{"id":3304,"date":"2012-04-23T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=3304"},"modified":"2012-05-29T13:06:34","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T17:06:34","slug":"alberta-votes-live-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=3304","title":{"rendered":"Alberta Votes Live Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

6 pm<\/strong> (mountain time!<\/em>):\u00a0The much anticipated downtown Toronto Alberta election night party is ready to roll: the Alberta flag has been proudly hung, the Big Rock beers have been opened, and I’m sportin’ a Supportin’ Morton button.\u00a0Polls are still open for another two hours, but the room is already full with a dozen ex-Albertans – and two Ontarians curious to see who will be signing their next equalization cheque.<\/p>\n

7:20 pm<\/strong>: Playing “Ted Morton is the man<\/a>” and “sing a song for Jim<\/a>” to get everyone pumped up. One guest – “ahhh, so that’s how Ed Stelmach became Premier<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

8:10 pm<\/strong>: In most Alberta elections, we’d be calling it right about now.<\/p>\n

8:14 pm<\/strong>: Watching the Global TV live stream online<\/a> – they have a CNN-style touch screen! Sadly, due to James Moore’s budget cuts, CBC will be announcing results via abacus tonight.<\/p>\n

8:42 pm<\/strong>: Current numbers have the PCs leading in 45, Wildrose leading in 22, NDP in 2, Liberals in 1. maybe this is the Dennis Coderre<\/a> bounce.<\/p>\n

8:50 pm<\/strong>:\u00a0 PCs now lead 55-21. And that’s the sound of pundits everywhere frantically re-writing their articles before deadline.<\/p>\n

9:01 pm<\/strong>:And they call it for the PCs. Absolutely shocking. Tom Flanagan blows it in the bottom of the 9th again. Conversation at our Toronto election party:<\/p>\n

“I thought this was supposed to be a close election”
\n“By Alberta standards, this IS a close election”<\/p>\n

9:40 pm<\/strong>: Guess we need to give Alberta Liberals an assist on this one. The ALP vote is down 15-20 points from their usual levels, far and away the margin of victory.<\/p>\n

10:37 pm<\/strong>: And the traditional chant goes up at PC headquarters: “40 more years! 40 more years!<\/em>“. That’s it for tonight all – tomorrow, I’ll try to make some sense of one of the most shocking election nights in a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 pm (mountain time!):\u00a0The much anticipated downtown Toronto Alberta election night party is ready to roll: the Alberta flag has been proudly hung, the Big Rock beers have been opened, and I’m sportin’ a Supportin’ Morton button.\u00a0Polls are still open for another two hours, but the room is already full with a dozen ex-Albertans – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[950,49],"tags":[1030,1049,981,1008,1059,1036,1060],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304"}],"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=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3396,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions\/3396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}