Endgame

A few notes on the Insightrix poll released today.

For the NDP and the Sask Party, there's both significant opportunity and significant risk in the numbers.

From the NDP's standpoint, the downside obviously comes in the surprising regional breakdowns which show the Sask Party with a narrow lead in the NDP's city strongholds. While it would be shocking if those results were replicated on election day, it looks like a few more of the NDP's urban seats will be in play than would have been expected earlier in the campaign.

The good news, though, is that the high number of undecided voters across the province suggests that Wall is far from having earned the trust of enough voters to be assured of forming government. Which means that if the NDP controls the message for the last week of the campaign(as seems likely so far), there's easily enough of a swing left to push the final result into the NDP's column.

Of course, the Sask Party will have the converse reaction to the results. And it'll be interesting to see if Wall is forced to come out of hiding to try to win over some of the large number of undecided voters, or whether he'll gamble that enough leaners will break his way without his doing anything to overcome the NDP's push.

As for the Libs...well, this may be my last mention of them for the campaign, as it's now looking like their 10% result from the previous SWNA poll (which I charitably figured to be an outlier) was in fact accurate, if not generous.

To put the Libs' 9% standing among decided voters in context, take a look at the historic Saskatchewan polling data from Environics. The only time in the past decade when the Libs' support had ever dropped into the single-digit range was in October 1999 - immediately after a significant chunk of its party had left to form the Sask Party, and the rest of its remaining caucus had joined a coalition with the NDP.

Yet two polls in a row have now put the Libs in that territory. And this is before both Karwacki's bizarre debate performance, and what figures to be another strong late-campaign push from the NDP to stop the Sask Party.

In sum, the campaign's endgame is (not surprisingly) down to an NDP vs. Sask Party contest for Saskatchewan's undecided voters. And it'll be interesting to see whether Calvert can replicate his closing ability from 2003 in order to keep Saskatchewan on a progressive path.