I made a mistake at the beginning of this campaign in stating that my opinion for "who is going to win" is simply "this is Harper's majority to lose". A lot can happen in six weeks and, as 2004 showed, Stephen Harper has been on the receiving end of a rude electoral awakening. The dynamics of 2011 are different than that of 2004 though; Harper is on the inside, has a history with voters now and entered the campaign with the lead (2004's days of the Tories struggling in the upper 20s seem like a distant memory to most politicos, let alone voters).
That is why I go on the record to say that if the campaign continues to be days like today, the Prime Minister is likely to be handed 154+ seats in exactly six weeks; the Tory vote is currently in the upper 30s, with some polls showing it cracking the 40 threshold while the Liberals hover around 25%, sometimes more, sometimes less. The job of Michael Ignatieff is to rattle the cage and turn this into a dog fight.
If you look at the policy planks that the two leading parties released today (a somewhat distant promise of income splitting from the Conservatives and scholarships for poorer students from the Liberals), the boring theme seems to take hold. The Tories didn't announce their income splitting plan to attract new voters to the fold; this was purely targeted at that socially conservative base that will come out in droves on election day for the CPC; often it's not how many supporters you have in close elections but how many bother to vote! The Liberals, for their part, are targeting the wrong group if history offers any insight; students only vote 15% of the time, on average, and it's fair to say that most of those 15% are committed to a particular party anyway. The highschooler parents that Mr. Ignatieff is banking on might not materialize either -- middle-class families don't consider themselves "poor" and the tuition policy stipulates that one must be in the lower class to qualify; lower-class families likely already look at university as an unattainable dream. In summary, the Tories did a classic maneuver in shoring up the base early; the Liberals aren't likely to do more with their move than reinforce the Tory line that they're spend-thrifty.
Now, before I end tonight, looking at the NDP and the Bloc, it's amazing again to see how much Gilles Duceppe has been commanding attention so far this campaign -- the coalition talk is still in the news, largely thanks to the BQ leader and the Quebec party is coming across as important and instrumental, which will serve the third-place party well on election night if it holds. Jack Layton went to the former NDP heartland of Saskatchewan today in an attempt to shore up support. It's no surprise that Jack is spending a lot of time out west since that's where the NDP hopes to make big gains this year. Aside from being a pain in Iganatieff's side by also talking of coalitions (both the alleged 2004 one with the Tories and a possible one later this May), the NDP leader is having difficulty in conveying anything more than a protest movement -- this will hurt Jack as he has, for the fourth time in as many elections, begun his campaign by stating that he's "running for Prime Minister"; he risks being seen as too reactionary and not as proactive as a PM should be if this continues to be the main coverage the NDP gets.
Day 3 Winner: The Conservatives
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