Indecisve Quebec Campaign Continues

A new Léger poll out today is more favourable to Jean Charest's PLQ. It would deliver 57 seats to Charest, a Liberal minority rather than the CROP poll's PQ minority but continuing evidence of an indecisive outcome.

Growing number of American liberals

I missed this Pew survey when it was first released in October 2006. But its findings are quite intriguing. Among self-identified Democrats, as recently as 2002 as many Democrats considered themselves conservatives as liberals. Since then there has been a significant increase in the share of liberals. While overall ideological trends appear stable, as I noted in an earlier post, there is other research that reports a strong increase in support for the Democrats.

A key ambiguity in the survey is that is uses the designation "moderate" to capture those in the middle. One problem with this is that the word "liberal" has been demonized for a number of years in popular and media discourse. My guess is that if one parsed the moderates, one would find that, in substance, more are really liberal than conservative, both among Democrats and among the population as a whole. This would account, for example, why overall there has been an even partisan division within the U.S. for the past number of years despite a nominal advantage for conservatives. The trend at the moment is to a Democratic advantage.

Quebec Election - PQ Starts Ahead

This election looks like a classic set-up for the third party: there is a relatively unpopular Premier and administration (only 42% say they are satisfied with the Charest government) and an even more unpopular leader of the Parti québecois – André Boisclair. The third party, the ADQ, is led by Mario Dumont, who according to this CROP poll is the preferred leader when respondents are asked who they would want to babysit their children or with whom they would want to spend an evening. (Charest leads when the question is who would make the best Premier.)

But I don’t think the ADQ can win. The PQ remains well ahead among francophones and the PLQ dominates the anglo-allo vote (see detailed chart here). The ADQ has only 3% among Anglophone voters who don’t trust Dumont for his support of the YES side in the 1995 referendum, and is five points behind the Liberals among francophone voters. However, the party has made itself as a force to be reckoned with by appealing to more rural, conservative voters, essentially the old Union Nationale base. This may have helped entrench the ADQ but it also prevents it from succeeding overall in a province that is well to the left of it ideologically, among both anglophones and francophones.

So the story is more complicated, but there are reasons for Quebec voters to find the ADQ as less than satisfactory.

What we are likely to see therefore is an indecisive result, most likely a minority government, which Quebec has not had in the modern era of politics.

If one applies this week’s CROP to my model, I get the following outcome:

Party Seats
PLQ 52
PQ 60
ADQ 12
QS 1
Others 0

So this campaign starts off with André Boisclair leading in terms of seats but with less than a majority. The lack of confidence in the alternatives also makes it more likely that the campaign could matter a great deal.

Harper's Character

I think Aislin gets it right.

New Strategic Counsel Poll

Aside from allowing the Conservatives to cue their poll questions, the problem with all this leadership focused polling by the media (such as the Globe poll by Strategic Counsel) is that it is misleading. Leadership preferences tend to follow partisan switches not lead them. This Paul Wells post nails it.

Indeed, Joe Clark in 1979, Jean Chrétien in 1993 and Dalton McGuinty in 2003 were all deemed less popular than their opponents at the outset of their campaigns but won anyway.

In fact, I can't believe that most Canadians have any firm view of Dion who has held his position less than three months. Quebeckers perhaps but not English Canadians. This entire discussion amongst the pundit class strikes me as a classic case of Ottawa Rideau fever.

The Liberals have real liabilities going into the campaign - organization, money (meaning an ability to respond in kind to the Tory ads), division on issues (Afghanistan, extending the anti-terrorism law, etc.) but so-called weak leadership impressions at this stage aren't among them.

Leading Indicator of 2008 U.S. Election

One of the leading analysts of American politics is Charlie Cook. He began to sense weakness in the Bush administration and the Republican Congress long before the 2006 election.

Now his analysis of recent Gallup polls, pinpoints a strong shift to the Democrats underway. Gallup has been asking in all its polls with which party a respondent identifies. Because they have an annual sample of about 30,000 the margin of error is about ± 0.5%. The trend has been shifting the Democrats way for a number of years. I often read, however, about the increasing tendency, especially with younger voters, to call themselves independent. Gallup has been probing these independents for 15 years to see if they lean to the Democrats or the Republicans.

As Cook puts it about Gallup's new numbers in his latest column:

...the real jaw dropper is when independents are asked which party they lean toward. This is important because historically, independents who lean toward a party tend to vote almost as consistently for that party as those who identify themselves with the party. There are just some people who like to call themselves independents but, functionally speaking, are really partisans.

In this category of leaners, Democrats had an advantage of 1.3 points in 2001. The parties were within the margin of error in 2002, when four-tenths of a point separated them and in 2003, when there was just a one-tenth of a point difference.

In 2004, Democrats had a 2.7 point advantage, and it grew to 4.4 points in 2005.

But in 2006, this category exploded to a 10.2-point advantage for Democrats: 50.4 percent for Democrats, 40.2 percent for Republicans. The remaining 9.4 percent did not lean toward either party.

This 10.2-point advantage is the biggest lead either party has had since Gallup began tracking the leaners in 1991.

Perhaps most alarming for Republicans is that for the Gallup interviews conducted during the last quarter of 2006, the Democratic advantage was a whopping 14.2 points: 52.3 percent for Democrats and 38.1 percent for Republicans.

This to TC is an early sign of a potential Democratic blowout in 2008, taking the presidency, keeping the House of Representatives, and ending up in the upper fifties in the Senate. The Iraq war seems well on its way to destroying Republican dominance in the United States every bit as much as the Vietnam war destroyed the Democrats. Their downfall was postponed by the Watergate scandal but they were not able to avoid it. The Republicans appear to be headed for a similar fate.

Nixon or Bush?

So who is the worst liar in American history: George W. Bush or Richard Nixon. I watched a riveting documentary this week on PBS's Frontline documentary series on the state of the American media, which was focused on the Plame case.

I found more of the interview with Carl Bernstein on the Editor and Publisher web site. The answer to the question posed in the title of this post:

Nixon and his men lied and abused the constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped.

The Bush Administration -- especially its top officials named above and others familiar to most Americans -- was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a (Republican) bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, 'Nobody died at Watergate.' If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush....