Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacks
Prentice didn't lose because of his campaign platform, he lost because of a decade of baggage from his predecessors ending in the disastrous Redford government. He could have campaigned on finding world peace and still lost the election.
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I don’t believe that at all. Prentice was sitting at over 40% in polls as of December 2014. He had strong support up until his budget. What lost it for him was asking Albertans to look in the mirror then raising taxes on the people and not touching the corporations. His whole campaign came off as arrogant and out of touch with the people. The problem was that he wasn’t wrong and his budget was probably going to be a fairly effective one, way better than anything the Wildrose tried to throw out there.
So he lost his support of the right who embraced “no new taxes” and the Center who didn’t want to see a wave of Klein era cuts. There may be a stain of previous PC governments, but his demeanour did it to himself. Why not call an early election when you have 40% support. It wasn’t Redford that took him down, it was him. The only way the past haunted him is that people saw that same arrogance from the PCs before and wanted no part of it, but it was him that acted that way. The worst prt is as a lefty I would take him over Kenney 10 times out of 10 and I think he would have navigated the recession reasonably well.