Things to come - a new coalition?

It is not evident in polling now - there has yet to be a sharp or marked departure from trends of the past few years. Canadians seem to be in a wait and see mode, but they are deeply worried about the direction of the economy. Inevitably and eventually the public will turn in a clear way against the Harper government. They just haven't done so yet.

Even now the last two Nanos polls suggest a Liberal minority, which could command a bare majority in the House with the support of the NDP were an election on offer. When I average the last two polls and perform a seat calculation this is what I get:

C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc
109	128	29	0	42

The Liberals plus NDP would have 157 seats (a clear majority is 155). The NDP has not been in this potential position of leverage since 1979 (and all it led to was a Bob Rae motion of non-confidence that ended the Joe Clark government). After a disastrous decade in the nineties, the NDP has recovered much lost ground since Jack Layton became leader in 2003, but they have not won enough seats to make them the obvious governing partner for the Liberals. Paul Martin & Layton did a "budget" deal in spring 2005 but that reflected Martin's desperation, and it took the vote of Chuck Cadman and the defection of Linda Stronach to save the government then. The prospects for something quite different are now becoming visible as we see in the numbers above. There is a tendency to believe the future will be like the past - that the NDP plus Liberals in Ottawa somehow can't construct a majority. The radical changes in the economy these past few months should tell everyone that the recent past is certainly no guide to the future.

Obama's Early Days

Despite a few very minor missteps, it is abundantly clear that Obama is doing quite well in his early days in office, culminating in the passage of his stimulus bill. The small 'c' conservative Republican leaning media in Washington has been trying to see his administration as getting into trouble but the public isn't buying it. Take a look at this article in Politico, a Washington newspaper/web site that, because it is steeped in the capital's culture, has a Republican lean to it. In particular, I was struck by the following quotes from the piece, the first of which I saw on Political Wire:

“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me,” said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest....

“I don’t think he’s lost anything in terms of overall job approval or favorability,” said Andy Smith, a pollster at the University of New Hampshire. “That’s just the a perception inside the Beltway that everybody outside Washington pays attention to politics and eats and lives politics the way you guys do down there.”

More support for the Seltzer-Smith view can be gleaned from the details in the polling data contained in this post by Kos on Daily Kos.

Update on Sunday: today's column in the NY Times by Frank Rich reflects the theme of TC's post. Ditto this TPM item today: the Big Disconnect.

The First Test of the Politics of Recession

There are likely to be at least two provincial elections this year, one in Nova Scotia where a minority government is coming up to the end of its third year, the other on the west coast.

The first will likely be in B.C. on May 17. In lotus land the economy of Gordon Campbell is tanking just as the Olympics construction boom is winding down. Despite the downturn the most recent Mustel Poll suggests the BC Liberals have a 14 point lead coinciding with growing concern about the economy. However, this column in the Tyee by former Socred cabinet minister Rafe Mair argues strongly that Liberals are in deep trouble as various "chickens come home to roost". One example he cites:

...just a few weeks after he stated bluntly that we would have a balanced budget in 2009, Premier Campbell was forced to get amendments to his own law requiring a balanced budget so that his government can bring two consecutive massive deficits.

Campbell had to acknowledge this after the poll was taken. Indeed none of these laws, which can be found in many provinces, will prevent deficits in a recession. They are symbolic and will in all cases be ignored the minute a government finds it necessary, but the message will reflect negatively on the governments such as Campbell's that are compelled to break their earlier commitment.

Recessions will force governments to deliver many examples of bad news. This process is only just getting underway.

Stimulus

Here is an excellent brief explanation by Harold Chorney about the role of government in delivering stimulus to a failing economy.

John McCain complained today of Obama's stimulus proposal: "I think it's a massive -- it's much larger than any measure that was taken during the Great Depression..." Um, it was precisely the lack of such measures that made the Great Depression the Great Depression and caused it to last over 10 years. We should all be grateful that he lost.

The Politics of Depression

I was listening yesterday to a panel of Ottawa pundits yakking about the current situation and getting themselves in a tizzy about whether Michael Ignatieff had handled his Newfoundland MPs astutely when he authorized them to vote against the budget.  They really don't get it.

We are in a severe economic downturn (see this employment chart originally from U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi).  The economic crisis will soon begin to dictate political outcomes.  Incumbent governments of all political stripes face defeat.  Polls in Canada since the election suggest that the public remains in these early days in a "wait and see" frame of mind.  This will not last long.  

Historically recessions and depressions cause incumbent governments, particularly at the national level, to lose office:

1.  The Herbert Hoover example is the most obvious but in Canada, Mackenzie King lost in 1930 in part because of the depression just beginning to unfold.  Five years later the same fate befell R. B. Bennett.

2.  The early eighties deep recession contributed to the Mulroney landslide in the 1984 election, when the Liberals were reduced to 40 seats.

3. The early nineties downturn was critical to the PC demolition at the polls in 1993.  The same recession contributed to the defeat of both the Peterson and Rae governments in Ontario in 1990 and '95 and the defeat of the Bourrassa/Johnson government in Quebec in 1994.

It is clear that there will be a series of defeats of incumbent governments in Canada over the next few years.  Gordon Campbell might survive in B.C. as his opponents are the "dreaded socialists", but a national election - likely this fall or perhaps as late as spring 2010 - will make Michael Ignatieff the Prime Minister and the vote on the budget by Liberal Newfoundland MPs will be long forgotten.

The situation in the U.S. is quite different from Canada.  More on that in a future post.

The Grand Coalition

TC is slowly being persuaded that the grand coalition of the Liberals, NDP and Bloc may indeed come to pass.

Seeking to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the arrangement, Harper declared on Friday that the effort was a "backroom deal to overturn the results of the last election". But it is equally valid to see the votes cast for the opposition parties as votes for this accord.

If one adds together just the votes of the NDP and the Liberals from the last election one gets the following outcome:

Coalition: 153

Conservative: 112

BQ: 41

Other: 2

Add in the Greens who have voiced support, and this becomes:

Coalition: 176

Conservative: 89

BQ: 41

Other: 2

Go all the way and throw in the Bloc, and it becomes:

Coalition: 225

Conservative: 82

Other: 1

Seems legitimate enough.

However, the whole enterprise is fraught with peril, not the least being the danger that the Coalition will be blamed for the worst effects of the coming downturn.  Still, it was worth it just to see the look on Stephen Harper's face today in QP.

Obama Wins

One of my favourite moments watching ABC's Monday Night Football back in the seventies would come when Dandy Don Meredith decided the losing team had no chance of winning and he would burst into a chorus of Willie Nelson's "The Party's Over".

Well, it is Willie Nelson time in the U.S. election for John McCain. Chris Bowers, who I regard as cautious about these things, made the case in the blog Open Left today:

Here is why this is over:

1. In order to win the election, all Barack Obama needs are the Kerry states, plus Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico. That adds up to 273 electoral votes.
2. Obama leads by at least 9.5% in every Kerry state and Iowa, according to both Pollster.com and Real Clear Politics. Also, my own numbers concur with those calculations.
3. This means that in order to win the election, all Obama has to do is hold onto states where he leads by 9.5% or more, and win both Colorado and New Mexico. These are both states where more than half of all voters will cast their ballots before Election Day (source). In other words, the elections in Colorado and New Mexico are already almost over, not just beginning. And these are the only two states he needs to win, other than the ones where he leads by double-digits.
4. In Colorado, about 60% of the vote is already in. According to the crosstabs of the three most recent polls in the state, Obama leads early voters by 15% (Rasmussen), 18% (Marist) and 17% (PPP). Even in the best case scenario for McCain, where he only trails by 15% among those who have already voted and only 55% of the vote is in, he still needs to win the remaining voters by 18.4% in order to eek out the state. And that is the best-case scenario. The worst case scenario for McCain--65% of the vote in and an 18% deficit among early voters--is that he needs to win the remaining voters by 33.5% in order to win the election.
   
5. That leaves New Mexico. In 2004, New Mexico had an even higher rate of early voting than Colorado (50.6% to 47.9%). Further, all polling aggregation sites show Obama's lead to be larger in New Mexico than in Colorado. While the recent dearth of polling in the Land of Enchantment means there are no early voting crosstabs, those two facts suggest the situation is even worse for McCain in New Mexico than in Colorado. At the very least, it isn't much better. Update: A new poll from PPP in New Mexico indicates that 56% of the vote is in, and Obama leads 64%-36% among those voters. If that is accurate, McCain would have to win the remaining voters by 35.7%.

So, unless one of the following occurs:

• Obama blows a double-digit lead in either Iowa or one Kerry state
  
• McCain wins the minority of remaining voters in either Colorado or New Mexico by at least 20%

Then the election is over and Obama has won no matter what happens anywhere else.

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The rest is here.

It all makes perfect sense to me.

Blogger tcnorris is still on semi-sabbatical. Can't say when more frequent blogging might resume.