Press releases and polls: Competing for attention in the election's first week

If you ever wanted to watch Steve Kent get jabbed with a sharp object, you had your chance on Monday when the government invited people to watch the deputy premier receive the seasonal influenza shot. 

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If watching Kent get a shot in the arm wasn't your style, you could spend the afternoon with Susan Sullivan and Clyde Jackman as they toured new gender neutral washrooms at the Murphy Centre.

Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to put ministers in a struggling government in a photo op with a toilet. 

There are just part of the barrage of government news releases that have had the official government newswire working overtime in the days leading up to Thursday's writ drop.

More than 50 announcements last week. Nearly 20 in the first two days of this week. 

Sprinkled in with the flu shot and the new washrooms (and competing with them for attention and news coverage oxygen) were far more significant events such as an overhaul of offshore royalty rates and a new governance structure for Nalcor. It's all part of a pre-writ courtship before Premier Paul Davis pops the big question to the electorate: will you re-elect us?

Pollsters in the field

The PCs will find out fairly quickly if this heavy media push has had an impact. Abacaus Data, a respected national polling firm, is in the field polling voters in Newfoundland and Labrador on their voting intention for this election.

Its poll should be released Friday — one day after Davis is expected to officially launch the campaign.

PC insiders concede they have an enormous task ahead of them, but insist they feel they can win. To do that, they will need to make gains in public opinion every single day of the campaign. 

The governing party was already behind. But the game changer (to overuse a phrase) in the run up to the November election was the October election.

The federal Liberal sweep of this province (and Atlantic Canada) may keep Ryan Cleary awake at night, but it delivered a healthy dose of new voter data to the Liberals and may have further whetted the provincial electorate's appetite for change. 

That desire is what buried Cleary and swept Jack Harris from office.

Could it now devour the provincial Tories and NDP?

The most recent Abacus poll in June had the Liberals way ahead at 53 per cent of decided voters. The NDP was second at 25 per cent, the PCs third at 21.

But that was before the Trudeau surge and the Mulcair collapse. The poll on Friday will give us our first glimpse at the provincial fallout of the federal election.

Is a full sweep possible?

If Trudeau gives the Liberals a bounce into the high 50s or low 60s does that make a clean sweep of the 40 seats a possibility? 

Will the provincial NDP join their federal cousins in decline? And if the desire for change is stubbornly high — as it was in the federal election — can the PCs even hope to make those daily gains they need to turn their hopes around? 

Yes, people overreact to polls. And the only poll that truly matters is the final one, on Nov. 30. 

But that doesn't mean they aren't a useful tool for assessing the state of play at the start of a campaign. And this poll, combined with the opening act by the three main leaders, will help set the narrative for the campaign's opening week.
 
Abacus often goes deeper in its analysis than the simple horse race numbers of party standings. How big is the available pool of voters for each party? Can the PCs win back the unhappy voters who delivered staggering majorities in three straight elections? 

The answers to those questions will let us know if this campaign is a competitive battle or a fait accompli.