— Musings —10.19.2010 08:15 AM
Power and Politics, Oct. 18: Libs are ready to govern
Monte reacts as I remind him that Liberals are going to kick his party’s ass.
— Musings —10.19.2010 08:15 AM
Monte reacts as I remind him that Liberals are going to kick his party’s ass.
Monte’s looking good, isn’t he?… prosperous, and buff. His stylist should be commended. I didn’t really pay attention to whatever he was saying, because, ah, well… blondes… you know.
But the optics are definitely that he no longer has to work for a living (did he serve long enough for the pension?), whereas, you, you poor schlub, apparently do.
You have no idea.
The video: http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Politics/1244504890/ID=1618700846
I am not surprised that the former “natural governing party” thinks that it is ready to govern. There is just one problem. The voting public doesn’t seem to agree. Based on the polls since the last election, your headline could be described as “wishin and hopin and thinkin and prayin plannin and dreamin each night…” Lyrics by Hal David
If you notionally add the NDP and Liberal vote in each riding, to form a notional “coalesced” party, then recalculate the winner in each riding assuming no other voter migrations at all, then that notional party gets 153 seats to the CPC’s 112 and the BQ’s 41.
That’s two seats short of a majority, without a single BQ vote.
I don’t know anything about any “plan”. You contemplated a marger of parties that aren’t the Conservatives, and I played along with your thought-experiment, cleverly changing just one variable for the purposes of further elaboration of the idea.
And I agree that the sum would be less than the parts. After all, you saw, and continue to see, the same thing with the “merger” of the former PC and Reform parties.
In seven out of ten provinces, the One Big Happy Conservative Party of Stephen Harper failed to get a larger vote share in 2008, than the two seperate, supposedly right-wing parties combined got in any election between 1993 and 2000 inclusive.
In BC, Alberta, NB, NS, and PEI, the “united right” has never, in three post-merger elections, had as large a vote share as the two former parties combined, and they only managed to do so once in QC and NL, both in 2006.
In fact, there is no province where the Combined Happy Cheery Harper Tories have exceeded the combined PC-Ref/CA high-water mark, from the years of the supposedly divided right, in more than one post-merger election. In NS and NL, the “merged” party actually saw the lowest “right-wing” vote of the past six elections in 2008, although there were, to be sure, unusual extenuating circumstances.
WJM,
How vindicated I feel for having voted against the merger.
Warren,
Nothing so delights in politics as watching someone failing to expect the unexpected!