Quote:
Originally Posted by powderjunkie
Rural votes are pretty much worthless to the NDP. Every plausible flip is in Calgary (and Lethbridge-East).
The margins are so absurd in truly rural ridings that it's pointless to chase them.
|
It's pointless on a seat-count basis, but it's not pointless on a wider eletoral strategy. There are suburban voters who empathize more with rural voters than they do with inner-city folk. Right-wing parties have been very good at navigating these heavily polarized climates, particularly with the insinuation that the rural communities are the heart of 'real Alberta/Canada/America', etc. Left-wing parties tend to fall into the trap of accepting those divisions, thinking that they can win based simply on having the policies that benefit the most people. But that often fails because people often aren't voting out of their own self-interest.
If you're the NDP, you don't reach out to rural Alberta to try to win seats there, you do it to try to position yourself as the party that wants to push past division and polarization. The Harris/Walz campaign in the US right now is a great example of this... to win the 'heartland' swing states, it's not enough to just have policies that benefit the majority of the people in those states... they need to actually win the hearts of those states by showing they care about farmers and factory workers, even when those voters will still vote overall for Trump.