News1130 election analysis

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – News1130 spoke with Omni TV Political Reporter Kim Emerson who compared this election campaign to others he has covered.

“It’s perhaps the most negative, nasty, vicious campaign that I’ve ever seen, but that’s only coming from the Liberal party.  I’ve never seen any party that attacked so personally and with such vigour against any other person.  I mean, you just have to look at the Liberal platform and you see that Adrian Dix’s name is mentioned more often than Christy Clark’s name.”

“I thought the NDP carried out a mostly ineffectual campaign in the sense that they weren’t doing anything to grab anyone’s attention.  They’ve never done that before, they’ve always tried to be front-and-centre.  But in the last week and a little bit they did turn things around and they did start to focus on what the Liberal record was.  And the Liberals complained that they (NDP) were going negative.  Well, they’re going negative about ‘what you’ve done.’ It seems like a silly argument.”

“It is different in many ways but in some ways it’s been almost exactly like the 1991 campaign when the NDP was swept into power with Mike Harcourt.  Rita Johnston was kind of the caretaker premier for a bit of time.  The same way Clark is in many ways.  Johnston went to many plants and buildings and things like that; Christy Clark has done the same thing.  But Clark’s brand messaging has been light-years ahead of what Rita Johnston’s was back then.  She keeps hammering away at ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and investment in BC.  So, her messaging at buildings and plants and mines and things has worked pretty well.

On whether it was a mistake for the NDP to eventually go negative.

“I don’t think it was a mistake because the one thing the public really hates is all the negativity and all that nastiness, even though negative ads, we know, they work.  I think it was in some ways the right thing to do, in many ways.  But when you keep getting pounded over and over and over again, and you put up absolutely no defense whatsoever, you’re going to have serious problems down the road.  So they did have to change things, they did that by bringing up the government’s record.  And if the government thinks that its own record is negative they have no one else to blame but themselves.  But they (NDP) did have to mount some kind of defense.  If they had just kept going the way they were then the Liberals may have been able to move up even farther (in the polls) than what they have done so far in narrowing the gap with the NDP.”

How will things play out this time around?

“I don’t think it’s going to be any different than what anybody thought from the very beginning, other than (the election) may be a little closer than what people thought.  But I still think at this stage of the game we haven’t seen anything that would really change the narrative out there in any dramatic way. So I think you’re going to see an NDP government as of about 9 p.m. or 9:30 p.m., and most likely at this stage a Liberal opposition.  And there is a possibility a Green Party candidate or two that gets in.  I think the Conservative vote, for all intents and purposes, has collapsed, but I’m pretty certain at this stage that we’re going to see an NDP victory.”

Emerson believes the economy will be the number one priority for whichever party is elected.