Having planned all along to dismiss the current campaign as meaningless (see yesterday's post), I find myself in the midst of what promises to be an interesting election, one in which the campaign period seems to have produced enormous changes in Canadians' voting intention. Elections do matter, and the campaign month regularly confounds what the eve-of-dissolution polls predict.
The actual campaign -- the ads, the signs, the relentless jetting about, the soundbiting -- remains disaffecting. It's striking that none of the parties accurately predicted what the voters might do this month, and none seems to have had strategies to shape it or to cope with it. Surely none of them (including the NDP) controlled or drove the changes. The voters' intentions changed, that is, but it is hard to see that the parties' campaigns produced those changes It is as if the voters and the campaigners have been moving on separate tracks throughout April.
How would one write a history of this electoral season if the efforts of the parties themselves seem to have had so little to do with actually making that history? Dunno....
