Don't Split the Vote!

In Alberta, it's a phrase as common in political campaigns as "hard-working Albertans" or "Laurentian Elites": "Don't split the vote".

What it really means is "please don't make me have to work for this: I'm lazy and I'm entitled to win."

It almost always comes from those on the right - not because the right has a monopoly on laziness, but just because no one on the left in Alberta is crazy enough to feel entitled to anything other than an ass-whipping at the ballot box.

What makes it such a pernicious phrase in Alberta, though, is the attitude that it projects: "I am owed this victory, because I am a conservative". As though being a conservative - actual policy ideas and suggestions on how to improve things be damned - is the only thing you need to do to be owed a victory.

In many parts of the province, that's not entirely incorrect. Which is why the attitude persists.

We first started hearing whining in these parts about "splitting the vote" when the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative Parties were fighting for the hearts and minds of right-leaning voters, allowing the NDP to swoop in from out of almost nowhere and form government. Immediately, the self-styled high foreheads in the conservative camps decided that the NDP victory wasn't a result of an electorate tired of an arrogant, out-of-touch and scandal-plagued governing party in their fourth decade of virtually unchecked power and an opposition right-wing party that had just seen most of its MLAs - and its leader - move over to the government benches a few months before, still mired in the muck of a "Lake of Fire" bozo eruption from the previous election. 

No, no.

The problem was that the voters had too many options. The conservative vote was being split, and the NDP had won an illegitimate victory. Gulags for free market thinkers and entrepreneurs couldn't be far behind.

In on his white horse - or blue truck - rode the great saviour of Alberta's conservative movement, Jason Kenney, to end the vote splitting and save us from the orange horde. Kenney won the leadership of the PCs, who - after more than 40 years in power - were panicked by their sudden lack of access to power, and willing to roll over for anyone who could get them back to the promised land and get the donations flowing again. He then merged the party with the Wildrose, creating the United Conservative Party. And lo and behold, in the next election, the UCP won a healthy majority government.

Granted, the UCP MLAs and core volunteers ran the gamut from closeted Red Tories to proud neo-conservative Trump supporters, and that's going to create some fault lines in your party, but that would be up to someone else to manage in the future. Far sooner, it turned out, than Jason and his team had anticipated. 

The bottom line was: going from two strong conservative options on the ballot to one conservative option resulted in a win. So, the theorem was proved after one experiment: It MUST have been the vote splitting! It couldn't have been the Sky Palace or the private jets or the Lake of Fire or that Rachel Notley was actually an intelligent politician and hard campaigner. No - it was the math. The problem was never US, the conservatives - it was the voters. They got confused. Poor, stupid voters.

The UCP codified this "logic" into law recently, barring any new political party from using words in their names like Conservative, Liberal, Green,Wildrose, Reform, Democratic, Independence, Communist, Pro-life, Republican, Solidarity, or Advantage: because those stupid, easily-confused voters might deny conservatives their rightful win at the ballot box if they accidentally voted for the wrong shade of blue lawn sign.

Fast-forward to today's by-election in Calgary-Shaw, and we see the same tactic, being used by one of its most devoted practitioners. The UCP is polling at 55% in the riding, and the vote-split they're worried about is with the "Progressive Tory Party", polling at 3%. 

Photo cropped, but Craig knows who he is.

Now, none of us knows how many people are going to come out to vote in this by-election, but it's generally pretty safe to say, it will be far fewer than in the most recent general election, when 25,000 voters came out (63% of eligible voters).

What this means is: there are 14,500 eligible voters who didn't get off the couch. They are COMPLETELY up for grabs. You just need to throw your obviously VASTLY superior ideas in front of them, they'll grab their coat and handbag and go cast a vote for you.

So why don't you go target them? Why not try to win their hearts and minds?

Nah. Looks too similar to hard work. I'm not looking to work hard - I'm looking to win a seat as an MLA and cash that nice, big cheque. So I'll just chase the 3% who might vote Progressive Tory, for fear the riding might "accidentally" elect an NDP MLA who, as an opposition member in a majority legislature, would have the power to shut down the energy sector, turn our children gay, and destroy our very way of life... or something.

Make no mistake, Nation: Mike Derry is going to be the next MLA for Calgary-Shaw. That was decided the moment they finished counting ballots in the UCP nomination meeting.

But if his party keeps sticking to their mantra about vote splitting, and the arrogant presumption from whence it springs, they're going to end up exactly where the old Progressive Conservatives did in late 2014: wondering why the polls won't get any better, facing challenges from within and from without, and hoping like hell they can hold on.