>I actually agree with you, but those words and phrases: "danger," "sneak," "steal" and "up through the middle" were direct quotes from a friend of mine who is well plugged into one of the campaigns ~ not the CPC one.
And, on reflection, I partly disagree with myself. When parties split or splinter, it is meaningful to talk about vote splits. I suppose what I dislike is the characterization of the third-party beneficiary of a shift of votes from one candidate to another which allows neither to win.
Weak candidates - people lacking both policy sense and the gift of bullsh!t, or people with policy sense but lacking the ability to sell themselves - should confirm the floor of strongly aligned voters for their respective parties. A single strong candidate in a riding should draw most of the unaligned or weakly - perhaps also moderately - aligned vote. But if another party finds a strong candidate, the return of that party's voters to the fold is not theft.
Not knowing Dewar's riding, I'm not sure if it's a proper example; the question is this: was he the past beneficiary of voters who ordinarily support Liberals, or are NDP voters slipping away?
All I can see so far is that the anti-Harper vote has finally coalesced behind one party - as most expected it to - and has moved to the Liberals. The NDP forgot - or ignored - that much of their support was among people who are not normally NDP voters, and got so high on the smell of themselves (polls) that they forgot to guard their tongues. Trudeau, meanwhile, had two bars to clear: the bar of low expectations set by the CPC, and the bar of competence to be PM. He cleared the first one via the debates; he has not cleared the second, but many voters have conflated the two.
