Tories feeling blue in Elmwood-Transcona after trying to convince orange voters to see red

When a federal byelection was held in 2023 in the southern Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar, there was no question the Conservative Party of Canada would hold on to the profoundly conservative seat.

Nonetheless, the Conservatives poured money and resources into that race in a concerted effort to extinguish any political spark remaining in the hearth of Maxime Bernier and his People's Party of Canada.

The strategy was successful. Conservative Branden Leslie amassed 65 per cent of the popular vote, while Bernier was only able to draw 17 per cent in one of the few Canadian ridings believed to be receptive to his brand of populist conservatism.

An attack from the right is no longer a threat to the Conservatives.

In this week's Manitoba byelection, the Conservatives employed another unusual strategy.

They tried to retake Elmwood-Transcona, an eastern Winnipeg riding that's belonged to the NDP for all but four years of its existence, by trying to ensure voters were keenly aware of the two-year governance deal between the New Democrats and the unpopular governing Liberals.

For most of the summer, Conservative campaign signs in the riding referred to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh as "sellout Singh" and depicted him in a handshake with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The Conservative strategy was clear: attack the New Democrats, whom a significant number of east Winnipeg voters have always liked, by going even harder on the Liberals, who have never enjoyed better than middling support in this corner of the city.

Running against one party by tying them to another was a novel strategy, U of M political studies Prof. Royce Koop said earlier this month.

"The Liberals are very unpopular. They're certainly not competitive in that seat," and so an attempt to tie the NDP to them "makes some sense," he said.

"But you don't see that all the time."

After what happened on Monday night in Elmwood-Transcona, you may never see it again.

When the strategy is too successful

When the final poll was counted on byelection night, NDP candidate Leila Dance had 48 per cent of the popular vote, four points better than her Conservative competitor, Colin Reynolds.

The Liberal candidate, Ian MacIntyre, received five per cent of the popular vote.

That proved to be a disaster for the Conservatives, especially when you consider that the Liberal candidates in Elmwood-Transcona the last three general elections garnered from 12 to 30 per cent of the vote in the riding.

On Monday, the Liberal vote cratered in Elmwood-Transcona to a degree unseen since 2011, helping the NDP's Dance beat Conservative Reynolds by 1,158 votes.

This was not because the Conservative election strategy was unsuccessful. Rather, it appears to have been too successful.

It's entirely possible Pierre Poilievre's party managed to remind voters in a riding rarely enamoured with the Liberals that most of them really don't like Trudeau and his party right now.

For diehard left-of-centre voters, switching from the NDP to the Conservatives is not an easy manoeuvre. Nonetheless, the Conservative campaign appeared to do everything in its power to ensure voters who for all intents and purposes never vote Conservative that the Liberals are not the best political option for them right now.

Some Liberal-NDP swing voters appeared to vote orange instead of red. Or rather, just enough to ensure the NDP retained Elmwood-Transcona.

If the Conservatives ever find themselves fighting the NDP in a two-way race again, it's doubtful this third-party strategy would be repeated.

More to Liberal unpopularity than carbon tax

At this point, you may be wondering why the Conservatives took this gamble. The simplest explanation is it may not have looked like a gamble to them.

Poilievre has achieved great success among die-hard conservative voters by promising to eliminate the tax on carbon, a key Liberal policy plank. What the Conservative strategists may have minimized is the other reasons Canadian voters may have lost interest in supporting Liberals. 

The Aga Khan trip. That visit to India in costume. Gropegate. Blackface. The SNC-Lavalin affair. WE charities. Chinese interference. The ArriveCan app. A Waffen-SS member in Parliament. The housing crisis. This is a partial list in roughly chronological order.

The Conservative campaign ads aimed at Singh in Elmwood-Transcona only mentioned the carbon tax. That speaks to Conservative voters. It doesn't speak as well to Liberal-NDP swing voters.

It would be fair to suggest other factors led to Dance's win. Singh's decision to dump the confidence-and-supply deal during the byelection campaign could not have hurt.

The Conservative campaign's decision to keep Reynolds away from debates and interviews with reporters, however, likely played no role, as this is standard practice for Conservative candidates in the Poilievre era.

In the next general election, Elmwood-Transcona's borders will shift east to encompass the Dugald area. The Conservatives should pick up a few hundred more votes east of the Red River Floodway, based on poll-by-poll data from the 2021 election.

That alone won't guarantee a victory for the blue team in Elmwood-Transcona. Dance will be entrenched as an incumbent and the NDP will have fewer fronts to defend and attack in Manitoba (four, counting their existing three ridings and an attempt to take Winnipeg North from the Liberals) than the Conservatives (they hold seven of Manitoba's 14 ridings and will likely target others).

What usually wins close election battles is anything but novel: knocking on doors, identifying friendly voters and getting them out to vote on election day.