On positive outcomes

Following up on this morning's candidate rankings, I'll add one more general post in advance of this afternoon's NDP leadership debate.

While plenty of media commentary seems to be asking questions about whether anybody can land a knockout punch, let's note that a party leadership debate - and particularly one early in the leadership campaign - involves radically different incentives than the election debates where such terminology makes somewhat more sense.

First, the leadership debate isn't a zero-sum game where any candidate has much reason to focus on "knocking out" competitors. Instead, with the membership deadline several months away there's ample time to build on the organizational structure each candidate currently holds - which means that the goal for each candidate should largely be to build name recognition and positive impressions for the campaign to come. (This factor might arguably as the candidates' relative positioning becomes more clear - but for now it's a fool's errand to try to guess as to how the rest of the campaign might play out so as to justify negative contrasting now.)

Which leads to the second point: (arguably) unlike the dynamic in a general election campaign, there's ample reason for every candidate to want to stay on good terms with opponents and their supporters. In part that's based on the leadership campaign itself: since any candidate will almost surely need second-choice votes to emerge victorious, any candidate's attacks on another candidate which causes a camp to close ranks against the attacker will likely serve to narrow the prospects of winning in the end. But it's also based on the fact that the candidates will need to be able to work together within the same party and caucus for years to come - giving each a strong reason to maintain a respectful tone rather than building entrenched rivalries that will reduce the electoral prospects for whoever ultimately wins the leadership, as well as the party as a whole.

Of course, our most recent example of a federal leadership race (the 2006 Libs' contest) didn't fit the above pattern. But surely the end result of that campaign isn't one to be emulated. And so the NDP's leadership contenders would do well to focus on the positive.