[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

What specific protest or ad plan, in which ridings, with what budget, run by whom, produces more persuadable voter contacts than 90 days of door-knocking?

I guess that depends on how persuasive you consider door knocking to be. Is it more persuasive than meeting people in other public places where they won’t have the ability to just not answer the door or may not be there(home) at the time?

'You don't need a recall campaign to talk to people', sure, that's true.

But a recall gives you:
- a clear local target
- a public reason for being at the door that does not sound like partisan recruitment
- a hard deadline, for that 'sense of urgency' to make contact
- and a media hook that forces coverage of the underlying issue.

An actual election campaign also provides those things, and there’s always a hard deadline for an election. I don’t see the media coverage as a positive in this case because the entire campaign was too disorganized and I’m of the opinion that the predictable end result isn’t going to be helpful in the long run.

I think the biggest part of the problem was that it was presented in far too partisan of a manner. The message shouldn’t have been focused primarily on getting rid of the UCP, it should have been focused on getting rid of the MLAs who voted in favour of using the notwithstanding clause when there was no need to.

“This MLA violated the charter rights of these teachers so the party needs to find a more suitable representative” is going to resonate a lot more with a person who will vote for the conservative choice on the ballot no matter what(I think there may be a few voters like that in this province) compared to “we need to get this party out and the party you don’t like in”. If the goal was to send a message to our representatives that using the notwithstanding clause as they please is not ok, that in my view was the better approach rather than making it a partisan issue.

This misses the point; Nicolaides only won by 385 votes in 2023. That's it. Assuming that Caged Great's 10% holds for every volunteer's list (he said 100/1000 were people who voted UCP before and said they won't be next time), that's potentially ~651 votes that he's lost, more than his margin of victory last go around.

I think you underestimate how many people will tell you what you want to hear to avoid a political discussion or to simply get you to leave their doorstep.

Signing a petition and telling someone what they want to hear or even what you actually feel at the time for that matter doesn’t guarantee that someone won’t vote differently when it actually matters. Because that comes after someone else has had a chance to refute what you told them, there is no pressure to avoid upsetting the person you’re talking to face to face and they know who they actually vote for is kept secret.