Has the long campaign helped or hurt the Conservatives?

(Submitted by Simon Druker) There are exactly four weeks left until you head to the polls. This election campaign has been one of the longest in Canadian history.

The long campaign was supposed to play to the Conservatives’ favour, as they’d be able to out-spend the Liberals and NDP and control the message.
But that hasn’t been the case, says political scientist Mario Levesque with Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

“It has probably not gone quite as expected,” says Levvesque. “The Conservatives, they’re pretty bruised right now and trying to recover. For example, they had the Duffy trial, which dragged them down. They’ve had the fact they’ve had deficits every year they were in office and two recessions.”

However, he says there is one positive for the Conservatives.

“For them, they’ve almost bottomed out. I don’t think they can really go much lower. So from their standpoint, trying to appeal with these little boutique announcements. They can only go up,” says Levesque.

The boutique announcements are meant to appeal to individual ridings, especially key ones.
The latest polls have the three major parties in a virtual tie. And while polls have been inaccurate in the past, fellow Mount Allison political scientist Wayne Hunt says the race is definitely tight and will remain so until the end.

“This stage in the campaign, it is very tight; there’s no doubt about that. The big point is, one way or another, each party is trying to figure out a strategy that will help them get swing voters in swing ridings,” says Hunt.

But with a campaign filled with surprises so far, Hunt says we should expect more of the same.

“We can expect a few black swan events — events that come entirely out of the blue, where no one predicts them, but they can really change the shape of things,” he adds.

Hunt says the Conservatives are usually better at getting people out to vote than the other two parties.