With the end of the official candidate debates and (more importantly) the passing of the deadline to sign up new members, the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race now figures to be entering a new phase. But before that starts in earnest, I'll take some time to discuss how the campaign so far has gone for each of the candidates from my standpoint - as well as to toss in some armchair prognostication about how the campaign figures to go from here.
Not surprisingly, we'll start with Dwain Lingenfelter.
The Candidate
Lingenfelter's front-runner status in the race was never an accident, and by most indications he's stayed out in front so far. Having apparently made his decision to enter the race based on the promise of a strong volunteer and fund-raising base, he's put those advantages to good use to stay at or near the head of the pack in virtually every poll, survey or other means of measuring support.
And his time in the private sector doesn't seem to have hurt Lingenfelter's political skills. As Jason noted, Lingenfelter's public speaking has stood out from the pack to go with a thorough command of the underlying policies. And there isn't much doubt that he's kept up his ability to work a room or drive a media narrative.
But there's one additional factor in play that might deserve more attention than it's received. Simply put, it's worth asking why it is that Lingenfelter didn't have to doubt that it would be possible to line up volunteer and fund-raising strength.
The answer may not be obvious to those of us who weren't paying close attention to politics during Lingenfelter's formative political years. But while the younger set within the NDP may tend to see support for Lingenfelter as a matter of bandwagon-jumping or crass calculation, there's no lack of people within the party who built strong loyalties to him personally during the course of the fight against the Devine government. And that factor may go a long way to explaining some of the more curious moves by Link's campaign.
The Strategy
As I've noted, Lingenfelter seems to have largely abandoned his early-campaign effort to play everything to everyone by talking up renewal strategies and youth involvement. Instead, his campaign has focused almost entirely on taking up immediate opposition to the Wall government, and in so doing he's frequently brought up past fights which most would have considered to be behind the province.
But then, the fights surely aren't forgotten by those who participated in them. Which means that there's sure to be some latent willingness to buy into much the same message now. And that figures to be a largely untapped resource, as the circumstances surrounding the last leadership campaign (held while the NDP was in government) didn't much allow for a similar strategy.
If Lingenfelter can tap into the same opposition mindset that built the party to its early-'90s apex - spread by his loyalists through a population that surely hasn't forgotten the era entirely - then he'd naturally serve as the face of the effort. And when one considers that the NDP of that time was five times the size of the party now, that strategy would provide Lingenfelter with an obvious path to take up the mantle of leadership without having to attack his opponents in the process.
The Result
The problem, though, is that such a strategy is fairly limiting for the rest of the campaign. While Lingenfelter can likely move first-ballot support toward himself by accessing fond memories of NDP strength past, it's hard to see how that kind of focus will win him any significant later-ballot support.
Which makes Lingenfelter's campaign into somewhat of an all-or-nothing effort at this point: he'll either manage to draw on enough of the NDP's collective memory to win on the first ballot, or he'll find out too late that there's more of an appetite to work toward the future than there is unmet demand to repeat the past.
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