Western Standard - April 27, 2023


UCP and NDP neck-and-neck as election kicks off...


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

158.33197

Word count

324

Sentence count

25


Summary

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

The Alberta election is deadlocked in a dead heat between the United Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party. Is this good news or bad news for the UCP? We talk through the latest polls and give our perspective on the situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Now, this has got the UCP and the NDP, not just in a statistical dead heat, but in an exact dead heat at 36% each support among decided voters.
00:00:12.840 The Alberta party, ever so hopeful, at 4%.
00:00:16.120 Other parties, 3%.
00:00:18.300 But a very high undecided at 22%.
00:00:23.000 I mean, it's an absolute dead heat.
00:00:25.600 If you take the undecideds out, generally it's 47 UCP, 46, sorry, 47 NDP, 46 NDP.
00:00:32.920 Just the way that works out with some of the decibels around there.
00:00:35.660 But then there's the battleground Calgary, where everyone agrees the election is mostly going to be decided.
00:00:44.280 There's a few battle, you know, the ringer, the donut ring around Edmonton is going to be a battleground, very important.
00:00:50.440 A few tiny seats here and there.
00:00:52.000 Banff, Kananaskis, west of Calgary, Lethbridge East, the one UCP seat in Lethbridge is going to be a battleground.
00:00:59.440 But the big prize is Calgary.
00:01:01.560 Who wins Calgary is likely going to win the election.
00:01:04.620 There, the UCP have a slight lead.
00:01:07.980 49 UCP, 42 NDP, 7 Alberta party.
00:01:11.660 We'll start with you, Nigel.
00:01:15.380 We've had a lot of polls coming out lately.
00:01:19.080 But it's quite a shift over the last year where the UCP was far behind the NDP.
00:01:24.080 It's now back to competitive.
00:01:26.040 Some polls have the UCP slightly, but it's generally pretty neck and neck.
00:01:29.740 Is this good news for the UCP or bad news?
00:01:35.220 If you're Daniel Smith right now, how are you taking the news of this poll?
00:01:38.820 Well, I think if I were Daniel Smith, I'd probably be quite encouraged that three months ago I was a lot further behind than I am now.
00:01:47.440 Problem with these dead heat polls is that you really can't predict how it's going to break because you can win a seat by a couple of dozen votes.
00:01:57.300 I mean, federally, I've seen seats change hand on as few as two votes.
00:02:02.280 Yeah.
00:02:02.420 So.