02 Oct Don Mills plumbs the causes of the probable NDP collapse

Assume for the moment that the Corporate Research Associates poll showing Stephen McNeil’s Liberals with a 30-point lead is accurate (which I assume it is), and assume McNeil holds that lead until Tuesday (which remains to be seen).

The next question is, how the heck did this happen?

The NDP made serious mistakes (see here and here) but they did not run a horrible government (see here and here). Not everyone will agree, but there is a reasonable case that Dexter deserves another term, something of a tradition in Nova Scotia, as many have pointed out.

The curious thing is that one detects little passion in this election at all, certainly no mad fury to throw the bastards out. Election signs are few, and in my circle at least, hardly anyone is talking about the election. The public exudes little warmth for McNeil, and his slender platform is pockmarked by a handful of dreadful ideas.

Without the CRA poll, my main expectation would be a record low turnout. These are not the impressions one expects a week before an electoral tidal wave strikes.

CRA Chairman and CEO Don Mills thinks the NDP’s problems are rooted in the fact it took power just as the worst recession in 80 years settled in to stay.

“These have been the most difficult economic times in most people’s living memory here,” he told Contrarian in a telephone interview Tuesday.

CRA tracks the economic wellbeing of Nova Scotians every quarter, and in each of the last four years, 40 percent of its respondents reported no increase in pay. Inflation, meanwhile, has eaten away at the value of their pay checks. In effect, a large cohort of Nova Scotia’s middle class has seen a 10 percent drop in buying power during the four-plus years of the Dexter Government. This may be no fault of the NDP, but that’s of little consequence to fed-up voters.

“Virtually every household is worse off,” said Mills. “I think they would have very little patience with any government—and it doesn’t matter what government it is, by the way. I think this is why electricity rates are such a sore point.”

To that economic malaise, add the voters’ dashed hopes that the NDP would be different. Take a closer look at Mills’s poll. Dexter was elected in June 2009 with 45 percent of the vote. Within six weeks, his government’s popularity soared to 60 percent. Voters—even those who didn’t vote NDP—must have said to themselves, “Let’s give these new guys a chance. Maybe they really will turn out to be different.”

The new government did little in its first six months, and then the expense scandal hit, with Dexter smack in the middle of it. In retrospect, I believe this created a sense of disillusionment that voters have been nursing ever since.