Incomplete slate hurts Liberal brand

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This article was published 15/09/2023 (993 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The news on Tuesday landed with a gut-shaking thud in the province’s 43rd general election campaign.

The Manitoba Liberals — the province’s perennial third-place party, which started this campaign with a very real chance to become the balance of power in a minority legislature — failed to field a full slate of 57 candidates.

The Grits’ final tally was just 49, which means that on election day, Oct. 3, voters in Brandon West, Dauphin, Dawson Trail, Flin Flon, Lac du Bonnet, Red River North, Selkirk and Swan River will have no Liberal option.

Leader Dougald Lamont tried to put a brave face on the development, but it was clear he was struggling like a man trying to dig a ditch in the middle of a lake: no matter how quickly he tried to dig himself out of the horrible optics of the moment, the figurative ditch kept filling back up.

“While I regret that not every Manitoban will have a Manitoba Liberal candidate to vote for, at the end of the day, our focus has been on fielding very strong candidates in constituencies where we have a strong chance of winning, of which we have many,” he told the Winnipeg Free Press.

“This is an incredibly strong slate of candidates who can contend and win at the constituency level.”

Perhaps, but this is a case in which the image of a party unable to field a full slate may indeed eclipse the potential of any one candidate. Why, exactly, did the Liberals come up short?

Lamont noted that a few potential candidates were rejected in the candidate selection process.

He also suggested a discernible backlash aimed at the federal Liberal government played a part in dissuading candidates from putting their names on a provincial ballot.

All that makes sense, but does not erase the fact this is a huge moment in the campaign. Right now, the other parties are revising their campaign calculations to determine whether they’re a net winner or loser as a result of the Liberal shortfall.

The first and most obvious theory is that the NDP will benefit the most.

There is no hard and fast rule about where Liberal voters go when they can’t or won’t vote Grit. But traditionally, the prevailing perception has been that a strong Liberal election result harms the NDP more than it does the PCs. Conversely, if you look closely at the eight Grit-free ridings, the absence of a Liberal option is likely not good news for the Tories.

It’s also worth noting that seven of the eight seats in question are currently held by the Tories, with five of those having no incumbent MLA. It is also of interest that just about all of those Tory seats are, in theory at least, prime targets for the NDP.

Brandon West, Dauphin and Swan River, for example, will be very much in play. So, too, could bedroom-community ridings such as Red River North and Dawson Trail, although the dynamics in those two constituencies are a bit harder to predict.

The Tories may be threatened by the lack of Liberal candidates in some ridings, but there are other constituencies in which the PCs actually received good news.

The Manitoba Party, which in theory presented a small threat to the PCs in some rural ridings, did not field a single candidate this time around.

And the Keystone Party, which presents a slightly larger but still modest threat to capture some of the far-right wing of PC support, only nominated five candidates.

None of that will help the Tories in the critical battlefield that is Winnipeg.

Although there will be Liberals running in every city riding, the Green Party — another soft drain on NDP support — only registered 13 candidates.

Fewer Greens and Grits definitely isn’t the worst news the NDP has received in this election.

For the Liberals, it’s all mostly bad news right now, even though fielding fewer than 57 candidates is not necessarily the worst thing that could happen to a party.

First, even when parties present a full slate of candidates, they do not necessarily campaign at the same level in all 57 ridings.

Even the fully funded main parties have to make strategic decisions about how much money and other resources to inject into long-shot ridings.

As the campaign wears on, the parties start reallocating resources to competitive ridings, and away from ones that are lost causes.

Of note: the eight constituencies that eluded Liberal nomination would not have been priorities for the Grits.

Anyone who stepped up to carry the Grit colours would have been largely a sacrificial lamb.

Still, after a promising lead-up to the election, less than 57 seems likes a step backward.

The Liberals had strong showings in recent byelections and have delivered a coherent and somewhat inspiring platform.

But there is some collateral anti-Liberal emotion swirling through the province right now, and despite the fact that it is trained mainly on the federal Liberal government, it seems destined to play a role in this provincial election.

That dynamic, along with the optics of fielding only 49 candidates, means Lamont has to contend with a concern among voters that the Liberal Party is, frankly, less than complete.

That will make Lamont’s task of holding on to his three existing seats, and to his job as leader, exceedingly difficult.

» Dan Lett is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist. This column originally appeared in the Free Press.