{"id":3078,"date":"2011-06-28T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=3078"},"modified":"2011-06-28T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T13:00:00","slug":"could-have-been-elections-the-liberal-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=3078","title":{"rendered":"Could Have Been Elections: The Liberal-Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In response to my previous “what if” post on running elxn41 under a preferential ballot<\/a>, a few blog readers wondered how the election would have turned out had there been a Liberal-NDP merger.<\/p>\n

The challenge with that kind of analysis is that we have no real way of knowing what 1 + 1 equals. Even merger proponents are not so naive as to assume every <\/em>current Liberal and every <\/em>current New Democrat would vote for a new Lib-Dem Party. The tricky part is figuring out how many would stay home or jump to other parties.<\/p>\n

I’ve run these kinds of exercises before<\/a>, but it doesn’t hurt to update it given the new realities of the day. After all, even though a merger seems unlikely, it will be talked about at various times over the next four years – pretty much whenever columnists or bloggers are looking for something to write about during the otherwise dull life of a majority government.<\/p>\n

I decided to go into this exercise using a “best case” scenario for the Lib-Dems. That is, I assume that every Liberal with the Conservatives as their second choice (17%) would vote Conservative and every NDP member with the Greens as their second choice (21%) would vote Green. But everyone else would vote for the new party. This would give the Lib-Dems a retention rate of over 80% – higher than the hold rate of the merged Conservative<\/em> Party in 2004, despite the CPC being given the gift of Adscam (they held just 78.5% of the combined 2000 PC + CA vote).<\/p>\n

Under this scenario, the end result is largely the same as now – a 160-seat Conservative majority and a 144-seat Liberal Democrat opposition<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Of course, this was the best case scenario. If the Liberals lose a quarter of their voters to the right and the NDP lose a quarter of their voters to the left, then Harper leads the Lib-Dems 178 to 125 seats in this restrospective hypothetical.<\/p>\n

Perhaps <\/em>a merger would make sense in the long term. But anyone who assumes it would be a quick-fix for booting the Conservatives just simply isn’t looking at the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to my previous “what if” post on running elxn41 under a preferential ballot, a few blog readers wondered how the election would have turned out had there been a Liberal-NDP merger. The challenge with that kind of analysis is that we have no real way of knowing what 1 + 1 equals. Even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[579],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun-with-numb3rs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}