r/canadaleft • u/Aggressive-Front-677 • 3d ago
338 projections and the ensuing counterproductive calls of strategic voting for liberals
God I hate making this post cuz fuck electoralism, but this is the arena where majority of Canadian pay attention, so here it goes.
I'm sure many of you have seen the 338 projections being used to convince people who don't want to see conservatives win, suggest people vote liberals cuz look 338 shows they're up! Well, most recently I came across a post on that dreadful liberal r / canada, which was about a conservative candidate being a pos (what's new?), and in the comments I noticed a few times people suggested voting liberals strategically to keep cons out, saying the ndp vote collapsed and of course using the 338 projections as "proof". The riding? North Island—Powell River. Sitting MP? NDP's Rachel Blaney. 2021 election vote share? New Democratic - Rachel Blaney - 23,834 | Conservative - Shelley Downey - 20,502 | Green - Mark de Bruijn - 8,891 | Liberal - Peter Schwarzhoff - 8,251. Yes the greens got more votes than the liberals in the riding. There was even a marxist leninist candidate! I want that person to get more votes.
What's my point? If you see liberals sharing the 338 projections as a way to persuade people to vote liberals to keep cons out, please inquire what riding they're talking about and who has the best chance of keeping the cons out, strategically. I can't comment in that sub cuz I don't have enough karma and automod removed my comments instantly cuz I might be a bot. So if you're doom scrolling and sometime feel like you gotta say something, then maybe this will be helpful.
Please don't come at me about ndp not being worth it. I agree with you. I'm more pissed about liberal hacks using 338 projections as a way to dupe people into making a counterproductive decision.
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u/4friedchickens8888 3d ago
I agree with Steve Boots' criticism of the NDP though, a big part of the good projections from liberals stem from the fact that the NDP dont even seem to be taking themselves seriously at this point... they're too afraid to say or do anything that seems like actual socialism so they come off as just liberals but nicer? It's not helpful and I don't see a candidate in my riding with a snowballs chance in another party. That's simply the reality of it. Choices are very much limited
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u/annonymous_bosch 3d ago
Lol you’re talking about arr Canada, but I’ve been seeing so much blatant Liberal astroturfing even in the NDP sub that it’s crazy. Nearly every comment critical of Liberals or Carney getting downvoted hard.
Canadian Reddit is developing into an echo chamber esp with all the polls, and this is giving me flashbacks of the US elections where every political sub was astroturfed by blue MAGA until the last moment when it became undeniable that Trump had won by a landslide.
PP is a fascist, and I think it’s ok to engage in electoralism that leads to conditions under which it’s easier to organize. So yeah I hope he’s not the next PM, that’s for sure.
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u/Various_Fan_6811 3d ago
The astroturfing of blue maga is interesting because it did nothing towards the regular maga astroturfing which resulted in two very isolated voting groups never ever interacting. The end vote then becomes whichever group is least demoralized.
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u/holysirsalad 3d ago
A few thoughts
- Yep, it’s election season, partisan trolls are out. Liberals hijacking ABC is a sacred tradition.
2. Pollsters engage in electioneering whether they mean to or not. Seat projections, like most gambling activities, are a giant wank; self-justifying, self-fulfilling, autoerotic prophesizing that Schrödinger could only dream of.
- Really shitty thing is the Liberals have been close to tied with the NDP in my riding as long as I’ve been here, and neither the NDP nor Greens are running candidates (though the NDP may have found someone by now, the local RA decided to not campaign). North Island—Powell River Sounds pretty cool
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u/Various_Fan_6811 3d ago
So true and many ridings are like that, open for the taking by any other party but winds up going con due to inaction. It also gets misinterpreted as enthusiastic support for the cons, and not turnout being so tiny even knocking on 1k doors makes a huge difference.
Many missed opportunities, it’s a strategy the PPC have unfortunately been picking up on.
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u/holysirsalad 3d ago
The whole thing is both a nightmare and a joke. With the Greens and NDP here, since the provincial EDAs and federal RAs are mostly the same people, and they’re exhausted from the bullshit provincial election we just had in Ontario. Not only because it was a huge waste of time and resources thanks to Douggie’s somehow-legal snap election, but this federal election is right on the coattails of it.
So cool that incumbents can just say “Oh by the way I decided you guys get to vote next week! Good luck!” Nice fuckin’ democracy
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u/Various_Fan_6811 3d ago
Completely a nightmare. It would be nice to wake up from this nightmare sometime soon
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u/al_spaggiari 3d ago
Take screenshots. Document every boneheaded argument they make because come election day when they're proven wrong they will delete their comments and gaslight you for the rest of your life.
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u/Trickybuz93 3d ago
There’s no way you think r /canada is a liberal sub lmao
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u/Aggressive-Front-677 3d ago
I'm sorry but what makes you think it's not?
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u/pomegranatesandoats 3d ago
it’s been well known for a long time now to harbour and being run by white nationalists. the accusations and evidence about it goes as far back as 2018 and has been reported on even up to the past few months.
i think the reason you’re seeing a more liberal perspective is because of the reactions to the US election- people who don’t usually use reddit politically or even at all are flocking to the subreddit since it would be the most obvious one- given the name to get guidance and talk to other canadians. that sub has had a huge boom over the past three months, in the same way that askcanada and buycanadian has.
i’d say your better comparison would be onguardforthee . that’s the proper liberal sub.
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u/Aggressive-Front-677 3d ago
We're talking about the same sub? Or do you mean canada_sub?
Also when I say Liberal, I mean ideologically, not colloquially.
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u/pomegranatesandoats 3d ago
same sub! so canada_sub was a break off from r/ canada because of a ideological divide between the different fascist groups within the original sub. so like canada_sub is the even more extreme version of r/ canada. if i remember correctly it happened sometime just after pp got elected. so like if i were to put it into party references: canada_sub would be ppc, r/ canada would be like cons to ppc- but more recently a bit more cons-light/libs and regular people who just don’t know what the history is of that sub is. the shift that’s happened there has only been in the past 3 ish months, before that it was staunchly cons to ppc light.
onguardforthee is like lightish-ndp to staunch liberal.
and yes i also mean it ideologically
it’s kind of like how there’s canadahousing and canadahousing2 because the original one didn’t allow the users to be racist enough towards indian people so they broke off- but the og sub is still very staunchly conservatives and if you so much as suggest any socialism housing program- you were downvoted straight to hell
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u/Chaoticfist101 2d ago
Correction.
The OG Canada Housing sub banned all mention of immigration for years and all users who dared to mention that immigration is a factor in relation to the housing crisis.
Canadahousing2 started because thousands of users were banned enmasse by the mods because they mentioned immigration.
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u/Aggressive-Front-677 3d ago
Thanks for the explanation and the breakdown.
I guess to me, all liberals are the same regardless of the degree of racism and government intervention they're ok with. Especially now that red liberals are going to be explicitly adopting austerity economis and neocon war hawk policies as well. I suppose it's important to note that the blue liberals are appealing to more reactionary culture war politics that can create harsher conditions to deal with.
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u/QuietSilenceLoud 2d ago
this is exactly the same kind of "both are shit" rhetoric we saw Russian bots spreading prior to the US election, trying to convince leftwing Americans it's not worth voting.
now they are facing an actual fascist state and are losing their democracy.
It is absolutely vital right now not to elect PP and most people know that.1
u/Aggressive-Front-677 2d ago
I'm sorry if my point came across as such, which is not that people should sit out this election, nor is it to let cons pick up seats. Very specifically, the point being made is that it is not always strategic to vote liberals in every riding, and people should take individual riding and the voting record in that riding carefully into consideration while engaging in strategic voting.
I resent being called a bot when I've spent nearly a decade in grassroots organizing, electoral organizing and been part of coordinating direct action and mutual aid in my local region as well as setting up cooperatives and collectives. But I suppose we will never know who we're engaging with online so I can understand reactionary takes to people truthfully pointing out that LPC and CPC both serve capitalists and their interests and not the interest of the working class.
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u/QuietSilenceLoud 2d ago
Oh, that makes more sense. Yes I agree re riding by riding.
Sorry - I'm glad you're not a bot. Good job organizing. It's so important.
I think this is a rare moment when a broad coalition is kind of needed to stop fascism, which means working with people we usually wouldn't.
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u/mddgtl 3d ago
shit sucks, my riding has been ndp for over 20 years and now some no-name liberal candidate who entered the race at the last minute is polling above our mp. and of course, libs in my city sub were saying "we need to go liberal this time for the best chance of keeping the cons out of power!"
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u/gingerbeardman79 17h ago
338 is recommending Liberal in every riding I've seen where they epically come in 3rd or worst, including multiple ridings with strong NDP performance or even sitting NDP MPs.
I seriously think all this "ABC" is rigged to send voters to the LPC.
Even votewell or whatever the fuck is telling me to vote Lib in a riding where the incumbent [CPC] typically gets 50-ish% of the vote, followed by NDP at 35-40%, and LPC typically falls in the "other" category that sees less than 2% of votes.
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u/Aggressive-Front-677 17h ago
Dude how fucked is that... clearly liberal voters should vote for ndp in your riding, "strategically". But yeah it definitely seems like anytime there have been calls for strategic voting, it's always about giving liberals more votes.
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u/gingerbeardman79 14h ago
it definitely seems like anytime there have been calls for strategic voting, it's always about giving liberals more votes.
Yep, and then they come in third or worse again
[as per basically every goddamn election out here in the prairies]
and liberals bitch at NDP voters and actual progressives in the west for "splitting the vote". Like fuck off and go look in the goddamn mirror already.
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u/voteabc 3d ago
338 projections are highly touted because of their record (according to their website they've missed outside the margin in of error in only 4.2% of riding-level races since inception) but I agree with you that their weakest region seems most likely to be Vancouver Island.
338 is still "recommending" an NDP vote in Cowichan-Malahat-Langford though, as well as in a bunch of other tight races like Elmwood-Transcona and Edmonton-Griesbach, so "vote Liberal everywhere" is absolutely the wrong conclusion to take from the website regardless!
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u/Velocity-5348 LET'S GET UNIONIZED 2d ago
Yep. Even going by 338's numbers it's pretty clear the Conservatives aren't getting in. The question we're now facing is whether or not the Liberals get a majority. We really don't want them having free reign to push neoliberal policies while continuing to equip the people doing the genocide against the Palestinians.
If people start pushing 338 or strategic voting sites, I'd encourage you to share the wikipedia article on your ridings, if it has a history of not voting Liberal. There's a lot in western Canada that never vote Red, but have voted Orange or Green.
I'd also point them to the HUGE margin of error that 338 has for the NDP. Most people suck at statistics, and don't quite understand what that site is doing.
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u/Memory_Less 3d ago
And when Poillievre was getting all the positive polls for years according to the same polling that was good!? Really!
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u/Aggressive-Front-677 3d ago
Sorry do you think I'm shilling for cons?
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u/Memory_Less 2d ago
It read like you didn’t like how the polling was being presented or at least used to support the Liberals. What I was saying is that that is done by everyone, for better or worse.
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u/drysdan_mlezzyr 3d ago
The core issue is, there are basically no riding level polls. They are explicitly just vibe projections using passed votes and current national trend. Broadly, good for understanding the direction of the election, but specifically useless