If there’s one thing that the 2019 provincial election made crystal clear, it’s this: the NDP government of the past four years was a fluke.
Over the years, a lot of people have attributed the NDP’s victory in 2015 to “protest votes. “They’ve championed a narrative that conservative voters cast their ballots for the NDP because they were upset with both the PC and the Wildrose, which had been gutted after the floor-crossing by numerous MLAs.
This last election, however, proved that narrative to be a fiction. A handful of conservative voters might have given their votes to the NDP, but there was no great movement of Albertans casting so-called “protest votes.”
Meanwhile, the left-leaning contingent of Albertans that were normally bereft of choices realized they finally had a horse in the race after Rachel Notley’s strong performance at the leaders’ debate and supported the NDP.
This is backed up by the numbers. In the 2015 election, the NDP received a total of 603,459 votes, representing 40.59 per cent of ballots cast.
In the 2019 election, the unofficial results available as of last Thursday have the NDP at 536,250 votes. Once the nearly 700,000 advance ballots are counted, the NDP’s total in 2019 will be almost identical to their tally from 2015.
In short, virtually the same people who voted NDP in the election voted for them this year.
So how did they win then and not now? Because in 2015, roughly a third of those voters who would normally back the PCs or the Wildrose simply stayed home.
When those advance ballots are counted in the days ahead, you can bet the UCP will have over one million votes. If you add the votes cast for the PCs and the Wildrose in 2015, it comes in around 770,000. That’s a difference of over 230,000 votes.
Taken together, these two elections prove that two-thirds of this province remains staunchly conservative. With that in mind, it was obvious that the UCP were destined to win.
Sure, Jason Kenney might have more than his fair share of skeletons in his closet, but the alternative was another four years under Premier Rachel Notley.
So if you ever feared that the NDP’s victory meant Alberta’s population has swung to the left, dispel those fears now. Barring some world-changing event like an asteroid wiping Calgary off the map, future elections in Alberta can only be lost by the UCP, not won by their leftist opponents.
And that should be a takeaway for all Albertans who cheer on the UCP victory. Conservatives were able to rally together this election because they had a common foe, but who’s to say in the coming years that we won’t see a re-emergence of the divisions that split conservatives into two parties to begin with?
If you want to avoid another NDP government, you would do well to stay “united.”
