Making strides

Barbara Yaffe writes about the promise of a federal NDP breakthrough. And while most of the information is relatively familiar, there's one surprising indicator of just how far the NDP has come over the past few years:

(W)hile few have been watching, the party's membership list has grown to the same length as that of the Liberals. And the NDP is set to spend the same as mainline parties in the next campaign.

(Said Jack Layton) "We're going to run an $18-million campaign and match the Liberals and Conservatives for the first time in history."

Based on an extremely quick look, I haven't been able to find total numbers from the last few years. As a result, it's not entirely clear just how much of the gap has been made up recently.

But from what I've been able to track down (see p. 21 here), Lib members outnumbered NDP members by a 6-to-1 margin as recently as 2003. And if the NDP has indeed managed to close that gap in just four years - despite the Libs getting the inevitable membership boost from a leadership race in the meantime - then there's plenty of reason to suspect there's a shift in progress which hasn't yet registered in the polls.