wackado
Mulcair blew the election on the niqab issue.... now JT will gather all the orange wave in Que. ,,, Oh well
Elvislevel
Anybody have a theory of how the niqab issue hit the NDP but not the Liberals who have the same position? One theory is that the pro-racism parties picked up NDP votes in Quebec but then lost it all in the rest of Canada, where the "defending women" argument makes a lot of people want to throw up.
deathtokoalas
it's nonsense. if anything, it seems to have helped the liberals in toronto and vancouver, which the conservatives needed to win. and, the polling has not consistently demonstrated a bump for the conservatives in quebec, either. my read is that a bit of sampling error coincided with the fiasco, and the media jumped all over it like the vultures that they are.
you can explain the ndp's fall almost entirely on their collapse in quebec. they were never running much higher than 20 anywhere else, to begin with.
when people look back on this election, they're going to point to the niqab as a massive blunder, not as a brilliant tactic. it's going to cost the conservatives the election on a massive urban and suburban collapse.
it's beginning to look like they may lose every single urban seat they have outside of alberta, and even calgary and edmonton are starting to loosen up.
the ndp got a lot from the bloc in 2011, yes. but, they also got a nice ten point swing from the liberals in quebec. now, they're down that same ten points to the liberals and really only a couple to the bloc, while the conservatives have stayed roughly steady. i don't think you really need an explanation for this at all. it was just soft support, based on perceptions and other things. the biggest thing trudeau has going for him is that he's not ignatieff - and that he's a native french speaker, as well. and, everybody should have known it was going to be hard for the ndp to hold bloc support.
the media wants an easy to understand story. they want cause and effect. i don't think that's what is actually happening. i think the lead was sort of an apparition in the first place, and all that soft support is just realigning with where it really always was in the first place.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/elections/parties-take-aim-at-trudeau-as-liberals-lead-polls/article26768494/