QotD: Canadian Left Wing Voters

[T]here is not now much point in trying to strip votes from the New Democrats by conflating them with the Liberals. The New Democrats would have been long since dead and buried if this logic were at all convincing to NDP supporters.

I suspect that at the 2004 polls Jack Layton (and Ed Broadbent) merely brought the New Democrats back to their natural level in the popular vote. About one-sixth of us, I think, are simply New Democrat by nature — old hippies floating in internal exile, overgrown red-diaper babies, identitarians of various flavours, Gaia-worshipping vegans, and, above all, workers for whom The Union represents the sum of their aspirations and the totality of their intelligible thought. These people, and especially those in the latter category, may stay home if they're asked to vote for some insincere schoolmarmish warhorse like Alexa McDonough. Give them a grinning, attractive regular-guy who speaks in complete sentences and they'll turn out.

Barring the "Third Way" species of self-reinvention that the party continues to resist, it is hard for me to see the New Democrats ever getting 20% of the vote in a Canadian election again. (I bet publicly against the NDP getting 20% in '04, at a time when people were whispering "Official Opposition", and it was the one thing I got right about the outcome.) But until the party gets rid of Jack Layton it should continue to draw the maximum vote possible. It's a Kuhnian process. Mortality should cause the NDP vote ceiling to sink slowly, but then again there are new fools being born every day.

Colby Cosh, "A gun to the head", colbycosh.com, 2005-11-02