On growth patterns

Following up on last night's post about the total number of memberships sold for the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race, let's note that the timing of the new influx of members may be highly significant in figuring out what's likely to happen in the June leadership vote. Just over a week ago, Murray Mandryk was writing this:

(W)ith a week to go before voting registration closes, party memberships are likely around 10,000 (9,344 as of a week ago Monday, according to NDP sources) and will now likely be half the 2001 total. While that's better than the estimated 5,700 members in January, it doesn't constitute a new groundswell of support.

So why does that timeline matter? Remember that one of Dwain Lingenfelter's initiatives since entering the race last fall was the 1,000 Club, intended to get a thousand supporters to recruit 10 members each for a total membership influx of 10,000. (Which in retrospect would have been plenty to swamp his competitors.)

But there's little indication that the membership numbers moved at all when Lingenfelter had the field all to himself. And indeed it sounds like the totals actually bottomed out in January after he'd had three months to build support.

In turn, it's only after the other leadership candidates entered the race that membership numbers started to grow significantly. And even there, it looks like there was a huge flurry of activity late in the game when all of the campaigns were presumably working to full capacity, with more members added to the list over the final two and a half weeks before the deadline than in the previous three months.

From my standpoint, that pattern would suggest that it's unlikely that Lingenfelter has managed to turn the new membership numbers in his favour to any degree. It's possible that his campaign decided to hold back before an all-out April blitz - but it seems far more likely that the boom since the other candidates got into the race in earnest points to a relatively balanced inflow of new or renewed members. And that can't bode well for Lingenfelter's chances of overwhelming his competition on the first ballot.