1. For the NDP's Alberta victory to be replicated here, a whole lot of political earthquakes would have to happen. Ones that are, alas, not very likely to happen.

In many ways (and in no way should this diminish the accomplishment of the NDP), the 2015 provincial elections were something of a perfect political storm for the NDP.

Despite the phenomenal performance of the NDP on Tuesday night, it is helpful to remember that the two rightward parties (PC and its farther-right rival, Wildrose) outpolled the two leftward parties (NDP and Liberal) by a 52-45 margin. Now, to NDP's credit, that is not only hugely better than the prior election (2012, which had some special circumstances we'll get to in a little bit), but it is also better than the 2008 provincial elections, where the split was greater than 20 points.

All that said, it still shows that they won, despite the fact that the party garnered just 41 percent of the vote. Such is life in a multiparty system, of course, but for the NDP to win in the way they did, it needed two independent events to take place that would be a tough sell, sight unseen.

NDP needed a near-perfect split of the right, and it would need a collapse of the Liberals to consolidate the Left. Miraculously, it got both.

We'll get to the rightward split in a moment, but suffice it to say that the near-even split between the PC and Wildrose doomed the majority party, because they wound up losing to Wildrose candidates in safe right-leaning ridings, and losing to NDP candidates in every marginal seat, courtesy of bleeding centrist support to NDP, and right-wing support to Wildrose.

The Liberals, already weakened both nationally (they slid to the third party position in 2011, behind the Conservatives and the NDP) and locally (they slid from 26 percent in 2012 to 10 percent), were the victims of a general sense that the NDP was better positioned to be the alternative to the bickering rightward parties. The Liberals absolutely limped out of Tuesday night, relegated to just 4 percent of the vote province-wide, and with just one member of the legislature.

That, by the way, is counter to what "normally happens" in Canada. In the 2011 federal elections, for example, it was the two left-of-center parties that combined for nearly 50 percent of the vote, but split it just enough (31 for NDP, 19 for the Liberals) that the ruling Conservative Party held on despite getting just 40 percent of the vote (the Wildrose is a provincial party and did not compete in the federal election).

Therefore, for this type of result to be replicated in the United States, you would need to see a formal split of the GOP into a Republican and "Tea Party." The two camps still have a healthy distaste for one another, for sure. But to develop a wholly separate campaign apparatus, and to do so even on a state level? There is no sign of that yet, and in those places where Democrats are presently weakest, they would need such a schism to claw their way back to relevance. A better message alone won't do it.

2. The NDP benefitted from a colossal comedy of errors by the leadership of the ruling PCs.

Look: I will not even attempt to insist that there aren't Republican leaders in America who are capable of shitting the bed as forcefully as PC leader Jim Prentice did in this campaign. But it is hard to imagine someone replicating the strategy and policy errors made by the PCs in this election.

Start with a simple one: he did not have to call for the election. When he announced early last month the call for a May 5 election (yes, election cycles in Canada are amazingly short), it was immediately and roundly criticized, most notably perhaps by Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. In a soft economy, it allowed Prentice's opponents to nail him on the expense of an early election.

A more complicated gaffe dealt with his handling of the Wildrose opposition to the right of his party. To understand that dynamic requires a bit of history.

When the last provincial elections occurred in 2012, the big story was the emergence of the splinter party to the right of the PC majority: the Wildrose Party. Wildrose had been in existence for about a decade, but had taken off in the 2012 election cycle, actually leading the PC in virtually all pre-election polling.

In an odd way, this allowed the PC to neuter the two left-of-center parties (the NDP and the Liberals). When pre-election crunch time came, the PC was able to sell itself, essentially, as the sane alternative to Wildrose. When all was said and done, the two right-of-center parties in the 2012 elections combined for 78 percent of the vote on Election Day, with PC holding onto their majority by a 44-34 percent margin (and maintaining a whopping 61 of the province's 87 legislative seats).

That was not, properly understood, a sign of how far-right Alberta was, though. It was a sign that the province's centrist and left-of-center vote were fairly well terrified about the prospects of a Wildrose majority. The combined Liberal/NDP vote, which had been around 35 percent of vote in the prior election, cratered to just under 20 percent.

Fast forward to the late 2014. In an effort, perhaps, to try to consolidate support ahead of elections, Prentice tried to smother his conservative foe by assimilating them into his party. In the moment, it may have appeared to be a masterstroke. In the end, it may well have been a disaster:



Only months ago [Prentice] was seen as his party’s saviour. He accepted 11 Wildrose floor-crossers, seeming at one stroke to roll up the right-wing opposition under his office carpet. But in fact he was sowing his own destruction. The bitterness lingered, spilling over into nominations and then the election. Several floor-crosser ridings were re-captured by Wildrose on Tuesday. Danielle Smith’s Highwood thundered back to the party she abandoned. The floor-crossing ploy — too clever by half, Prentice critics said — turned out to be a key factor in driving conservatism out of office after 80 years.

One has to assume that Prentice and the PC believed that by getting roughly two-thirds of the Wildrose caucus to switch parties, Wildrose voters would recognize that their right-wing insurrection had come to an end, and they would grudgingly return to the PC fold. That was a gross miscalculation. Wildrose grew, if anything, more hostile to the PC, creating an even more contentious two-way split of the right-of-center vote.

Critics also contend that Prentice's remedy for the economic trauma in Alberta (caused in no small part by the energy economy, which has been getting thumped as of late) was pure political toxicity. As our own resident Albertan James Lambert noted last month:



Prentice's situation only grew more precarious after he finally released his long-anticipated budget in March. Not only did it include cuts to health care and education, it also included 59 tax hikes and increased user fees, including a re-institution of an unpopular "health care levy." It was a "bad news" budget that Prentice presented as bitter, but necessary, medicine for Albertans to swallow. Yet it was also a budget that had something for everyone—something for everyone to hate, that is. By putting forth a tax-and-cut budget, Prentice breathed new life into his opponents on the right and the left. At this point, the warning signs for the Tories had grown obvious, but Prentice nevertheless persisted in calling for a snap election on May 5, perhaps because the ossified PCs, in power for 44 consecutive years, had been so used to leading that they couldn't comprehend losing.

Of these three glaring errors, one is impossible to replicate here: in America, there is no discretion on when elections are called. The second is unlikely: you would need to have a viable right-leaning third party to stage that kind of a mass defection. The third is the only one that is plausible, but would again only be an enormous political liability if there were a viable alternative for offended hyper-conservative voters.

3. Alberta is considerably less right-wing than its historic support for the PCs might indicate. And it is nowhere near as right-wing as America's pockets of red territory.

It is absolutely worth reading in whole, but Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason's post-mortem on Alberta makes a critically important observation:



The reality is that the ground began to move long before this election was called. Alberta is a province that has been radically altered in the past five to 10 years, in large measure because of the hundreds of thousands of people who have poured into the place from across the country and around the world. It has become increasingly urbanized, with its two largest centres, Calgary and Edmonton, led by young, progressive-minded mayors whose personal ideologies transcend strict party doctrine. They could be as comfortable with parts of the New Democratic Party election platform as they could with the Progressive Conservatives. As it turns out, so could many of their constituents.

Even Danielle Smith, the one-time leader of Wildrose who was part of that 2014 mass defection to PC (and who wound up losing her riding as a result), penned an op-ed in the immediate aftermath of the PC catastrophe in which she made the argument that the rise of the NDP was predictable

Now, to wade through the article requires stomaching a heaping spoonful of "they lost because they weren't conservative enough" boilerplate, but some of the argument here is worth exploring:



Through all this, progressives were winning major victories on LGBTQ rights. The public was already highly sensitized to equality issues because of intolerant comments by a Wildrose candidate in 2012 who stated gays would burn in a “lake of fire.” In 2014, the more extreme social conservative views of a few Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers also came to light. Both conservative parties needed to prove they weren’t going turn back the clock on issues of morality. With the Liberals and NDP leading the way, Alberta was brought into the 21st century by revising nearly 30 pieces of legislation including the Marriage Act, the Vital Statistics act, the Human Rights Act and the School Act to make Alberta a leader on LGBTQ issues.

Can one imagine the leader of the "most conservative" party in Texas, or anywhere else in the South, referring to legal protections for the LGBTQ community as bringing the state "into the 21st century?" Neither can I.

And therein lies a key difference. A lot of folks see the voting patterns in Alberta, and the petroleum-dependent economy, and make the automatic parallel to Texas. But, ideologically, the comparison is not an accurate one. Danielle Smith's view on gay rights (not wanting to "turn back the clock") would get her branded as an extremist liberal in vast pockets of the conservative American South, no matter her views on taxation or government regulation.

In effect, this is why trying to draw parallels between this one notable and historic progressive win and the American polity are so problematic. Structurally, the comparison cannot be made fairly. Ideologically, the comparison cannot be made fairly. While the temptation to say, "if they can win there, we can win anywhere," is enormous, it doesn't hold up terribly well to scrutiny. The lesson of Alberta is that a competent campaign, given the right circumstances, can score a transformative victory. But the fact that those "right circumstances" are very difficult to replicate in the United States cannot simply be ignored for the sake of convenience or in the name of 2016 optimism.