In this episode, I talk about the by-elections happening in June, and why I think the UCP is going to win the next election. I also talk about why the polls are not what they looked like a year ago.
00:04:41.360They're just pretending, I understand why people used to vote for the party, but now you can't.
00:04:46.220Now, they're too extreme, whatever extreme means, even though arguably every party was more conservative.
00:04:53.080Even the PCs under Lougheed, other than a few aspects of his oil and gas energy policy,
00:04:58.960he was more socially conservative and fiscally conservative than the UCP is today.
00:05:03.560That's not saying the UCP is bad today, but everyone tended to have smaller government kind of ideas back then.
00:05:10.220The government did less stuff back then, so Nahid Nenshi pretending like, oh, I like those guys, but not these guys, is patently absurd.
00:05:18.780So, just the smarmy way he kind of acts is the problem here, I'm going to say.
00:05:24.800I'm trying to, like, diagnose the situation here.
00:05:27.800And then, a little bit later, I want to get into the current polling in Edmonton-Elsley,
00:05:33.660as well as talking about Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills, and where the Republican Party of Alberta could cause trouble for the UCP in the future,
00:07:33.640This washed-up mayor has told us that they're Trump, and that means you can't vote for them because he, in this stupid game of slap, like, of slapdash, has said, oh, they're Trump.
00:08:20.140It looks like a 90s, like, what is it, those, like, magic eye photos where you, like, stare at it and it becomes, like, a picture of Mickey Mouse or something like that.
00:08:31.640And then he has this kind of, like, soft gray sweater on, and then he has a bunch of buttons attached to it.
00:08:36.940This is what I assume, like, if he was younger, a college socialist club person would look like.
00:08:44.100And now he's going to tell us about, like, I think it's, like, some Filipino holiday or recognition month or something.
00:08:49.420Okay, what could be better than being at the beginning of Filipino Heritage Month?
00:09:09.740I don't, do you think, I think Filipino people probably wake up, like, a few days in and be like, yeah, I think we kind of run out of stuff to do.
00:09:15.760Because at the end of the day, like, real life has to start back up.
00:09:19.080Why does things have to be months or now seasons?
00:10:35.180It's, like, three minutes or, like, a minute and a half of him, like, fluttering his eyelashes and saying, well, this is making me feel so Albertan because it's Filipino History Month.
00:10:50.240And he keeps closing his eyes for, like, three seconds at a time, looking like he's about to fall asleep.
00:10:54.840I don't want to go out of this one for purely the aesthetics.
00:10:59.060But the aesthetics of Naheed Nenshi come off as fussy, progressive, out of touch.
00:11:05.800And what's going on with the NDP right now is they've lost working class voters in the exact same way that Jagmeet Singh lost them.
00:11:14.140They have, he is just a fussy, downtown progressive.
00:11:18.200And this is why he may lose Edmonton voters.
00:11:20.520Edmonton voters tend to be very unionized, working class voters.
00:11:25.140And those people are the people that pure poly and the conservatives just picked up in big swathes around the country in very Edmonton-like areas.
00:11:33.860Windsor, Tecumseh Lakeshore, and these other, I think it was Windsor West, both ridings that conservatives hadn't either won between the 50s or the 30s.
00:15:59.660I'll just quickly show this on screen.
00:16:01.000In 2023, the UCP and Daniel Smith beat the NDP in the popular vote by 8%.
00:16:08.600Now, that was not like that still isn't exactly like it was still a very close election when it came to seats because of Calgary.
00:16:17.180But that should tell us that if now the UCP are 12 to 25 points ahead, the NDP might be in like even more trouble than we think in a lot of these seats.
00:16:30.960Let's look at Edmonton Elsley, which, yes, has been voting NDP since 2015.
00:16:36.280But this is not exactly a super reliable NDP riding.
00:16:41.660So in 2015, the NDP first won this riding back, like the use of the, in 2012, the PC Party had won this with the Wild Rose Party being second place.
00:16:55.000And third, we had the NDP only winning 16%.
00:16:58.280Jump ahead to 2015, the NDP won it with 61% of the vote, which is a very commanding victory.
00:17:05.120Although there was a lot of problems with the Progressive Conservatives changing out their candidate because the guy, Nourish Baradwaj, I'm so sorry for not being able to pronounce those names.
00:17:16.460He was the MLA and then he had to drop out because of a fake scandal that was later proven untrue.
00:17:21.260But then when they ended up having to throw another guy and then Jackie Lovely, who's currently on MLA for the UCP, ran as the Wild Rose, it split things up a lot.
00:17:29.600And then the NDP ended up rocketing way ahead.
00:17:32.5202019, though, it actually got pretty close, 50% to 37.91.
00:17:37.720But that's still when the NDP's working class draw was quite strong.
00:17:43.540Jump to 2023 and Rod LaHoya had held on to it with 61% compared to Ranjit Bath with 36.8.
00:17:52.060And again, I'm not trying to come down on Ranjit Bath here, but I don't believe that that was really a riding that they were even attempting to win, not that even Ranjit probably was attempting to win it.
00:18:02.060The UCP knew that there was no ridings they were going to win in Edmonton, so they threw a lot of people into ridings knowing that they're just there basically as a paper candidate to put in a good showing, and that's kind of it.
00:18:11.300In 2025, though, Nourish Bardwaj is back running for the UCP against a new NDP candidate because all this was kicked off by Rod LaHoya resigning his seat to run for the Liberals,
00:18:25.340who then kicked him out of the nomination they gave him, which meant that he now has no office.
00:18:30.260And this riding, with the past incumbent back, does probably have quite a good chance of actually being able to win.
00:18:37.920And by the way, this isn't even the fully updated list of candidates.
00:18:42.320The Alberta Liberals are running candidates in both of the Edmonton by-elections.
00:18:47.740And I shouldn't have to tell you, that's really going to hurt the NDP because a lot of Canadians, in Edmonton especially, just got through voting Liberal.
00:18:56.180Now, the Liberals only won a couple of seats, I think they only, yeah, they only won a couple of seats in Edmonton, but then they, at the same time, even though they only won two seats, a lot of these seats overlap with some of these provincial ridings.
00:19:10.700So you have a lot of people who are probably preparing to go to the voting station, they'll see Liberal on the ballot, and they'll be like, oh, I like the Liberals, and they'll like scratch in an X,
00:19:17.900even though the Liberals don't even really exist as a party on a provincial level, and they didn't run candidates in the last provincial election.
00:19:24.460So when you saw the NDP holding on to a lot of these Edmonton seats with high percentages of the vote, part of it was because there really wasn't many Alberta Party candidates,
00:19:34.480and there wasn't any Liberal candidates, and now the Liberal Party, on the strength of Mark Carney's brand, is back.
00:19:42.060So, yeah, this could get pretty hairy for the NDP.
00:19:45.920I predict that Ellslie is either going to be close, or the UCP actually could win it.
00:19:51.500So either the NDP is going to win it by just a few points, or the UCP could win it by a few points.
00:19:57.680Now, let's talk about Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills.
00:20:02.960I don't need to bring anything up on screen right now, but what we have going on here is a riding that the UCP is obviously going to win.
00:20:10.120It's a rural riding, but if you were to pull ridings on where separatism was most popular, where independence was most popular,
00:20:18.580Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills would be a prime riding to go around gathering support for that movement,
00:20:24.220because it's probably well above 50% support for saying that Alberta would be better off as its own country.
00:20:30.240I do want to bring up this poll on screen, which showed what the current ratings are in Alberta for if Canada or Alberta would leave Canada.
00:20:40.160Right now, 66% of people in Alberta think that it's unlikely, 14% think it's likely, and 11% could happen.
00:20:48.380Now, this is not a poll of people who actually want to leave.
00:20:52.280Last time I saw that, it's around 35% to 65%.
00:20:56.240Now, a lot of people don't think it could happen, at the same time, around the amount of people who think it could happen
00:21:03.060is heavily concentrated in the one-third of Alberta that is rural, and Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills is easily above 50%.
00:21:13.100Now, in that riding, as well as the two Edmonton ridings, the Republican Party of Alberta is running candidates.
00:21:20.480In fact, the leader of the Alberta Republican Party, Cameron Davies, is running as the Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills candidate.
00:21:29.200Now, I'm going to say, if the UCP wants to stave off an independent surge in the provincial polls,
00:21:37.060it needs to keep Cam Davies in that riding below 13%.
00:21:41.800If they can keep him in the low teens, then it's going to look like a flash in the pan, and it's not going to go anywhere.
00:21:49.240A big problem for the UCP is it could even win Edmonton-Elsley, and what could then happen, though,
00:21:55.960is if, let's say, the Republican Party can clock in at 20% in Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills,
00:22:02.780then that's signaling, there is legs to this, because even on short notice, we were able to actually punch into the 20s.
00:22:08.960That is going to shoot up the separatist polling, especially in rural areas across Alberta,
00:22:15.060and it may even dig a few points into Edmonton ridings and Calgary ridings.
00:22:19.840That's where, even if the NDP is very weak with NEMCHI, they could still win the next provincial election
00:22:25.360if you experience a big independent versus federalist vote split.
00:22:30.280So, that's a little warning going into that.
00:22:33.280I don't want to do deep analysis on that, just more so.
00:22:36.420That's what I'm looking forward to on June 23rd.
00:22:40.400I want to see what happens, and depending on what happens,
00:22:43.060I think it's going to really change how Alberta politics is going to shape up for the next election,
00:22:48.420or it may just mean that the UCP is way ahead, nothing's changed,
00:22:52.340and they're probably going to win re-election easily in 2027.
00:22:55.800So, anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:22:59.620In this video, I've been sort of tripping over myself in the latter half of these videos.
00:23:03.540Obviously, I film all these in one take, and I always have to be kind of like,
00:23:07.260pace yourself out and have a good rhythm.
00:23:09.140That's why I do the, hey, guys, Wyatt Claypool here at the start of the video,
00:23:13.280because if I don't do that, kind of the rhythm can feel very like,
00:23:16.560like, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, and I'm not like, really like,
00:23:19.500kind of like, going at like, like, like, bang, bang, bang.
00:23:22.920It sort of starts to feel like I'm, like, tripping all over myself immediately.
00:23:26.700But hopefully you don't mind this insider information I put in at the end of my videos.
00:23:31.080One, the video's already long enough, so I do want to just mention random other stuff.
00:23:35.160I will do, at some point, some sort of video or short over all of, like, the NES games