The New Democratic Party provincial council meets in Vancouver this morning to conduct a grim post-mortem, looking for cause of death of their election hopes.
There’s been five weeks of media analysis, so they have a lot to wade through.
It’s an amusing body of work, since many of the explanations of what happened during the campaign are coming from people who had no idea it was happening at the time.
For example, a consensus has emerged that Premier Christy Clark changed the contest with an outstanding performance during the TV debate.
But the prevailing view in the few days of coverage after the debate — mine included — was that three of the four leaders did well and there was no clear winner.
Giddy B.C. Liberals, from a much-happier perspective, have also been analyzing how they managed to pull off the historic upset.
So there’s room for review of how we media pundits blew the call and were as startled as everyone else by the result.
It would normally be mortifying to realize that after paying close attention to the political scene for a long time, most of what I thought I knew about the 2013 election was dead wrong.
Oddly enough, it’s been an amazing, rejuvenating learning experience to look back and reflect on how off-base I was. Much of the awkwardness is eased by the fact it’s shared so widely.
So here are an assortment of lessons learned:
• Never trust opinion polls, especially if they confirm your impressions.
All the public polls were wrong about nearly everything. I’ve always thought there was a certain amount of black magic and witchcraft involved in their analysis of their data. But I’ve never been able to fully resist letting them influence my views.
If you spend your days wondering what people are thinking about politics and someone presents you with a scientific study that says “this is what they think,” it’s hard to avoid buying into the conclusions.
Not any more.
• Victoria is not B.C. The capital and the Island skew by and large to the NDP. So their thinking tends to dominate the small political world around the legislature. I absorbed some of their certainty that Election 2013 was in the bag, and discounted the fact B.C. is four or five political regions with different things going on in each one.
We all share one licence plate, but there’s a world of differences in our outlooks.
• Everybody thinking the same thing doesn’t mean everybody is right. Groupthink is a comfortable way to reinforce your assumptions — right up to that point where you find out everybody is wrong. There was room for a contrarian position in the pre-election guessing game, but it went mostly unoccupied.
• It turns out jobs and families are important. The B.C. Liberal message got discounted a bit in this corner. It sounded motherhood. There weren’t a lot of sophisticated angles to dwell on. But who needs them? The emphasis on jobs, families and a future for kids was enormously appealing. That’s what people really care about. B.C. Liberals stressed it day in and day out, and people liked what they heard.
• Elections are more about the future than the past.
The B.C. Liberals had an insipid track record over four years, preoccupied by the harmonized-sales-tax debacle. I thought the mistrust and suspicion over the HST would run right up to May 14. But it seems to have ended on April 1, when the tax was abandoned.
People got what they wanted and moved on to other issues.
Dix will recount his lessons learned this morning. They’re probably a lot more painful and profound than mine are. But whether they’ll cost him his job is probably still up to him to decide at this point. There is no one in the party who has the high ground from which to say: “I told you so.”
Just So You Know: The above is adapted from a speech (“Learning to Love the Margin of Error”) I was invited to give to the Canadian Club of Victoria this week. They are an engaging group of people who have meeting for more than 100 years.
They sing O Canada at their meeting, and they sing it loud and proud.
