On testing grounds

Alice has an interesting post up about the NDP's HST advertising strategy. But while the current list of riding targets certainly can be seen as "target practice" in some sense, I'd think there's at least one more calculation involved in the NDP's decision as to how to distribute its advertising.

Here's how Alice sees the choice of ridings where the NDP's ads are running:

Once it was decided to target Conservative seats, the choice of ridings could be reasonably guessed by looking at the list of the NDP's best Conservative-won seats in 2008, by vote-share, for both Ontario and British Columbia. The party has held all but 3 of the 10 at some point in the last 20 years federally. And Leader Jack Layton personally attended the nomination meetings of 5 of the 8 currently nominated candidates, according to my notes, and many of these communities were also visited during the party's spring task forces on the recession and recovery, so they've evidently had the seats in mind for some time.

Where the 2008 margins were large in BC, they often represented Liberal voters who stayed home or switched to the Conservatives (as suggested in an earlier analysis of BC voting patterns), and short of those Liberals returning home, the NDP needed a new strategy to shrink the Conservative vote in those ridings.

In Ontario, they've picked their only unheld seat in the northwest, and four seats in southwestern Ontario who've been hit by the decline in the manufacturing sector, and where the party had reasonably strong local campaigns in 2008 and has strong local candidates in place. While the party's vote dropped somewhat across southwestern Ontario in the last election, I did notice a lot of movement back and forth between the NDP and Conservatives in the southwest during the daily tracking polls of a number of pollsters over the course of the campaign.

So, by an incrementalist narrow-margin approach to targetting seats, not all these would be next on their list. But one thing long-time stalwarts of all parties learned in 1993 is that hot-buttons and a desire for change can make large margins melt away. We may not be there yet, but political veterans also know not to wait for opportunities to appear, they work to create them and to be ready to maximize their advantage.

Now, it seems safe to say that the ridings selected for the NDP's ads reflect somewhat of a hybrid approach. As Alice notes, they probably don't represent the absolute best choice of targets solely from the standpoint of being the NDP's most likely pickup opportunities in Ontario and B.C.; instead, they seem to have been chosen as the ones most likely to flip from Con to NDP in an effort to expand the playing field.

But it's worth noting what may be behind the limited scope of the ad buys in the first place. If the NDP's plan was to use the current ad campaign to build the kind of widespread public discussion and desire for change required to support a massive shift in party loyalties, it wouldn't make much sense to limit the scope of the ads to ten ridings. At the very least, the ads would blanket all of the ridings fitting the pattern of Con-held seats where voters might be frustrated by the HST - and arguably a province-wide push would be appropriate at the outset.

Instead, the current ad campaign looks to be more of a test run to see what results the NDP can generate in the most fertile areas - while leaving the rest of the province as a control group for comparison. If the ads themselves don't shift public preferences in the target ridings compared to the rest of Ontario and B.C., then the conclusion will presumably be that the ads aren't worth a wider investment - which will presumably mean looking for other ways to reach voters with the HST message.

On the other hand, if the NDP does see a substantial shift in its target seats which can be traced back to the ad campaign (along with an enthusiastic enough public response to help fund more widespread distribution), then I'd fully expect to see the campaign expanded. And that's the point where the strategy might shift from the familiar narrow targeting we're accustomed to, toward a realistic opportunity to generate an orange wave across two of Canada's three most populous provinces.