Saturday, April 23, 2011

What a strange campaign, the calm of Easter Weekend

For the first couple of weeks this election was a snoozefest with most of the people going through the motions with the passion of Stephen Harper for Russian history or Michael Ignatieff for Hayekian economic theory.

Last week the campaign suddenly came alive when the polling numbers for the NDP in Quebec, and then the rest of the nation, suddenly starting moving upwards quickly.   Just this was happening the Easter weekend hit and the political campaigning slowed right down.

Tomorrow the campaigns will start up again, but not in full swing.   Many people are not going to be ready for politics on Easter Monday.   It means that in some ways whole new campaign will be fought for six days before May 2nd.  Instead of the normal six week campaign, we will see a frenzied and crazy six day campaign.

The Bloc, Liberals and Conservatives need a whole new game plan to deal with a surging Jack Layton.   He is surging enough that the NDP could win a seat like Brome-Missisquoi.  A riding level poll came out today that had the NDP tied for second in the riding with the Liberals, but the pollster noted that the NDP support dramatically climbed each day of the poll and that the NDP could now be leading.

Ignatieff, Duceppe and Harper had not thought that the NDP might come out of nowhere in this election.   Many of the political pundits and experts are dismissing this NDP surge as ephemeral and that people will see 'sense' by election day and vote as they always do.    I for one do not know what is going to happen in eight days, but the 41st Federal Election promises to much more interesting that I thought it would.

No comments: