Danielle Smith’s big win
Smith shared her plans to victory with Rick Bell months before the 2023 election
Danielle Smith has never been interested in building a big tent political party.
It was October 2022 when Smith landed in hot water with United Conservative Party MLAs from Calgary when she told Postmedia columnist Rick Bell that she would be okay with her party losing half its seats in that city.
Fast forward seven months and that’s what happened when Smith’s UCP were re-elected on May 29, 2023.
Smith made clear in her interview with Bell that she was only trying to win over voters who valued, in her own words, “freedom, family, faith, community, free enterprise.”
For Smith, that meant focusing on Alberta’s rural communities and small cities, ridings where the UCP supporters who propelled her into the party leadership had rebelled against former premier Jason Kenney and his government’s COVID-19 public health measures.
“I don’t intend to try to win every vote,” Smith told Bell in the October 2022 interview. “I recognize if I’m stretching to reach certain seats I’m probably going to lose Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre.”
Mentioning NDP leader Rachel Notley’s Edmonton-Strathcona riding, Smith said “there’s just different values in those two ridings.” And apparently, in many others, Bell quipped.
This interview explains a lot about how Smith approached the last election and why her government has since pushed forward with a fairly divisive political agenda.
Smith’s close proximity to COVID-19 skeptics, right-wing groups like Take Back Alberta, and her long history of bizarre and controversial statements made her unpopular among moderate conservatives. She wasn’t helped by the hasty departures of Travis Toews and Sonya Savage, who were seen as being more closely associated with the old PC-wing of the party.
But despite being uncomfortable with Smith’s politics, conservatives still wanted to win in 2023.
A year ago, the UCP was not the electoral juggernaut it was when it crushed into power in 2019 but the party had begun to regain the public support it lost to the Alberta NDP after Kenney resigned as premier months earlier.
Notley’s NDP was attempting to accomplish something that had never been done in Alberta’s history - return to power. Never in Alberta’s 118 years had a party that previously formed government returned to power in a future election. But despite Notley’s party losing their big lead in the polls, they were still competitive.
With most of the nearly a dozen rural seats the NDP had won in 2015 now firmly in the UCP’s grasp and Edmonton safely in the orange column, the NDP traced their path to electoral victory through Calgary and the handful of ridings circling Edmonton known to political watchers as “the donut.”
The NDP recruited an impressive slate of candidates that would have been unrecognizable to New Democrats of a previous generation. Many in Notley’s 2023 slate were more likely to have recently hobnobbed at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon than gotten their hands dirty on a shop floor.
It was a slate designed to appeal to former Progressive Conservative voters in Calgary. Along with a handful of endorsements from former PC MLAs and cabinet ministers, Notley’s NDP were presenting a middle of the road image aimed at moderate conservatives uncomfortable with Smith’s politics.
While the NDP was making big gains in Calgary, where the party spent a tremendous amount of resources in the years before the election, Smith was harder for Notley NDP to pin down than they might have predicted. Smith ran a peek-a-boo campaign by design, with few publicly announced stops on the campaign trail and a thin series of announcements instead of a thick policy book like Kenney had released four years earlier.
The list of things Smith said she wouldn’t campaign on might actually be longer than the UCP’s actual platform in 2023.
A terrifying series of wildfires raging across the province took Smith further off the campaign trail and, when she finally re-emerged at the only televised leader’s debate, she didn’t sound like the scary monster the NDP had spent their advertising dollars telling Albertans she was. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone who had paid attention to Smith’s decades long career in media. She is incredibly comfortable in front of a camera and is very disarming in person.
The NDP made themselves vulnerable after releasing a fully costed budget of their campaign promises, and were caught off guard when asked if it would require corporate tax increases. If the NDP had been running as social democrats, like they did in 2015, this wouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was out of character for the NDP in 2023. Almost immediately the UCP used that promise to stoke fears that the NDP would crash the economy with tax increases.
It’s simplistic to say this was the only thing that sunk the NDP’s chances of forming government in 2023. Notley’s path to victory was steep and narrow, but speaking with UCP MLAs and volunteers about it, they all admit that this moment felt like a turning point on the doors. It allowed the UCP to shift to narrative from “crazy Danielle Smith” to “risky Rachel Notley.”
There was a rumour circulating during the election that UCP campaign manager Steve Outhouse had a sign on his desk that reminded him to think about what voters in Calgary-Peigan were thinking. Smith was comfortable losing half of Calgary, but the working-class southeast riding of Calgary-Peigan was the UCP’s line in the sand.
When the votes were counted on May 29, 2023, Smith’s UCP lost more than half the seats in Calgary to the NDP. The UCP held the line not just at Calgary-Peigan but with a handful of narrow wins in north east and north west Calgary ridings that weeks earlier were believed to be in the NDP’s grasp.
The NDP walked away with 38 MLAs, the largest opposition in Alberta’s history but were still short of winning enough seats to form government. With the exception of gains in Banff-Kananskis and Sherwood Park Notley’s party was unable to breach that big blue wall of UCP voters that Smith was focused on outside the big city limits.
It was Danielle Smith’s big win. The plan she shared with Rick Bell worked and it has defined the politics we are living today.
Two changes for election 2027
In the days following last year’s election, I wrote down a few things I think we should rethink about future elections in Alberta. Here are two of them:
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