that was some sleep. needed that. and, i woke up to some clarity of thought.

i will repeat that a shy tory effect makes no sense in alberta, but there is another party to their right called the alberta freedom party that is one of these faux right-libertarian parties. they believe in freedom of thought, so long as you're a christian; they believe in private property rights, so long as they don't end up excluded, and etc. it's really a "status quo" party, that uses these vague appeals to liberal ideology in order to justify their own dominance. i have a lot of sympathy for libertarians in principle, when they're honest they're the real liberals, but it's so hard to find any that actually are honest and consistent about it, or that even realize their own contradictions. some of my favourite arguments have been with right-libertarians, partly because we're able to better focus on the actual underlying issues - which is so frequently how we address property in this society.

anyways.

in the last election, there were two major parties on the right - the old "progressive conservative party" (which i claim is a redundancy rather than an oxymoron), the tories, and the wildrose party, which was a bunch of these upstart, pro-christian fake libertarians. between the two of them, the tories and the libertarians won a clear plurality, but, in a fitting outcome for the capitalist parties, their competition destroyed each other, and the ndp were able to come up the middle. now, that wouldn't have mattered had ndp turnout not been stronger than expected, but notley would not have won against a united right, and everybody knows that.

so, i might have actually made the same mistake i've been so carefully warning against for so long. i've been yelling for years that when you look at national polls, "undecided" usually means "undecided on the left", rather than "undecided in the centre", and i've cited actual polls that indicate as much, through direct querying. you will no doubt see the same kind of polling come up over the next few months, that asks people if they're undecided, then who they're leaning towards, then who they won't vote for, etc in order to try and build a set of causal inferences around it. caveat: the liberal majority may have thrown a wrench into this, as the opposition is no longer united against the government, and i'm not going to carry this forward, a priori. we'll see what evidence appears about this. but, the logic is nonetheless sound enough: when the tories are in power, the undecided vote comes up on the left, because we're predominantly a liberal society.

but, alberta is a conservative society, and the ndp were in power. so, these high numbers of undecideds and uncommitteds may have actually been wary about the conservatives not being faux christian libertarian enough, and sitting between the conservatives and the freedom party. in the end, they made a pragmatic choice to remove the government, even if they'd prefer a more right-wing option.

it would make the data both consistent and sensible, at least.