Great risks and small rewards

The CP reports on a poll asking whether the Libs and NDP should consider a merger. But the analysis seems completely counter to the results of the actual poll, which suggests strongly that the NDP is far better off staying away from any merger:

A new poll, released as two more left-leaning candidates prepare to enter the Liberal leadership race, suggests a merger of the Liberal and New Democratic parties could be an electoral winner.

The Decima Research poll found that 25 per cent of Canadians believed the two parties should unite.

Voters who supported either of the two parties in last winter's election were even more receptive to the idea: 36 per cent of Liberals favoured a merger and 32 per cent of New Democrats...

In the last election, Decima found 17 per cent of Canadians voted strategically for a party that was not their first choice, motivated primarily by a desire to defeat the Liberals. More than one-quarter of those strategic voters cast ballots for the NDP.

While that's a relatively small number, the Decima analysis points out that the election results hinged on fewer than 20,000 votes in 14 ridings, where the split between the Liberals and NDP allowed the Tories to win. Had the Liberals won those ridings, they would have formed a minority government.

To sum up: sound majorities of the Dippers surveyed don't like the idea, and Canadians in general are even more thoroughly opposed. Even among the party which lost power in the last election, the appetite for change is limited to just over a third of those surveyed.

Meanwhile, based on Decima's own election analysis, any electoral gains for a "united left" (which of course means a Lib-dominated party with the NDP merrily agreeing to its own destruction) would only have resulted in a minority government which would then have had to seek Bloc or Con support. And even that relatively small improvement ignores a substantial portion of NDP voters who weren't at all interested in voting Lib, and may well have voted Cons as their second non-Lib choice. Which means that even for the "stop Harper at all costs" crowd, there may not have been any meaningful benefit to a merger...while the dangers of rightward drift in a Lib-type party with no NDP counterweight could lead to all the more damage in the long term regardless of who managed to win power.

It's only in the face of what sounds like strong disapproval and a lack of any great electoral gain at stake that the article tries to claim that the small group of people receptive to an NDP/Lib amalgamation is supposed to favour a merger. But the majorities in both parties seem to prefer the status quo. And for the NDP in particular, it'll take a far better deal than could possibly be expected from the Libs - and far more foreseeable gains than the Decima analysis suggests - to justify going through the trouble of convincing two-thirds of Dippers and three-quarters of Canadians generally that it's worth taking on the Libs' baggage.