We are bombarded with news on a daily basis regarding what is happening with our governments and the journalists and pundits cannot help but make all sorts of claims of how a given event, situation or statement will move the political needle.
We are seeing it with the situation with Donald Trump in the US, the situation with Doug Ford in Ontario and things swirling around the government of Justin Trudeau.
The Liberals are seeing an upswing in their polling according to the public polls and now the pundits are all opining about why.
In all cases I will go out on a limb and state their reasons are wrong. It is not the cooling down of the SNC Lavalin "scandal". It is not the fact women are coming back to the Liberals. It is not any particular reason that the MSM point to. The main reason for their recovery is they are the incumbent government at the end of their first term.
As I have pointed out in this space before first term governments tend to be given the benefit of the doubt during their second election in this country. Sometimes they are given the benefit of the doubt beyond that but for the most part Canadians usually decide to stick with a government for two straight elections before then considering a change.
Stephen Harper, Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris, Dalton McGuinty and many others all benefited from this phenomenon. They all faced serious "scandals" and controversies during their first terms and the media all questioned whether they would be able to pull off another election victory as a result. In the end the results of their second elections were not even close.
The same will probably be true for Mr. Trudeau. That is probably the reason why the Liberals seem to be climbing in the polls. That is also the reason why we have not seen any discomfort from the Liberals this year. They have been the prohibitive favourate to win the election this years since they won in 2015 and probably none of the political minutae that we have been bombarded with will change that.
Unfortunately for progressives in both Ontario and the US this same phenomenon probably means that both Doug Ford and Donald Trump are the favourates to win their next elections.
I know progressives in Ontario are heartened by what is happening to Mr. Ford in Ontario and some are saying that he might not last until the next election. The problem is Mike Harris had similar problems during his first term and he won his second election handily. My guess is Mr. Ford will still be the premier in 2022 and that he will win another majority government, a reduced majority with a strong Liberal Opposition, but a majority government all the same.
The same is true of Mr. Trump. Americans tend to stick with the same President for two elections. There have been a couple of exceptions in the last fifty years but as a rule they stick with him. My guess is the same thing will happen next November, although the Republicans could lose the Senate, fail to regain the House and lose a bunch of governors' houses and state legislatures.
I used to follow every little event in politics but I stopped once I realized just how irrelevant they are in determining the result of elections. It really is just noise with very little meaning or impact.
1 comment:
Progressives in Ontario are heartened more so because Ford's calamitous premiership bodes ill for Scheer. As an aside, part of that "minutiae" is a pollster war playing out on social media. It's interesting to watch, annoying and quite concerning for purposes of strategic voting if the pollsters are digging their heels in ideologically over what constitutes accurate data.
But unless you're a stats junkie, I don't think everyday voters will care that Nik Nanos is having a spat with Eric Grenier, Angus Reid got Frank Graves of EKOS chased off Twitter, and Darrell Bricker of Ipsos has been having his own pissing match with Gerald Butts (that Butts wisely chooses not to engage in).
Most voters probably couldn't identify any of these people in a lineup. Watching the moneyball machine can be nerve-wracking, but I have to keep reminding myself that campaigns matter.
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