 fiasco in 2016, a self-inflicted would that haunts it still.