Monday, November 06, 2006

Dead man walking

Whew. I'm reading the Ekos poll of Liberal delegates for the Leadership Convention, and there's basically nothing good for Ignatieff here. As I've suspected, Ignatieff has a very, very tough time getting any serious growth on the second or third ballots. To give you an idea of his problems, 44% of Dion's delegates say they would pick either Kennedy or Rae, but only 10% would pick Iggy. Probably the worst news for the Iggy camp is this, the combined 1st and 2nd ballot picks for the 4 front-runners.



Now, obviously the ballot is not going to go to 136%. Rather, these are the maximum numbers of people who could, theoretically, support these candidates on the second ballot, based on their stated 1st and 2nd choices.

So Kennedy looks like he's in trouble. Barring some extraordinary event, like all of the also-ran delegates voting Kennedy on the 2nd ballot, he looks likely to be disqualified for the 3rd.

But then it gets interesting. Kennedy's supporters are overwhelmingly going to split for Dion or Rae, and very few are going to go to Ignatieff. This assumes Kennedy doesn't direct them to vote for one candidate in particular - Kennedy's supporters are legendarily loyal, and he could easily be a king maker.

But Ignatieff is in real trouble if he can't break in to the mid-40s on the 3rd ballot. I'm starting to get more and more optimistic about this.

I'm going to work with these numbers a bit, and see if I can make a crude simulation of what might happen.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank God. Kennedy was interviewed on CBC Newsworld yesterday and I thought he was just as much of a tool as I did when I lived in Toronto and his office was located a few blocks away.

Oh and, Kennedy wants to increase immigration to assess our negative birthrate. Talk about cutting off the head to save the legs. Now Garth Turner is trying to get Canadians to have more kids by suggesting income splitting.

Watching the leadership is so cringe-worthy, it's frightening. The only leader I wouldn't personally feel sick to my stomach to see as Prime Minister is Dion.

Anonymous said...

How do you factor in something like the fact that 17% of delegates don't want Rae?

What will the impact of that be?

Also, because Kennedy and Dion have already talked alliance, what is a reasonable percentage of Kennedy supporters going to Dion?

john said...

Jeremy: I've made an attempt to address both those questions in the next post, here.