The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 01, 2024


David Eby's NDP base is abandoning him! (BC Conservative hold lead)

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Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
John Horgan David Eby Wilkinson Chris David Evie Stephen Harper Justin Trudeau John Rustad Bagel
BC Conservatives projected to win majority over Eby's NDP David Eby is running a losing campaign (Great for BC!)

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

182.57

Word count

2,897

Sentence count

182

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wyatt Claypool breaks down how the BC United Conservative Party is gaining ground in the polls, and why he thinks the BC NDP is going to lose the election to the BC Conservative Party. He also takes a look at what's going on with undecided voters and why they're not going to vote for either party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello everybody, Wyatt Claypool here, back yet again to talk about the British Columbia
00:00:05.700 provincial election, because a lot of fun stuff has been happening in the polls. It's basically
00:00:11.440 playing out the way I had been predicting for months now, that there was going to be a lot of
00:00:16.640 undecided voters, especially since the BC United Party decided to take a dirt nap, who are going
00:00:22.740 to be trying to decide whether they're going to find their new home in the BC NDP with Premier
00:00:27.900 David Evey or with John Rested in the BC Conservative Party. And I was saying that when it's an
00:00:34.320 incumbent government that you are already not supporting, if you are a United supporter or you
00:00:40.300 just were undecided since last election, you're pretty unlikely to jump on board now. You know
00:00:45.880 every single piece of information you need to know about them because they've been running the
00:00:49.900 province for seven straight years. If they haven't wooed you yet, it's pretty hard to be convinced
00:00:56.260 now, especially when they don't even have a good record. In 2015, Stephen Harper ended up losing to
00:01:03.240 Justin Trudeau because he ran a campaign that basically just said, well, vote for us because
00:01:08.360 we've been doing a pretty good job and the other guys could be worse. It was not particularly inspiring.
00:01:14.020 The BC NDP have an even tougher job than Harper. They've been in for a while and they've not done a
00:01:19.720 single thing right. And so as we've been getting closer and closer to the election, you'll notice
00:01:26.040 that as we get towards there, the undecided voters are naturally coming down and the BC NDP are
00:01:32.040 borderline getting none of them. It's basically going two thirds to three quarters towards the BC
00:01:38.020 Conservatives. So let's do a step-by-step walkthrough day by day of the polling. Obviously, the polling
00:01:44.900 kind of gurgles back and forth a little bit because it's IVR polling by Main Street Research. So
00:01:50.020 they'll call people up, say, hey, which party are you going to vote for? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And they
00:01:54.440 usually randomize the order so they don't get a response bias because they always put one party
00:01:58.980 as number one and it reads out first. But so we just have to take each day with a grain of salt,
00:02:04.600 but it's the overall trend you should care about. So day one here of their daily tracking poll,
00:02:10.080 they had 11% undecided, 4% saying they're going to go for another party. I would assume that's
00:02:15.260 mostly just going to be people who are also undecided, who used the another party option as
00:02:20.940 other, basically. You have the Greens at 8%, the Conservatives at 39, and the NDP at 37.
00:02:28.880 Day two, NDP 38, Conservatives 38, 11 undecided, 5% saying another party. So we still have around the
00:02:37.440 same amount of people who don't really know where their vote's going to go. Greens still holding at
00:02:41.900 three. We go to day three here and, or sorry, the Greens were holding at eight. I accidentally just
00:02:47.180 repeated the number three when I was looking at day three on my list here. But so day three, we have
00:02:52.100 the NDP takes an ever so slight lead over the Conservatives, 39 to 38, but we still have 10%
00:02:59.100 undecided, 4% saying other parties, Greens still 8%. And then we get to day four, where it goes
00:03:06.300 40% BC Conservatives, 38% BC NDP, 9% undecided, 4% other, 9% green. So as it's come down by a couple
00:03:17.300 of points overall, we're seeing it start to trend into the Conservative Party's direction. Day five,
00:03:23.140 this is a really big one. It goes to 9% undecided, 3% another party, 8% green, 42% Conservative,
00:03:32.260 38% NDP. Now this is from day six today. This one kind of contracts a little bit back to 40-40.
00:03:41.780 I believe when it's only decided voters, it's like 41-40 for the Conservatives, or it's like 43-42
00:03:48.540 after you remove all the undecideds. But overall, the Conservatives are starting to win those undecided
00:03:55.160 voters by a very good margin. If they keep it up, if they just keep on hammering the NDP on all their
00:04:01.740 policy failures, and the fact that the NDP are not serious about fixing any of the problems,
00:04:06.660 they will win. Because the NDP right now, what they're doing wrong, so wrong, is that they keep
00:04:12.840 focusing on attacking the BC Conservatives. Oh, they have crazy candidates. Oh, well, they're not serious 0.97
00:04:18.280 about X or Y issue. Okay, let's even say people even agree with you, the candidates are crazy. 0.99
00:04:24.900 They're really not. Every once in a while, you'll see one of them say something on Twitter four years
00:04:30.060 ago in a slightly more coarse way than maybe you would have said it. But overall, nobody really
00:04:34.100 cares about the statements. But let's see if, let's just say they do. You guys suck at governing.
00:04:40.120 You guys have been awful for the economy, awful for social issues. Crime is out of control. 1.00
00:04:45.060 The drug crisis is disgusting for anybody to witness your guises, like basically feeding into
00:04:51.240 it. So why should anyone care about your criticisms of the BC Conservatives when you've
00:04:57.040 been the party that's been driving the bus for the past seven years? People will take pretty much
00:05:01.440 anybody else at this point. And the Conservatives are the only other party that people really know
00:05:06.340 can make a difference that can actually create a change in government. And even then, the NDP are
00:05:11.320 actually probably going to hemorrhage, I think, another couple points towards the Greens
00:05:14.600 in terms of turnout. The Greens didn't get a candidate in every single riding. But overall,
00:05:19.760 I think the Greens, wherever they are, they're going to grab up a lot of NDP voters who they're
00:05:24.380 not quite willing to vote Conservative because maybe they just have still more of an anti-Conservative
00:05:29.020 mentality. But they know the BC NDP are the actual crazy ones. What do you care more about as 0.97
00:05:34.860 a voter? Somebody who said something on social media four years ago that you maybe don't quite agree
00:05:40.500 with, but you probably also understand where they were coming from. Or are you going to vote for or
00:05:46.200 care more about the party that has actual crazy policies? The NDP's policies are crazy. When David
00:05:52.520 Eby penned that pathetic letter two days ago saying, I'm calling on the BC Conservatives to drop these 0.98
00:05:57.820 five candidates because they said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like maybe you and all 93 of your 0.98
00:06:03.840 candidates should drop out because you guys literally support just handing out free drugs.
00:06:08.960 It resulted in the death of a 13-year-old the other day who was surrounded in safe supply drugs
00:06:13.980 and safe supply paraphernalia, crack pipes, and snorting kits. You guys are the crazy ones. You 1.00
00:06:20.760 guys are the ones who think that every single time there's an economic issue that the government
00:06:24.900 should just dump more money on the problem. That's crazy. You guys actually see criminals as
00:06:30.020 victims. That's crazy. When it's crazy policy, that's always going to be a much worse thing
00:06:36.460 than somebody who said something that maybe certain people don't like. Nobody actually thinks that their
00:06:42.400 own social media profiles are squeaky clean. So when you go after somebody for saying something that you
00:06:49.040 might have not said in the moment, nobody is actually going to get all that offended because
00:06:53.280 everybody does that. Anyways, but now I kind of want to move on to what is, in my mind, the scariest
00:07:00.660 statistics for the BC NDP. It shows the BC NDP's base is literally abandoning them. The NDP are only
00:07:09.160 grabbing up a portion of their 2020 vote. When you're an incumbent party, what you want is for 80 to 95% of the
00:07:19.560 people who voted for you last election committed to voting for you this election. I went over that
00:07:24.200 and talked to my friend Chris from the Great Canadian Bagel podcast, who's a very good poll
00:07:28.360 analyst, and he confirmed that that's generally the range you want to be in to have a good chance
00:07:32.540 of being reelected. Well, David Eby's BC NDP, if I can zoom in right here, are only grabbing up 68.5%
00:07:41.880 of what John Horgan took in in 2020. Only 68.5% of 2020 NDP voters are thinking of voting for the NDP
00:07:51.660 in this election. And I asked Chris from the Bagel podcast, well, what do you think about that? How
00:07:56.840 is that? What kind of range is that? And he says, you are going to lose range. Not like, yeah, maybe it's
00:08:02.120 not quite good. No, you're going to lose if you're taking in less than 70% of your 2020 voters, because it
00:08:09.100 doesn't get that much better when you start to look at the other statistics. We have 13.4% of
00:08:16.540 them going towards the conservatives. 6.9% are still undecided. And then another party is basically
00:08:21.700 also saying undecided. Maybe a couple of them vote for some fringe socialist party that's only running
00:08:26.660 for a few ridings. But 13.4% is great for the conservatives. You go to Wilkinson's liberals from
00:08:33.100 2020. The NDP is only grabbing 11.5% of them. The conservatives are grabbing 71.3%. Not an amazing
00:08:40.340 statistic, but the conservatives were not the liberals. So that's not even their base, but
00:08:45.080 they're pulling in 71% of another party's base from back in 2020. Now just remember that the top
00:08:52.240 line is the NDP and the second line is the conservatives, because those are the two ones we
00:08:56.740 care about. The Green Party, it's kind of a smaller stat. Some of them are going over to
00:09:01.820 the BC NDP. But look at that. 30.5% of 2020 BC Green voters are voting for the conservatives.
00:09:10.940 37 are naturally still voting for the Greens, and then there's some more that are undecided.
00:09:14.760 The Greens, because it's a small party, tends to have to cobble together a new coalition every single
00:09:19.140 election, because in most ridings they don't have incumbent MPs or MLAs. Now let's go to another party.
00:09:25.680 Most of them from who are voting another party in 2020, so that would have been the Christian 0.99
00:09:30.660 Heritage Party or other small parties, 92.6% are voting conservative. Not that big a sample,
00:09:36.980 but 107 is decently substantial. Didn't remember or didn't vote, which basically is probably mostly
00:09:43.400 people who just didn't vote. I doubt there's that many people don't remember what they voted.
00:09:47.520 50.9% are voting conservative. Only 19.4% are voting NDP. 4.3% are voting for the Green
00:09:55.640 Party, and 20.8% are still undecided. Now this obviously is a big vote that the conservatives
00:10:02.040 need to go after. People who didn't think it was worth it to vote in 2020, and frankly, I understand.
00:10:07.460 It was a sluggish, sleepy election. It was basically, do you want the corporate liberal
00:10:12.520 or the more blue-collar liberal? Because Horgan was more of a blue-collar, NDP-ish liberal,
00:10:17.080 and Wilkinson was a very corporate liberal. A lot of people stayed at home. And if this ratio
00:10:23.280 keeps up, the ratio between the conservatives and NDP and who's capturing who in the didn't vote
00:10:29.100 category, the conservatives are going to have a big majority government, because that is a great
00:10:34.320 takeaway. If they're taking half of the people who didn't vote last time, and the NDP are only grabbing
00:10:41.020 19.4%, based on the decided ratio, I think that's like more than two-thirds for the conservatives,
00:10:47.760 or about two-thirds for the conservatives. If they keep winning that other 20% by two-thirds,
00:10:53.740 dude, their lead is going to be massive on election day. And I still think a lot of the pollsters
00:10:58.700 could be underestimating how good the conservatives' vote is. Notoriously, one, if you actually look at
00:11:05.640 the ethnic cross tabs in these polls, you'll find South Asian and East Asians are only about 35,
00:11:11.340 48% of the people, not percent, but only 38 or 40 of the responses were people from those
00:11:17.320 communities. Naturally, some people from certain communities just don't answer polls. It's just
00:11:21.480 not part of the culture to get on the phone and take a phone poll from someone. White people love 0.99
00:11:25.440 taking phone polls all the time about nothing. You know, big disadvantage with white people, 0.98
00:11:31.680 taking phone polls about absolute nonsense all day long. Other groups tend to be much smarter at 0.99
00:11:38.080 just hanging up the phone because the phone poll is annoying. Regardless, though, those groups are
00:11:43.220 very under-polled. So their numbers are all over the place. I don't see the NDP picking up South Asian
00:11:49.980 voters or East Asian voters. Crime, SOGI-123, and affordability are massive, massive issues for those
00:11:57.200 groups because they have, and they put up with the NDP saying they're going to solve these problems
00:12:01.920 problems or try and get politics out of the classroom for so long and they don't trust them
00:12:07.300 anymore. You are going to have those communities swing super hard against the NDP because of SOGI-123
00:12:12.860 and because of drug decriminalization. A lot of Asian voters in Richmond aren't voting NDP and it's
00:12:19.300 mainly because of the drugs. They've put up with it for a long time. They were giving, they were being
00:12:24.560 very patient with the NDP, hoping that the NDP is actually going to get the drug, like the drug
00:12:30.820 problem, like sorted out. They were going to crack down on the amount of usage or their safe supply
00:12:35.960 program was somehow going to work and we're all going to live in utopia. It hasn't worked. They're
00:12:39.940 voting conservative now. And that's a group that would have normally defaulted NDP liberal if we're
00:12:44.660 talking in terms of federal politics. They usually aren't as much as conservative voters. This year they
00:12:49.280 are because they are only voting on one or two issues and the NDP can't satisfy them on any of
00:12:54.540 them. Anyways, that's, oh, actually, no, that's not it for me. What am I doing here, guys? I'm done
00:13:01.360 giving you guys your money's worth. I just want to bring up the Main Street, Nash, like provincial
00:13:06.240 wide poll right now of what's going on. Since today's tracking poll, it's contracted a little
00:13:12.860 bit for the conservatives, but they're still doing pretty well and they still have the better chance of
00:13:17.200 winning a majority government. Right now, Main Street is projecting that the BC conservatives win
00:13:22.180 48 seats to 45 seats with a 60% chance of grabbing that majority government. I still think that we're
00:13:31.040 going to end up with the conservatives driving up way more of their vote than the NDP. I couldn't
00:13:36.840 imagine what it's like to be a BC NDP voter these days. I'm not trying to go after anyone here, but
00:13:42.000 you know, I mean, I would feel like you're going to be more apathetic. I voted for them last time.
00:13:47.980 They promised a lot. And even if I generally agree with their worldview, they didn't deliver. So even
00:13:53.380 if you're like tacitly saying you're voting for the NDP, I guarantee their turnout is going to be
00:13:58.720 70%, 65%. Whereas the conservative, the conservative turnout on people who are supporting the
00:14:05.300 conservatives saying they're going to vote conservative, it's going to be like 85, 90%
00:14:08.940 turnout. It's a change election. And the reason why a change election is so powerful is because your
00:14:15.120 people are empowered to vote and the other people are usually only voting out of just obligation. I
00:14:20.180 vote every year. You know, I like David Evie a little bit more than than Rustad. That's not a
00:14:25.520 winning narrative. The idea that we're doing a bad job, but the other guys could do a worse job,
00:14:30.340 like the NDP has been saying, doesn't win elections, especially because nobody believes that somehow
00:14:35.800 these guys wanted to go in a more small government direction are going to hurt anyone. In Canada's
00:14:40.820 history, every time things have been great. It's usually been with small governments. It's not
00:14:45.420 been with big governments who pass bloated, like social programs in order to make people better
00:14:51.220 off. People have made themselves better off. The social programs always come in when a government
00:14:56.380 is screwing things up on the economy and people are getting poorer and poorer and the government wants
00:15:01.140 to pretend like it can fix the scenario by handing out money here and there rather than letting people
00:15:06.240 get back to work and spend their own money. Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys. If you live
00:15:11.900 in British Columbia, go and hit up your local BC campaign, help them doorknock. That's one of the
00:15:18.060 big things that campaigns always have a problem getting in every part of the country and every
00:15:22.740 level of government, people who don't want to doorknock. Go try doorknocking. Tell them why it
00:15:28.400 sent you. Go try it out. Go just talk to people at the doors. That's pretty much all it is.
00:15:32.700 Door opens. Hey, how are you doing? Hey, are you guys planning on voting this election? Where are
00:15:37.360 your big issues? That's pretty much it. Super, super easy. Give it a try. It's how you move from
00:15:44.040 just engaging online to making sure that you can help flip entire neighborhoods from orange to blue.
00:15:49.700 That's it for me today, guys. Have a good one.