Alberta Votes, Redux:  How Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Managed to Lose Huge

Pollsters, Pundits, the Media, and Academics Ironically Make Danielle Smith Lose Election

I chose the word “manage” in the title above.  Losses can be managed every bit as well as can wins. As I noted in a prior post, the 2012 Alberta provincial election was an extraordinarily strange one, in the sense that, in true Presto Manning (Presto long, longingly, and lovingly presaged an apocalyptic bouleversement of the right in Alberta, resulting in earnest/in another prairie fire; shed no tears for Presto, though, for he can always watch it on SUNtv from the afterlife) fashion, pollsters, pundits, the media and academics decided from day one that Wildrose would sweep to a massive majority.  But nowhere, just by being a human being, walking around, doing things human beings and citizens do daily, could one find any evidence that this foregone conclusion could be met.  After I wrote my blog post, Calgary-based writer Will Ferguson had some similar observations in the Glib and Stale for April 27, 2012.  He said that, if pollsters wanted to get it right, maybe they should talk to actual people, instead of robocalling or spamming them.  When it becomes not only cost-effective but massively profitable to send robots bearing cans of spam to people’s dwellings, this eventuality shall certainly event.

But in the meantime, let’s consider, again, why pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics got so behind Danielle so fast (it wasn’t just those boobs on wheels), and how it may have hurt her.

Obviously, in Canada, the only mainstream media there is is right wing.  People like Lawrence Martin long ago pointed out this piece of obviousness, and people who had lived in Canada for decades prior had lived it as a perpetual consequence of their lives being lived in Canada.  The further right you can go on the political spectrum, the more you can promise in terms of complete freedom from any kind of regulation or moral obligation or civic responsibility.  Since capitalism tends not towards competition but towards monopolies and oligopolies (routine gas-price fixing that now and then gets a tap on the wrist, etc.), it’s just obvious that the canwests, the murdochs, the bellglobemedias, the rogers’s, the shaws, etc., will just naturally back a party like Wildrose that promises to let them assemble price-fixed monopolies (Enmax, anyone?) and mutually-fulfilling oligopolies.  So duh, it is completely in the interests of the univocal (right-wing) media and its pundits to force, at any cost (money, truth, whatever) the election of the furthest right party, the Wildrose.  A media pundit who refused to back the Wildrose would be. . .hypothetical.

Pollsters need to make money.  Pollsters go where the money is.  There is just no percentage in purveying polls that show centre-left parties doing well.  Who pays for polls?  Who pays the pollsters?  In most cases, it’s the media oligopolies themselves and the moneyed parties themselves.  How could pollsters ever, ever come up with a poll that supported anything other than the richest furthest right party?  To do otherwise would be to go out of business.  You don't like it?  Ask the mafia.  You don't support the mafia, you get kneecapped; you don't support the right, you go out of business. 

As for academics, well, duh, pollsters, pundits, and the media are NOT going to talk to academics who don’t toe their party lines.  Duh. So they get Jack Mintz on speed-dial; if Jack isn’t already doing it, I could provide his pro-forma right-wing responses fresh n’ ready via recording on my answering machine each day by 8 a.m. Give me a week and I’ll have Jack Mintz’s responses media-ready on a daily basis through 2014 (then my rates go up). As against this, an eternal stereotype is that academics trend left (funny no-one at Texas-based University of Calgary ever got that memo), but it’s a fact that academics need exposure, too, and it is simply career-crucial to get to the heart of the high-rise fire and see and be seen. . .and to do that, you’ve gotta jump when they tell you.  I could spell this out in greater and more refined detail if anyone wanted, but no-one should be surprised that even academics who should know better get co-opted into the right-wing mediaspeak—they’ve just got too much to gain by so doing.

So why, with the massive support of pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics, did Danielle Smith lose?

Well, the first thing is, is that people just don’t like to be told.  Even very, very stupid people do not like to be told what they’re about to do.  Smoke a joint?  Maybe, whatever.  Go to jail for it?  Damn straight, I gotta try that!  People do not like to be told what to do. 

Secondly, by being lovingly and lavishly coronated hourly by pollsters, pundits, media, and academics, Danielle no doubt began to feel very queenly.  So when her candidates, some of whom even the Tories had rejected, started to come out as racist and homophobic, she was all about free speech, not just plain knowing when what’s wrong is wrong is wrong.  Perhaps if she hadn’t been told she was going to handily win a huge majority, she might have been a tiny little bit more thoughtful, and thought to herself, “gee, maybe I might just need those pederast votes somewhere.”   Yes, it seems like a bit of a reach, but because pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics kept telling Danielle she was sweeping to a majority, she ran like a frontrunner, one wanting to avoid any kind of controversy, and simply pooh-poohing everything and never answering, never confronting, never engaging, and only lamely stating, following her mentor Steve, “we will not legislate on contentious social issues.”  

(Parenthetically, it is also funny how tone-deaf the Wildrose was by constantly repeating how the Tories had been doing this or that wrong for “40 years.”  Uh, duh, when you’re not even elected and didn’t take opportunities to try to get elected, and when your sitting rump traitor caucus is essentially comprised of Tory defectors, and when you spent a lifetime supporting the Tories and building your career out of it, it just looks beyond silly to complain about the last four decades.  The (er,) densest voting bloc in Alberta has been voting Tory for 40 years, and Danielle keeps repeating that something has been going wrong for “40 years”?  You just told the majority of Alberta voters for nearly half a century that they are idiots, you idiot. Who was her campaign manager?  Tom Flamesagain?  Some Texas turnip?  People that stupid get hung in Dallas for not having a better lawyer or a cousin named Duke who knows one.)

So anyway, pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics have a bit of a task on their hands.  They all got behind Danielle for as much as they were worth—in for a penny, in for a pound.  They spared no cost or obligation to get her elected, but voters shut them down.  What will the PPMA do next?  More attack ads, is my guess, about which I will have more to say later.  For now, though, pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics can reflect on how they, by their lust for cash, desire to be on the winning team, aggressive refusal to consult with voters, and primping and prompting of Danielle Smith, created a devastating loss for the Wildrose.
-zr