BC Election 2013

[Remius]

So how does this work for Clark? Her BC Liberal party won but she lost the seat in her own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey to an NDP member!

???

What if another BC Liberal MLA doesn't step aside to allow a byelection for her?

Someone always does.  In most cases they get cushy rewards/appointments for moving aside.  I'm sure she likely has a few volunteers that a lining up to move aside.

 

[Old Sweat]

There was a report before the polls closed on election day that a Liberal MLA in a safe riding had already been approached about resigning in the event Premier Clark was not elected. The comment was made to the effect that this was rather ripe as after the drubbing the Liberals were going to take, there would be little appetite in the party to retain her as leader.

Maybe Clark's people knew something the rest of us had missed, or maybe they were just covering all the bases.

 

[daftandbarmy]

It's quiet in Victoria right now.... too quiet. Kind of like after a major storm.

I can see the Legislature from here.

Wait a minute, what's that?

I'm pretty sure those are gibbets being erected outside for all the party unfaithful who tried to stab Christy Clark in the back for the past two years. I'd better go back and read Machiavelli to get a sense of what the next steps might look like.

Pol Pot, look out, you are going to have some competition....  ;D

 

[dapaterson]

It's quiet in Victoria right now.... too quiet. Kind of like after a major storm.

I can see the Legislature from here.

Wait a minute, what's that?

I'm pretty sure those are gibbets being erected outside for all the party unfaithful who tried to stab Christy Clark in the back for the past two years. I'd better go back and read Machiavelli to get a sense of what the next steps might look like.

Pol Pot, look out, you are going to have some competition....  ;D

They still have one tool - what if they can keep anyone from resigning thier seat so she can run in a by-election?

BC Politics have a colourful history - the BC Liberals now have a chance to add to the legacy of Flying Phil & VanderZalm.

 

[RangerRay]

Well, that was a shock!

There are several things that went wrong for the NDP and right for the BC Liberals, but were never reflected in the polls (polls schmolls!).

• Half of the voters said "A pox on all your houses!" and stayed home.  With a choice of corrupt corporatists, Marxists, tree-huggers and bible-thumpers running for office, I would have stayed home too!
• The NDP failed to get more than their usual vote (~40%) and the free-enterprise voters were not impressed with the BC Conservatives
• Ms. Clark ran a very negative campaign against the NDP, but was also very happy and optimistic about the province's future.  Mr. Dix and the NDP ran a positive campaign but failed to respond aggressively to the attacks, in particular Mr. Dix's role in fraudulently back-dating a memo as an advisor to Premier Glen Clark during the Casino/deck scandal
• Mr. Dix talked about tax and spend while Ms. Clark talked about jobs and balanced budget.  It doesn't matter that the debt ballooned under the BC Liberals and BC continues to lose jobs.
• Mr. Dix was very nervous and unsure during the debates.
• The BC Liberals actually encouraged left-leaning voters to vote Green!  While their percentage of the vote from the last election was unchanged, there are about a dozen ridings where the Green vote ensured the anti-Liberal vote was split.  It's ironic considering those most worried about the BC Liberals' record with the environment helped to get them re-elected.
• The NDP failed to get out the vote from those who are not their traditional voters.  Free-enterprisers, scared $h!tless of an NDP government, were motivated to get out and vote Liberal.
• Perhaps the NDP's biggest mistake (aside from electing "dour Stalinist" Adrian Dix as leader instead of someone more personable and moderate like John Horgan or Mike Farnworth) was courting the radical environmentalist vote instead of the moderate centrist vote.  The turning point was when Mr. Dix flip-flopped and said that he would not support a proposed expansion of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline, before an application has even been made.  After that, he became "Dr. No" to all the major proposed industrial projects that would bring jobs to the BC Interior.  While they may have concerns about the environmental cost of these projects, the NDP's outright refusal to approve any project turned off a lot of people in the Interior worried about the economy.  I think a lot of people who told the pollsters they intended to vote NDP were hoping to hear a moderate message, but changed their mind at the last minute when they realised that all they heard was same-old NDP rhetoric.

This list still does not explain how the polls were so wrong.  I'm guessing the change in telecommunications technologies and those who indicated support for the NDP were more likely to stay home on election day (i.e. young people).

I have to say that I am very disappointed that Christy Clark will remain as premier.  She is perhaps the most incompetent person to hold high public office in the history of British Columbia.  Her friends will get rich, the province will become more of a Monopoly board than it has been, the environment will suffer, and criminals will continue to walk because of an over-taxed justice system.  However, an NDP government would have been just as devastating to the economy.  I'm just glad I don't live there right now.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Just to keep things superficial, which is what electioneering is all about really, I like to think of it as a victory of 'cleavage' over 'creep age'.

Dix looks a little too much like some kind of a wax dummy of a paedophile for my liking. Bill Vanderzalm and Glen Clark were both a complete mess, but at least they had lots of charisma.

Now, let's divert our focus back to Toronto to see yet another political side show on the boil. I tell ya, it's a fun time to be a newspaper reader in Canada!

 

[Haletown]

Christy made big gains with women, a group she was not doing well with,  after the media debacle over the red light incident.

All the media ginned up the story with hysterical stories about what happened  . . . She do go through a red light, but at 5:00am, after coming to a full stop and checking for traffic. They reported she "blew through a red light" and then piled on in full media bully boy mode.

The result was a lot of women turned sympathetic to her for the media bullying she was having inflicted on her.

Doesn't matter all that much how she did it.  As long as the BC NDP/BC FED are kept out of a position where they can wreck the economy in the name of union solidarity.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

People have been wondering how the BC Liberals pulled-off their little miracle. Brian Hutchinson from Saturday's National Post explains how they did it. Reprinted under the usual provisions of the Fair Dealings Section of the Copyright Act.

Why the Liberals were able to predict their victory in B.C. while public election polls missed the mark?

Brian Hutchinson | 13/05/18 12:48 AM ET

Late last week, four days before “E-Day,” pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos met senior members of the B.C. Liberal Party’s campaign team, including former MLA and finance minister Colin Hansen.

“We’ve got 48 seats,” Mr. Pantazopoulos told them. Popular support was in their party’s favour, enough to win a fourth consecutive Liberal majority government.

They had information that no one else in the province — aside from their opponents — could have believed, at that point: A B.C. New Democratic Party defeat was looking certain.

Most media, meanwhile, were telling British Columbians something else. Their supposition — an New Democratic Party landslide was coming — was based on public polls, handed to them for free or at a nominal cost. The data on which most newspapers and TV stations relied and which formed conventional wisdom were off the mark.

Members of the Liberal inner circle were taken aback in that meeting with Mr. Pantazopoulos, retained by the party before the election period. Not by the news he was sharing, but the timing. His confident forecast of a Liberal majority came just a bit earlier than expected.

The Liberals knew their election campaign strategies were working. After months of feeling angry and let down, British Columbians were coming back to the Liberal persuasion and to party leader Christy Clark.

The party had a “substantial deficit” in popular support before the campaign’s official start, Mr. Pantazopoulos said this week, after the votes had been counted and his client had won the election by a five-point margin.

“But the numbers had been tightening from the outset [of the campaign], and there was a gradual incline throughout.”

There were two key campaign moments, he said. The first came at the end of week one, when B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix reversed his party’s neutral position on a proposed oil pipeline expansion from Alberta to an existing Vancouver terminus. He said he had changed his mind — but could not say with clarity when — and was now opposed to the Kinder Morgan pipeline twinning project.

“It wasn’t so much the actual position that he took,” said Mr. Pantazopoulos. It was the sudden shift. “It meant to voters that he might be malleable, indecisive.”

The second moment came a week later, on the night of the party leaders’ TV debate.

“We did 500 interviews after it was over,” he added. People seemed impressed with Ms. Clark’s performance and her focused message on B.C.’s economy. She was on the correct path.

Mr. Pantazopoulos met almost daily with party officials in the latter half of the campaign. He was comfortable with his findings because, unlike most others in the business, he had been conducting careful, methodical polling, riding by riding. And he did it daily.

Public polls weren’t nearly as thorough. They missed what he had caught.

Established, reliable companies, such as Angus Reid Public Opinion and Ipsos Reid, conducted online surveys several times during the B.C. campaign and on the day before polls opened this week.

Some analysts think the online method is too selective. I’m not a huge fan of them,” said Mr. Pantazopoulos.

Participants are invited to join scheduled surveys; they may be less representative of the general population than randomly selected respondents in traditional telephone polling.

Angus Reid’s final poll saw the B.C. Liberals trailing the NDP by nine percentage points; Ipsos had them behind by eight. In fact, the Liberals captured 44.4% of the popular vote, the NDP limped home with 39.5%.

Both companies also missed in Alberta last year. And while they certainly weren’t alone in either case, they were defensive, suggesting voters had messed things up.

“The long and the short of it was the NDP voters did not get out and fulfill their promise to vote for the party of their choice,” reads an election post-mortem from Ipsos.

“I don’t think the polls were wrong,” offered Angus Reid in the Globe & Mail.

The National Post, for the record, published the most accurate public polling during the campaign, provided by Forum Research Inc. The Toronto-based firm used “interactive voice recognition” (automated telephone surveys, or IVR) to take B.C.’s pulse.

Results from its second survey, conducted May 8, indicated a “razor-thin” Liberal majority of seats was in the works. In fact, the Liberals took 50 of 85 seats.

“The way public polls are constructed these days — it’s stupid,” said Stephen Carter, a political strategist from Alberta who uses polling, including live agent phone calls, IVR and online survey, extensively for clients. “I have virtually no use for them.”

“The polls you saw in the media started with a broken concept, which is that a single survey of 1,000 people can reflect an entire province or country,” added Mr. Carter, who helped guide Alberta Premier Alison Redford to victory last year over challenger Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Party.

The most accurate forecasts rely on tried and true methods: Frequent telephone surveys, with real people asking respondents questions, in specific ridings.

But these cost a lot of money, which few media companies are willing to spend. “You get f–ked, you get nothing if you don’t pay for it,” said Mr. Carter, who followed the B.C. election campaign closely.

“You have to pay for polls for them to have any value. You have to control and construct them, too. If I was sitting down with editors who were gearing up for the 2015 federal election and they asked me how to use polling, I’d say, ‘Stop. Let’s try something brand new. Let’s pick some bellwether ridings, where the outcomes aren’t obvious, and let’s poll there.’”

That’s exactly what Mr. Pantazopoulos did for his B.C. Liberal Party client. The Liberals knew they had some ridings in the bag; others — on Vancouver Island, for example — were almost certainly lost.

Mr. Pantazopoulos says he focused on ridings that were actually in play, “those areas that could have gone one way or the other.”

And he wasn’t after voter intention numbers only. His survey team gathered responses to specific issues and fed those to Liberal party headquarters. Riding candidates were made aware of key subjects to raise when out door-knocking. And volunteers were apprised and prepared to deliver Liberal voters to the polls on election day.

The NDP had its own internal polling, of course. The results would have shown a tightening race and would explain why Mr. Dix toughened his messages in the last days of the election campaign, finally taking some shots at Ms. Clark and the B.C. Liberal Party’s record in government.

The NDP did not share its internal polling figures. To the end, voters were under the impression that Ms. Clark’s opposition had the election sewn up.

Complacency likely did play a role in the NDP defeat, says Mr. Carter. The bottom line, he says, is “if it looks like you’re going to win in a landslide, you probably won’t.”

National Post

Article Link

 

[Brad Sallows]

That doesn't seem dramatically different from what Nate Silver does - set aside the jurisdictions deemed "safe", and concentrate on measuring the competitive ones.  A legislative body is the result of many small election totals, not one large one.

 

[Edward Campbell]

There was a report before the polls closed on election day that a Liberal MLA in a safe riding had already been approached about resigning in the event Premier Clark was not elected. The comment was made to the effect that this was rather ripe as after the drubbing the Liberals were going to take, there would be little appetite in the party to retain her as leader.

Maybe Clark's people knew something the rest of us had missed, or maybe they were just covering all the bases.

According to and article in the Globe and Mail, "Premier Christy Clark is expected to announce shortly that she will be seeking a seat in the B.C. legislature in the riding of Westside-Kelowna, which was captured by B.C. Liberal MLA Ben Stewart in the May 14 election ... The by-election call is likely to be announced at a news conference with Ms. Clark and Mr. Stewart at his Quail’s Gate Winery on Wednesday afternoon."

Apparently it is a strong Liberal seat, it used to be WAC Bennett's home turf; there is no indication what nice fate awaits Mr. Stewart.

 

[GAP]

Apparently it is a strong Liberal seat, it used to be WAC Bennett's home turf; there is no indication what nice fate awaits Mr. Stewart.

so much PORK.....I think the trough will fit Mr. Stewart nicely.....

 

[Rifleman62]

My riding. Quail's Gate Winery is two miles down the road.

Very Interesting!

 

[RangerRay]

A fence post with hair could run in Westside-Kelowna for the BC Liberals and still win.

The only way Premier Clark will lose is if a very well known and strong conservative or independent candidate runs against her.  The NDP or the Greens have absolutely no chance of winning here.

 

[a_majoor]

An analysis of how the BC Liberals won (despite negative polls, a history of scandal and other negative factors). Interesting lessons learned (long article, 2 parts):

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/anatomy-of-a-comeback-how-christy-clark-beat-the-odds/article12754587/?page=all

Anatomy of a comeback: How Christy Clark beat the odds

GARY MASON

VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail

Six days before British Columbians cast their votes last month, Dimitri Pantazopoulos made a prediction that astonished his colleagues in the Liberal Party’s campaign war room.

As the party’s pollster, he was known for nightly reports that were optimistic but not overly specific. The joke was that he could speak for five minutes and say nothing.

More Related to this Story

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But this time Rich Coleman, campaign co-chair and veritable godfather of the party, wanted a number.

The answer he received: “Right now, I see 48.”

The room grew quiet, as the many doubters cast steely glances at the 45-year-old Mr. Pantazopoulos. There are 85 seats in B.C., so he had just predicted something they found difficult to believe: a clear majority.

By the eve of the election, their skepticism was keeping him up until midnight, going over his data in an attempt to see where he might have gone wrong.

“I couldn’t find anything,” he recalls. “I was either going to look like a genius or misfire in spectacular fashion.”

There was no misfire. The following night, the leader of the Liberals took the stage at the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver to give an acceptance speech that wasn’t supposed to be.

As the music died, she leaned toward the microphone and said: “Well, that was easy.”

A great roar went up because, throughout the campaign, opinion polls had her well behind the New Democrats of Adrian Dix. After 12 years in office, her party appeared to face certain defeat.

Instead, she one-upped her pollster by taking 49 seats in arguably the greatest political comeback in B.C. history.

How? Good political campaigns have staple ingredients, while strategy – how the staples are used – is a secretive science whose practitioners can be notoriously tight-lipped.

But some of the insiders who know just what went on have agreed to share their insights on the resurrection of Christy Clark.

It is a feat that, as well as being of national significance (it keeps a key ally of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in office), will be studied by political organizers for many years to come.

1. Wise man from the East

The first step on the road to victory came six months before election day, and thousands of kilometres away, in Three Small Rooms, the famed restaurant at Toronto’s Windsor Arms Hotel.

A quiet refuge for high-profile players, it was perfect for two political leaders to have a discreet rendezvous. In town to visit an ailing friend, Ms. Clark had asked Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty if he were free for coffee.

A month earlier, he had announced that he was leaving his office – she wanted his help in hanging on to hers. He had led four election campaigns and she, having become premier in mid-term, was facing her first.

They talked for 90 minutes, she recalls, and “Dalton gave me three critically important pieces of advice. ‘When you get off that bus every day remember everything is on your shoulders,’ he said. ‘In that moment you have to be perfect in communicating what it is you’re trying to do.’”

He also said to have someone on her bus whose advice she could trust completely and, probably the easiest advice for her to follow, told her: “Christy, you have a great smile. Don’t forget to have a good time, because people can tell if you enjoy talking to them. Smile as much as you can.”

Yet, words of wisdom aren’t all she received from Mr. McGuinty.

The battle squad assembled by Mike McDonald, her campaign director and long-time friend, included Don Guy, the brilliant political strategist behind many come-from-behind McGuinty victories, and Laura Miller who, as deputy chief of staff, had handled communications and strategy for the Ontario premier.

Another veteran of Queen’s Park, Ben Chin, had left broadcast journalism to work for Mr. McGuinty and came west as communications adviser to Ms. Clark.

The confidant for her bus she found closer to home: Brad Bennett, a scion of perhaps B.C.’s most famous political family. His father and grandfather – premiers Bill and W.A.C. Bennett – ran B.C. for more than three decades combined. A successful real-estate developer in the Okanagan Valley, he has been often asked to enter politics, but agreeing to hit the road with Ms. Clark is as close as he has come.

Also part of the inner circle, Mr. Pantazopoulos had served as the Premier’s principal secretary after coming from the federal Conservatives (not unusual for B.C. whose free-enterprise Liberals inherited many conservative-minded backers of the old Social Credit party of the Bennetts).

The outsized presence of Bob Rennie, the high-profile Vancouver condo marketer and international art collector, could also be felt in the war room. In his trademark dark suit and Converse sneakers, he helped to raise millions for the campaign, but offered moral support as well (as the Premier took to the stage on election night, he whispered in her ear: “Just be you.”)

By the time Ms. Clark returned from meeting Mr. McGuinty, the Liberal campaign strategy had begun to take shape. The goal was to persuade an electorate unimpressed by her uneven track record over two years in office that the Premier was better than she was being portrayed.

A month earlier, she’d had a good start with an upbeat party convention, which Mr. Rennie later admitted was critical to an election fundraiser he was planning. Had she bombed, he would have called it off instead of bringing in $2-million.

The convention also helped her attract several prominent candidates, including paralympic gold medalist Michelle Stilwell. Political commentators had suggested that dreadful polling numbers and her often bumpy time in office would scare away credible contenders. Proving them wrong was a sign of her estimable powers of persuasion, which would come in very handy once the race was on. By then they also had a campaign theme, which Mr. Pantazopoulos had left his post as Ms. Clark’s principal secretary to help identify.

“It was important for us to understand what our strengths and vulnerabilities were with voters,” he now says, “but also what the NDP’s strengths and vulnerabilities were – and how we could take advantage of them.”

The polling and focus groups he conducted across the province pointed the Liberals toward the economy: Even though the provincial debt had expanded on their watch, the issue still played to their perceived strength and the underlying weakness of any social democratic party.

2. Paternal inspiration

While Liberal strategists were certain of the election’s key issue, they still didn’t have an over-arching narrative – a campaign message that would connect with voters emotionally.

By late February, Mr. Guy, 48, had arrived from Ontario. About to speak at a “campaign college” for Liberal candidates, Ms. Clark consulted him and Mike McDonald about what to say.

“Say what you want this campaign to be about,” Mr. Guy recalls saying, “because, at the end of the day, what we’re running on is your leadership, your vision and your conviction. We can turn that into the message.”

On Feb. 26, in the same ballroom where she would give her election night victory address, Ms. Clark gave one of her best speeches – without notes, just speaking from her heart. She talked about the opportunity the province had to reap the riches from liquefied natural gas and leave future generations better off. She mentioned her deceased parents, Jim and Mavis, and her middle-class upbringing with three siblings in a modest, three-bedroom home near Oakalla prison in suburban Burnaby.

She told the crowd how her father not only made sure the family home was mortgage-free and all his debts paid off before he died but even pre-paid his funeral expenses. Surrounded by candidates, she had party organizers in the crowd enthralled.

“The speech kind of came out of nowhere and lit the room on fire,” Mr. Guy says. “I remember listening and thinking: ‘That’s it. I think we’ve got it.’”

That message was simple: Don’t spend what you don’t have; don’t burden future generations with debt; leave the world better off for your kids than what you had.

Joined by Don Millar, their resident advertising guru, the Liberal brain trust parsed the speech for talking points and potential slogans, coming up with “Strong economy, secure tomorrow,” the main campaign credo.

They also decided to channel Ms. Clark’s father for a campaign catch phrase: Debt Free B.C. Several were tested in focus groups, but that one “resonated with people as an aspiration,” Mr. Pantazopoulos says. “There’s some skepticism for sure, but at least you’re trying to get there.”

With their slogans in place, attention was turned to the half-hour TV commercial Mr. McDonald wanted to produce to erase memories of Ms. Clark’s previous shortcomings and present her in a new light. He knew that, as a former radio talk-show host, she was at her best with regular folks discussing everyday life.

Mr. Pantazopolous was not sold on the idea – $100,000-plus was a lot of money and he suspected few viewers would sit through 30 minutes of a politician talking. But he underestimated the creative magic of Mr. Millar, who had filmed Ms. Clark the previous year at a small-town Canada Day celebration where she served pancakes and square-danced with seniors. On the way home, he and his creative partner, Eric Hogan, had gushed about what they had. It would form the basis of the ad; writing a script to fit the pictures and the economic message would be easy.

The commercial aired on April 14 – two days before the campaign kickoff. “We knew the electorate was volatile – the TV special was our reset button, our chance to reintroduce Christy,” says Mr. McDonald, 44. “It was incredibly well received, and we had ... some solid momentum heading into the campaign.”

On the morning the race was to begin, Mr. Dix paid a surprise visit to Vancouver-Point Grey, sending a clear message that he was intent on taking the key riding, which includes the University of British Columbia and neighbouring Kitsilano – and which Ms. Clark had won by only 500 votes in a 2011 by-election after becoming party leader.

A Liberal stronghold it was not, and the war room was irate. “He went to her riding to kick her in the face before she’d even gone to see the lieutenant-governor,” says Neil Sweeney, a senior policy adviser. “It spoke to the arrogance of their campaign.”

And the Liberals had a weapon: controversial comments about aboriginals and francophones an NDP candidate had posted to a blog a few years before.

“We decided to drop the ‘candidate bomb’ ... because of what Dix did when he visited Point Grey,” Mr. Sweeney says. “That was a sign from us to them that we were not going to take this lying down, that they’d better be prepared. I don’t think they ever woke up to that, to be honest.”

Even later, when a Liberal TV ad mentioned his infamous “memo-to-file” imbroglio (in 1999, as chief of staff to NDP premier Glen Clark, he forged a memo to shield his boss from a conflict-of-interest accusation), Mr. Dix was upset at what he considered a personal attack.

“It was naive for the NDP to think we wouldn’t bring it up,” Mr. McDonald argues. “But the memo wasn’t the defining issue of the campaign – it was the economy.”

In any event, as a smiling Christy Clark visited the lieutenant-governor later that day to launch the race, Adrian Dix was having to fire his candidate. The Liberals had taken an early advantage.

3. The problem with polls

The party’s internal numbers were never as grim as those from big-name pollsters such as Ipsos-Reid and Angus Reid. Mr. McDonald says that, even in February, the Liberals were only 10 points behind the NDP – about half the gap others suggested.

Then a memo outlining a cynical strategy to woo ethnic voters was linked to staff in Ms. Clark’s office and cost some momentum coming off the provincial budget released that month, but by April the gap was closing again.

Heading into the election, Mr. Pantazopoulos estimated that the Liberals were down 13 points, not the 19 cited by Ipsos. The plan was to focus on 59 ridings (29 of them considered good bets) – the only ones in which the Liberals did any polling before and during the campaign.

From the beginning, the goal was to put Ms. Clark into as many of those ridings as possible – and into places where she could best discuss jobs and the importance of sound fiscal management. Organizers sought industrial venues where she emerged in hard hat, safety glasses and work boots (a set was custom-ordered to fit perfectly, including coveralls with her name across the front).

To no-one’s surprise, she made an early visit to northeast B.C., where she could talk about her plan to exploit the region’s natural gas, which she estimated could be worth more than a trillion dollars and help to make B.C. debt-free in 15 to 20 years.

The party also went to the expense of hiring a satellite-transmission truck so television reporters could get their footage out more easily from remote parts of the province.

“Pictures were extremely important,” Mr. McDonald says. “We had a candidate who looked great. We wanted to take advantage of that.” Mr. Sweeney says the Liberals also were better at marrying their message to the pictures. “If you looked at the 6 o’clock news, we were annihilating them every night.”

One early campaign stop was Burns Lake, a remote community northwest of Prince George that a year earlier had lost its sawmill in a fire. It is small and out of the way, but Ms. Clark had personal reasons for going: Her visit to the town just after the fire had been one of her tougher moments as Premier, says communications adviser Ben Chin.

“She tells the story of walking into the community centre and having everyone just looking at her,” he explains. “Without saying a word, their eyes said: ‘What are you going to do for me?’

“The whole town depends on this mill. She couldn’t promise the mill would reopen because she didn’t know.”

The government assured the U.S.-based owners they would have a ready supply of timber, so the mill is being rebuilt. Watching his boss speak at the ground-breaking ceremony, says Mr. Chin, 49, brought tears to his eyes. “That’s when I knew I was working for the right person.”

Meanwhile, the NDP was behaving as though the election were a foregone conclusion. It also had a very different take on the economy, and spent the first 10 days of the campaign laying out a platform that would include deficits the first three years of its mandate and hundreds of millions in spending promises.

This was just what the Clark team had been waiting for.

The Liberals had released their platform before the campaign, praying the NDP would angle for sustained media coverage by unveiling its program over the first week or so. This would allow them to create the image of a party willing to rack up bills with no real plan to pay them.

“It just made that out-of-control spending dynamic that we were trying to reinforce that much more powerful, and frankly easier,” Mr. Guy says. “It played right into our hands.”

To track the spending spree (and drive home the point), the Liberals erected the Spend-o-Meter, a grandiose electronic billboard, in a prominent location south of Vancouver.

Then came the coup de grâce.

 

[a_majoor]

Part 2:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/anatomy-of-a-comeback-how-christy-clark-beat-the-odds/article12754587/?page=all

4. ‘Kinder surprise’

The NDP campaign was in Kamloops on Monday, April 22. It was Earth Day, and Adrian Dix decided to commemorate the annual show of support for environmental protection by making a surprising announcement.

If elected, he declared, the NDP would thwart a proposed expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline carrying Alberta crude oil to suburban Vancouver.

Mr. Dix had already stated his opposition to Northern Gateway, the controversial new pipeline being planned, but had taken a different view with Kinder Morgan. He had said that, as a matter of principle, he would wait to see the company’s complete proposal before taking a position.

Now he was reversing course, saying he had decided in January he was opposed – a view not shared with his NDP colleagues, many of whom were stunned.

Initial reaction from the Liberals was muted. “We were confused at first,” Neil Sweeney recalls. “We couldn’t believe that he just woke up that day and decided to make that move ... We were trying to figure out why he did it, what was in it for them. Eventually, however, it occurred to us the gift that he’d given us.”

It was a defining moment in the campaign, and presented many opportunities: The ad hoc nature of the announcement dovetailed nicely with Liberal criticism of Dix policies as haphazard and ill-conceived. It also undermined Mr. Dix’s contention that he was principled and could be trusted not to make decisions for purely political gain.

Perhaps most important of all, Liberals could say the move showed how little the NDP cared about economic development.

It also showed how little they had learned from the past.

Brad Bennett recalls that, 30 years ago, his Social Credit father was well behind challenger Dave Barrett heading into the backstretch of a campaign. But then the NDP leader announced he would abandon the economic-restraint program his rival had introduced to deal with a recession plaguing the province.

“That was the Kinder moment of 1983,” Mr. Bennett says. “We jumped all over it.”

Four days after the “Kinder Surprise,” party leaders squared off in a radio debate. Within minutes, Mr. Dix realized the ammunition he had handed Ms. Clark.

“She got up inside his chest,” Mr. Guy says, and it seemed to have a lasting impact. “I think he was upset that he got rattled, and consequently he was too hot in the TV debate three days later.”

Don Millar was in charge of preparations for the TV debate, which he viewed as a “positive communications opportunity” for Ms. Clark, a chance to talk directly to voters.

“We form instantaneous judgments about the people with whom we’re dealing; television elevates that,” he says. “You have to be cool. People don’t want to be yelled at in their living rooms.

“At the same time, people can sense a level of sincerity. That’s where Christy scored big points, in the way she connected with, what, 1.4 million viewers.”

Kinder Morgan came up but didn’t dominate the debate, which many commentators felt Mr. Dix narrowly won, based on content, although Ms. Clark looked most like a premier.

“I think there was an expectation that perhaps she wouldn’t be that swift and would be eaten alive by this guy who was a policy wonk. And she not only held her own, she gained ground,” Mr. Pantazopoulos says.

“In terms of male voters 55 and older, our support soared,” Mr. McDonald recalls. “Sure, the NDP had us in terms of voters 16 to 34, but that didn’t reflect turnout reality. Typically, a lot of people in that age group don’t vote.”

Even women, who had been an elusive target for Ms. Clark, started moving her way. Internal polling showed a rise of seven points among women and 10 points for voters 55 and older.

5. The tide turns

Heading into the weekend following the TV debate, the war room was a jumble of excited energy. The Liberals figured 30 of their target seats were so solid, they didn’t bother tracking them any longer, and focused on the remaining 29. They, too, seemed promising, but Mr. McDonald worried that public polls still showed the party well behind.

He even considered joining the campaign tour himself “to demonstrate how we could win,” and prepared by drafting notes. Under the heading “NDP mistakes,” he wrote: “Running a strategy to impress elites – media, business, labour but not really speaking to voters,” and “Not touring. Bubble wrap. He’s not tested. Lulled into complacency by poll numbers.”

Next, the Liberals unveiled their version of an advertisement that has been used in U.S. elections to portray a rival as indecisive and untrustworthy.

The 30-second spot shows Mr. Dix’s head atop a weathervane that changes direction with each blast of wind as a storm erupts in the background. The message appears only at the end: “weak leadership, weak economy.”

“We went into focus groups with the ad and the people were really intrigued,” Don Millar says. “They found it very entertaining and thought-provoking. There were no words which allowed people to crystallize their own thoughts – way more powerful than telling them what to think.”

Eric Hogan saw how the focus group reacted and declared: “This is a knockout punch.”

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Ms. Clark was a machine. She had her organizers carve out 60 minutes every day for a workout, which she felt would give her more energy. As she was stumping in as many as seven places a day, Mr. Dix sometimes made only two or three stops.

She says she didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for all 28 days of the campaign, both to conserve strength and as a sign of discipline. She also hammered the same message every day, which Mr. Dix admits he failed to do.

It was Don Guy’s task to ensure she didn’t get bored and deviate from the central theme – “It’s about the economy” – posted on the war-room wall. “Every day a new set of voters pays attention for the first time,” he says. “And Christy totally embraced that. I don’t think I ever saw anyone have a better time campaigning.”

On the bus, Brad Bennett turned out to be an important sounding board. He would listen to Ms. Clark’s pitch at stop after stop, and look for signs in the crowd of what was resonating and what was not. If required, the message was tweaked.

Every morning on the road began with a call to the war room to discuss the day ahead – and the day before. “I’d start the meeting by asking: ‘Did we win the day?’” Ms. Clark says. “And most of the time, they’d say: ‘Yes, we won the day.’ And then I’d say: ‘And tomorrow we’re waking up and the score is 0-0.’”

She never asked for daily poll numbers, but good news on that front usually got to her. Dimitri Pantazopoulos lived for those numbers. His day typically started with a 4:30 a.m. review of the overnight tracking numbers.

As each day passed, those numbers told a story quite contrary to that of the big-name public pollsters. The disparity between his phone surveys and theirs done on the Internet caused him many sleepless nights, especially in the closing days of the campaign.

“Ipsos is a $100-million-plus company, Angus Reid is the grandfather of polling in Canada,” he says. “I’m not that arrogant to think I’m right and everybody else is wrong. But then you look at the data and say: Either they’re making a systemic error or I am.”

By the end his numbers were so good that two days before the vote, Mike McDonald sent an update to campaign directors across the province, a four-page memo entitled The Road to Victory that set out why the party could win – and called on them to get out the vote.

On the last day, Ms. Clark made nine appearances, while Mr. Dix – alerted to the danger by his own polls and what his candidates were hearing – made a desperate, 24-hour mad dash around the province. It was too little, too late. He had simply been outworked and out-strategized.

The next night, the Premier and her team assembled in two sprawling suites at the Sheraton. Although confident, she knew that crazy things happen in politics, especially in B.C.

But within an hour of the polls’ closing, the outcome was obvious. At 9:05 p.m., CTV-BC called a Liberal win and soon afterward a Liberal majority.

Other networks didn’t make a call until much later, as if they didn’t believe what they were seeing.

Up in her room, Christy Clark sat in jeans and a T-shirt watching the returns with Hamish, her 11-year-old son, and ex-husband Mark Marissen, a highly regarded political strategist who had helped on the campaign. The smile never left her face.

After a congratulatory call from Mr. Dix, she prepared to head downstairs for her speech. But first she told her son he could miss school in the morning.

“No way,” Hamish replied. “I’m going, so I can tell all those boys who were making fun of me, saying you were going to lose, that they were wrong.

“You won, Mom. You won.”