The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Danielle Smith would crush Naheed Nenshi in an election, polls show

00:00:00.000 Right now in Alberta provincial polling, Premier Daniel Smith and the UCP are set to win big if

00:00:06.320 there's another provincial election held. Obviously, we're a few years away from that

00:00:10.220 occurring again, but considering that we had a really tight provincial election where the UCP

00:00:14.900 only barely won the majority of seats by about 1,800 votes spread across a few ridings in

00:00:20.040 Calgary, this is a very good result for the UCP so soon after the provincial election.

00:00:24.920 Right now, according to a new Abacus data poll, they have a 16% lead over the NDP, but we could

00:00:32.280 chalk this up to the fact that right now the NDP is effectively not running with a leader.

00:00:36.420 While Rachel Notley is kind of still the leader of the NDP, we know she's going to be replaced by one

00:00:42.080 of the several leadership contestants that are running for the NDP provincial leadership.

00:00:47.340 But let's be fair, I think we all know, at least if you're in the province of Alberta and you've

00:00:52.820 been following this, the new leader of the NDP is likely going to be former Calgary Mayor Nahid

00:00:58.040 Nenshi. And so this is the Abacus breakdown of the popularity of these different individuals

00:01:03.200 vying for the control of the party and what kind of people generally think about them.

00:01:08.440 And so right now, Nahid obviously has a big advantage over everybody because he has a high

00:01:13.600 amount of name recognition, not only in his former city of Calgary where he was the mayor,

00:01:18.360 but just all over the province. Another person who has a decently high amount of name

00:01:23.480 recognition would be Sarah Hoffman and Kathleen Gangley being former ministers and MLAs for

00:01:29.540 the NDP government back in 2015. But overall, the funny thing is that there's a lot of people

00:01:35.080 who don't really know much about a lot of the people running. Even Sarah Hoffman has 51% of 0.96

00:01:40.460 respondents in this Abacus data poll saying that they don't know enough about her to really

00:01:44.900 say if they have a positive or negative sort of feeling about her. But the thing that Nenshi

00:01:50.140 really needs to be careful of, because he, in a certain sense, is actually kind of a threat to

00:01:55.020 Danielle Smith. Even though I don't like him because I'm a conservative and I find his personality quite,

00:02:00.100 you know, arrogant and smarmy. Overall, a lot of people do like him. Progressive, urban voters tend

00:02:05.780 to like Nenshi. The problem for Nenshi is that even when you look at this Abacus data poll,

00:02:10.360 a lot of people actually kind of like Nenshi because since he's been out of politics for a few years,

00:02:14.020 people have a more neutral view of him. Plus, frankly, the current mayor, Jody Gondek in Calgary,

00:02:20.860 is so bad she makes people wish Nenshi was back, even though he was just the sort of,

00:02:25.840 she was just the logical conclusion of all of Nenshi's policies. Even Nenshi really doesn't have

00:02:31.060 that great an approval rating. 31% positive, 19% neutral, 23% negative. So, you know, net impression

00:02:38.780 is above eight, but there's still 26% of people who haven't decided. And when you look at these

00:02:44.160 other polls of Daniel Smith's approval rating, I don't think I brought it up here, but her approval

00:02:48.720 rating right now is 38% with people. I think her disapproval is like 31 and there's a bunch of

00:02:53.420 people who haven't made up their minds. So, although the NDP waged much of its provincial

00:02:58.160 election strategy against the popularity of Daniel Smith as a person, I think a lot of the waters have

00:03:04.040 come since the provincial election. Everyone thought of that as a big fever dream and maybe

00:03:07.880 they should be evaluating Daniel Smith under merits. And I'm someone during a leadership race for the

00:03:13.540 UCB was not a supporter of Daniel Smith for several reasons that I would stand by. I think even some of

00:03:18.920 the issues I had have come out to be continuing to be issues now, but overall, I would say a lot of

00:03:23.860 the policy is very good, especially on parental rights. I'd like to see a big tax cut passed sooner

00:03:29.060 rather than pushed off till later, but overall people actually like Daniel Smith. So the NDP can't

00:03:35.340 simply rely on the fact that because Nenshi is the most well-known and probably going to win

00:03:39.840 the leadership race that he is automatically going to be a contender with Smith. Yes, he might be an

00:03:44.720 outsized personality who has a strong base of support, but Daniel Smith does too. And all Nenshi will 0.98

00:03:51.960 be able to run on is that somehow he'll do the job better. But if the UCP and Daniel Smith are keeping

00:03:56.800 the province pretty stable, it's a hard argument to get a lot of middle-class voters to say that they

00:04:01.340 want radical change with a party that tends to not exactly be super pro-free market. So before I get

00:04:07.900 to the overall polling when it comes to the different leaders against Daniel Smith's UCP, I just want to

00:04:13.120 quickly comment also on the fact that Racky Pankeoli actually dropped out of the leadership race,

00:04:18.740 which was kind of funny. You'll see her name on a fourth down from Nenshi. Racky was kind of

00:04:24.360 considered to be like, if you're an Alberta politico, you'll know the name Ed Stelmack,

00:04:30.000 the former PC premier. She kind of seemed like she would be the Ed Stelmack of this NDP leadership

00:04:35.600 race. Ed Stelmack, I believe in 2005, famously came up through the middle in order to become the

00:04:41.340 new leader of the PC party and the premier of the province. It was like a big fight between Ted Morton

00:04:46.360 and Jim Dinnings. And although those two had the vast majority of the support, Ed Stelmack with like 17%

00:04:52.500 on the first ballot slowly rose up to be everyone's, you know, third favorite choice,

00:04:57.240 which naturally made him the premier because everyone else, the two, the Dinnings and Morton

00:05:02.500 camps hated each other. That's what people thought Racky Pankeoli would be, but that doesn't seem like

00:05:07.760 it's actually in the cards since she came out and endorsed Nenshi. And so that really leaves the only,

00:05:12.780 I would say, true opposition to Nenshi, being Sarah Hoffman, Gangly, and Stonehouse,

00:05:18.420 and McGowan basically teaming up in order to try and overwhelm him. It almost turns into the

00:05:23.880 Daniel Smith versus the rest of the crowd UCP leadership race, where Daniel Smith, oddly enough,

00:05:30.760 didn't actually gain that much after each ballot on the UCP leadership race, because either you liked

00:05:36.060 her or you didn't like her. So first ballot, she's at 42%. Looks like she should lock this up on next 1.00

00:05:40.760 ballot. Next ballot comes up, you know, A here drops out, throws her support to Travis Taves or Rachel

00:05:46.160 or Rebecca Schultz. And then they keep going down, slowly shuffling more support behind Rebecca

00:05:51.260 Schultz and Taves, but until it becomes the Daniel Smith and Taves showdown, which it was actually a

00:05:56.340 very close leadership race. And I will take credit for being like the one person who said, no, this is

00:06:01.460 going to go down to the very last ballot. Yes, you might see a lot of pro Danielle stuff all over

00:06:06.600 social media and a lot of people saying they like her, but there's a lot of people who also wanted

00:06:11.100 someone else who felt like more of like a calm waters type candidate like Travis Taves. But now, this is

00:06:18.540 where the NDP should be a little bit scared. If Nahid Nenshi is going to be the guy who's going to ride in

00:06:23.900 on a white horse and save you all from yourselves, your radical party, and Rachel Notley was your

00:06:28.980 moderate face, and Nenshi's the only one who can replace her and make the party seem moderate to

00:06:33.580 especially middle class and upper middle class voters. Nah, not really. The thing is, Nenshi's a very known

00:06:39.680 quantity. And even when you see Nenshi polling against the UCP, he polls at 42% with the UCP at

00:06:46.400 51. Now, let's go back to this poll, 56 to 40. So, he improves the general margin that the NDP would

00:06:53.180 have by only a little bit. So, this is a 16% lead for the UCP. And with Nenshi as the leader, it'd be

00:07:00.280 a 9% lead for the UCP. And obviously, the general polling goes up for pretty much everyone except

00:07:06.200 McGowan and Hoffman. But overall, this really is demonstrating to me that Nenshi is kind of like

00:07:13.580 whenever people mention, well, why doesn't Oprah Winfrey run for US President? She's not going to run for 1.00

00:07:19.400 US President, because although she's popular outside of politics, as soon as you take someone like her who 0.99

00:07:25.000 has a lot of baggage, and you make her a presidential candidate, the whole positive vibes sort of feel of that 1.00

00:07:31.120 person wears off quickly. You can kind of be a positive vibes kind of person in municipal politics.

00:07:37.380 But once you're in provincial politics or federal, where everything's much more ideological,

00:07:41.820 municipal politics is still ideological, but you can kind of fake it a little bit because it's

00:07:45.500 nonpartisan. Once Nenshi comes out as the kind of big orange monster, stop being the big purple monster,

00:07:53.060 he then actually has to stand by hard and fast policies. And he has a base of NDP radicals holding

00:07:59.280 him accountable to their radical agenda. So he can't pretend to be some Alberta Party, you know,

00:08:04.680 leader, some very neutral, not the Alberta Party is not even center, they're actually left, but they're

00:08:09.520 just not as left as the NDP. He can't pretend to be some moderate liberal kind of person. Plus,

00:08:15.680 people don't like liberals in in Alberta. So he can't market himself as the softer kind of version,

00:08:21.580 because he'll just come off like he's Justin Trudeau. And so this poll of his popularity up against

00:08:26.500 the UCP, this is, oh, this one was actually Polera Palace. So he was 42-51 with the UCP.

00:08:34.420 And now with Abacus, he is at 38-53, which is kind of funny that Rachel Notley actually does better

00:08:41.080 than Nenshi would do. And that someone like Sarah Hoffman isn't that far behind. The problem again,

00:08:48.260 for Nenshi is that he's a known quantity. So he doesn't have that much room to grow.

00:08:52.560 So this poll might show that 26% of people don't know enough about him to say anything,

00:08:56.860 and 19% are neutral. But if they weren't positive now, it's going to be hard for him to convince

00:09:01.940 them later. But you can't deny that Nenshi does get the base out. The problem is, even though he

00:09:08.720 got in back in 2010 on a youth movement, he would be someone I'd classify, I think it was actually a

00:09:14.540 little bit earlier than in 2009. He is an old politician. When I say that, I mean that you

00:09:19.660 can't sort of re-roll the youth trick to get today. It's like Barack Obama, if he ran for president

00:09:24.920 again, he can't. He can't go out and get the youth vote, because he's a known quantity. He is an old

00:09:30.300 politician that people have seen around a while. To be a youth politician, you almost have to be that

00:09:34.620 spark that comes out of nowhere. And when you look, and I'm not trying to be insulting, but Nenshi's

00:09:38.740 rally is extremely old pensioners. So these are people who liked him as mayor, they know the name,

00:09:45.720 they trust him because they've seen him on legacy media a lot. But you're not going to go up to an

00:09:49.540 18-year-old and say, Nenshi's running for premier. That's not how it's going to work. Plus, Nenshi

00:09:55.680 might have been charismatic, but it was mostly labor unions that made it so that it was a rollover every

00:10:01.860 time he was running for mayor. They tried to get rid of him with Bill Smith back in, I believe, the 2017

00:10:07.420 mayor's race. And that might have worked, but it's just that trade unions tend to rule municipal 0.97

00:10:12.820 elections, so Nenshi couldn't be beat. Even though when you pulled it out, most people hated Nenshi,

00:10:17.920 it's just most people aren't engaged in municipal politics. And I will say, and this is a little bit

00:10:22.080 of a trailing off thing, but people trying to be like, Nenshi claimed there's 1,200 people at his

00:10:27.740 rally, but there was only 618. It's a big rally, guys. It's actually impressive. He actually went over

00:10:33.180 capacity for what that room was allowed to have. So I'm not going to say like, oh,

00:10:37.420 well, he only has 618. He had 1,200. Not to take a shot at Key and Bexty. Key and Bexty does a good

00:10:41.980 job. And I know that people hate the idea when people are like, there's 18,000 people in this

00:10:46.280 room. And it's like, dude, the room has a capacity of 400 people. I really doubt it. But Nenshi does

00:10:51.720 get the base out. The problem is that base is probably stalwart NDP voters, people who decide

00:10:58.000 they're not going to vote UCP a long time ago. And I don't think that Nenshi is going to be able to do

00:11:02.240 anything to prove he's sort of like a breath of fresh air for the province, especially if people's

00:11:07.540 tax rates are going down, the province feels stable, wait times in hospitals go down, Nenshi's dead in

00:11:12.560 the water. He has nothing to market himself with if there's not a massive disaster when it comes to

00:11:17.520 public policy. But here's a video he released from that rally. And you can make your own mind if you

00:11:23.080 think he's particularly inspiring. And even this entire video, it's not marketing him on ideas. It's not

00:11:28.620 marketing him on I have a fresh vision for the province. It's marketing him on the fact he's

00:11:32.620 Nenshi. And really, that's all Nenshi has is that he's Nenshi. Because if he says anything

00:11:36.760 ideological, he's no longer Nenshi. He's a socialist NDP politician.

00:11:46.500 I'd like to introduce to all of you in my hometown on this stage.

00:11:51.540 I just want to mention that Raki Pankhioli, who I said was kind of like, she had been like the

00:11:56.400 DEI type moderate NDP choice, like a very insider, like consultant type choice. I like how she's the

00:12:04.060 executive chair of the campaign. I remember Court Ellington, the Calgary Foothills NDP MLA, was his

00:12:11.840 chair, his campaign chair. But I like how they've now made her the executive chair just so that she

00:12:16.020 had a little bit more power than Court Ellington. You know, just sort of the pettiness of, you know,

00:12:21.360 horse trading and politics. The next leader of the Alberta NDP, and the next premier of Alberta,

00:12:28.220 Nahed Nenshi.

00:12:33.800 So, I've always been

00:12:35.960 an Edmonton Oilers fan.

00:12:41.020 I bleed blue and copper.

00:12:43.020 And I want to share with you my jersey that I've worn for years and years and years.

00:12:50.180 The slogan for the campaign.

00:12:52.920 For Alberta, for all of us.

00:12:56.380 I thought that that's how I would say it.

00:12:59.060 That the emphasis would be on the word Alberta

00:13:01.140 and on the word all.

00:13:03.780 But what I've learned in the last two weeks

00:13:05.700 is in fact, it's not the words Alberta

00:13:08.940 Alberta and the word all

00:13:10.040 that have really resonated with people.

00:13:13.140 It's that tiny little word

00:13:15.540 for.

00:13:17.040 F-O-R. 1.00

00:13:19.240 Because for so long,

00:13:21.300 we have been trained

00:13:22.780 by our political...

00:13:24.100 I'm going to, I'm not going to play this whole thing, but like,

00:13:27.060 that's just in my sense dull.

00:13:29.280 And he is avoiding like the plague

00:13:31.380 trying to say anything that makes him

00:13:33.260 sound like an actual NDPer.

00:13:35.020 And that's the funny thing, is I could see Nenshi

00:13:36.860 getting into massive scrapes with

00:13:38.960 the party stalwarts who want him

00:13:41.000 to be the nutcase,

00:13:42.880 pants on head socialist like Janice Irwin 0.98

00:13:44.880 is, or Sarah Hoffman or Kathleen

00:13:46.880 Gangly would probably be, or Gil McGowan,

00:13:48.820 but Gil McGowan's so irrelevant, I don't

00:13:50.800 care. He's like some union leader running

00:13:52.780 for the NDP leadership, which is funny

00:13:54.900 because he's still acting as the union leader while he

00:13:56.840 runs for them, which is like, you know, a big

00:13:58.860 tell based on how close the trade

00:14:00.840 unions are with the NDP and public sector

00:14:02.860 unions. But Nenshi is going

00:14:04.820 to keep doing this. Boring speeches

00:14:06.960 about how I'm here for you

00:14:08.740 and that's it. And the thing is, I think

00:14:11.000 that the UCP wants to beat

00:14:12.400 Nahad Nenshi. They have to go on the

00:14:14.580 fact that this guy is basically 0.98

00:14:16.420 a complete scammer. He scammed 0.84

00:14:18.800 his way in as a moderate in the

00:14:20.620 municipal elections, was a massive tax

00:14:22.880 and spend, like basically

00:14:24.980 NDP mayor of Calgary.

00:14:26.680 And now he's going to do the exact same thing

00:14:28.960 with the provincial NDP pretending

00:14:30.760 like he's some moderate conservative

00:14:33.140 Alberta party kind

00:14:34.800 of politician. He's not. He's the

00:14:36.800 type of guy who will basically

00:14:38.200 either, either he gets into a

00:14:40.840 massive fight with the NDP

00:14:42.040 stalwarts because he's not going to go along

00:14:44.620 with what they want, or he

00:14:46.660 is going to do exactly what they want and

00:14:48.680 push for radical, you know,

00:14:50.720 radical increase in taxes,

00:14:53.140 nationalization of certain

00:14:54.720 industries like the NDP tried to do last

00:14:56.380 time during provincial government

00:14:57.580 attacking the oil and gas industry.

00:14:59.100 That's what's going to hurt him. He can

00:15:00.800 go against the oil and gas industry as

00:15:02.460 the Calgary mayor because there's

00:15:03.660 enough downtown progressives who are

00:15:05.000 disconnected from the oil and gas

00:15:06.260 industry that they'll vote for him

00:15:07.840 and there's not that many people vote

00:15:08.940 in municipal elections. All those

00:15:10.520 comments are going to catch up to him.

00:15:11.980 All of his photos with Justin Trudeau

00:15:13.300 are going to catch up to him and all of

00:15:15.080 his kind of obvious just grifting

00:15:17.640 type position taking in order to

00:15:19.680 merely be popular is going to catch

00:15:21.480 up with him. At least what you can say

00:15:23.020 with Daniel Smith is she generally

00:15:24.480 believes what she says.

00:15:25.940 Nahad Nenshi does not believe what he

00:15:27.600 says. He's got to follow his career.

00:15:29.100 He's very much a man who has a very

00:15:31.860 leftist type mentality but is very

00:15:34.540 good at, you know, saying just enough

00:15:37.080 to let you, let you, make you leave 0.72

00:15:39.580 him alone so he can do whatever he

00:15:40.780 wants. Every single bad thing that

00:15:42.540 currently Mayor Jody Gondek is doing

00:15:44.840 in Calgary is just an offshoot of

00:15:46.680 what Nahad Nenshi had already done.

00:15:49.660 Anyways, that should be it for me today,

00:15:51.520 guys, just to quickly plug the fact

00:15:53.620 that I, Wyatt Claypool, am running for

00:15:55.520 the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party

00:15:57.200 nomination. If you live on the west side

00:15:59.180 of Calgary here, check if you live in

00:16:00.620 this riding. These are what the new

00:16:02.000 riding boundaries will look like midway

00:16:04.000 through April. So if you live in this

00:16:05.820 area, buy a Conservative Party federal

00:16:08.040 membership and check out my website,

00:16:10.080 WyattClaypool.com. And you can also

00:16:12.280 donate to the legal fund for myself and

00:16:14.260 the National Telegraph in the description

00:16:16.180 below. It's the Give, Send, Go link. We have

00:16:18.180 a billionaire developer suing us over

00:16:19.940 nothing, does not have any evidence that

00:16:21.740 we defamed him, has not actually submitted

00:16:23.680 any evidence that's worth anything, and

00:16:25.680 has basically just been trying to draw out

00:16:27.200 this case as long as possible, knowing

00:16:28.780 that he can't win. Anyways, have a great

00:16:31.140 one, guys. No, I know this has been a bit

00:16:32.960 more of a long video, but I do like to

00:16:34.740 chew on a topic a bit more, and this was a

00:16:36.400 fun one for me. Have a great one.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 28, 2024

Danielle Smith would crush Naheed Nenshi in an election, polls show

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