Christy Clark steered the Liberals to a stunning majority victory in Tuesday’s provincial election.
That win included electing Liberals Doug Bing in Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows and incumbent Marc Dalton in Maple Ridge-Mission.
The vote in both ridings was expected to be tight, as evidenced by Clark’s three visits to the area during the campaign.
Bing won by close to 700 votes, while Dalton’s margin exceeded 1,300. The latter is even more surprising given that Dalton took the riding in the previous election by just 68 votes, and was subject of a recall petition during his first term.
The Liberals has trailed by as many as 20 polls leading up to the election, and by as much as nine the day before the vote. Even Clark admitted surprise on election night, with her party earning a 50-33-1-1 majority. But she didn’t even win her own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey, losing by 785 votes.
So what happened?
NDP leader Adrian Dix will take much of the blame, for his dour demeanour, reluctance to answer specific questions, and flip-flop on the Kinder-Morgan pipeline issue. The party actually fared worse in the election under him than it did with previous leader Carole James in 2009, by two seats.
Some are suggesting that Dix didn’t run a negative enough campaign, while the Liberals are gloating that their jobs-and-economy platform struck a chord.
Surely some voters were swayed by attack ads that focussed on the memo mistake Dix made when he was ‘just’ 35, or feared the legacy of previous NDP governments. But it was more.
Ipsos Reid determined from an election day poll that, basically, NDP voters didn’t show up – they stayed home, while Liberal voters didn’t.
At 52 per cent, it was one of the lower voter turnouts in B.C. history, so a small number of voters were able to influence the greater outcome.
A quarter of voters only decided who to vote for in the final week of the campaign, and many of them – by a seven per cent margin – decided to not to take a chance on change.
And, yes, 65 per cent of exiting voters polled rated the economy as a ‘very important’ issue.
In the end, according to Ipsos, Liberal voters were more motivated to stop change rather than those for the NDP who wanted change.
– The News