(update from October 1st, Trevor Moat has stepped down as the candidate. The vote was a tie on Saturday and decided by a coin toss.)
I have to admit I am surprised to hear that Trevor Moat defeated Donald Galloway for the Green party nomination for the Victoria by-election.
The party members voted yesterday and from reports I hear the turn out was low and that Trevor gave a much better speech than Donald. The Greens went to raise $9,000 for Trevor's election campaign afterwards which is good for them as they will need $100k+ to have any chance of winning.
From everything I had heard, Donald Galloway was the preferred choice of the leader and was the sort of candidate that the media would take seriously as a threat because his background and his stellar set of endorsements. I. like almost everyone else, assumed he would win hands down. He does not seem to have taken the nomination vote seriously and not made sure he had 150 to 200 supporters in the seats ready to vote for him.
This is a classic case where a guy looks great on paper but is just not ready to get into politics because he lacks all the actual skills needed to win an election. The Greens are much better off with Trevor Moat as the candidate even if it looks very unlikely that they could win with him. When you have a favoured candidate that can not win a low turnout nomination you just have thank the election gods that they saved you from a humiliating election campaign.
I think the NDP will be happier running against Trevor Moat than Donald Galloway, on paper it looks like they dodged a bullet. I also think the Liberals will be happier because the Greens now have the very hard task to sell people on the narrative that they are ahead of the Liberals in support. The Liberals are now "comfortably" the #3 party in the race.
What do the Greens do now? They need major league endorsements of Trevor Moat. They need a fulltime campaign manager that knows how to win, if they were smart they would be on the phone to American Green Lynne Serpe and get her to come up here now. They also need to have a very robust ground campaign, Trevor Moat needs to shake every hand in the riding twice and not sleep till after the by-election.
Honestly, unless I see something to tell me otherwise, I think the Greens will only do marginally better than in 2011.
1 comment:
I was there, but not eligible to vote because I live 10 metres outside the riding. Both candidates gave good presentations. I would have voted for Trevor had I been eligible. I think he has a humble, realistic view of his own abilities which is something that a good campaign team can build upon.
If Cull is the selected NDP candidate, it will be interesting to see if some of Murray Rankin's erstwhile-Green endorsers move back over to the Green Party. For all her gardening savvy, Elizabeth Cull has not been strong in the sustainability field.
Who are the Liberals fielding anyway? Any whisper of that?
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