The UCP Leadership Race - An Overview

Each of the seven candidates has been hard at work selling party memberships over the last few months. Their work resulted in 123,915 UCP memberships sold; members can vote in this race via mail-in ballots or at one of five in-person voting locations. 

Throughout the race, numerous polling companies have tried to determine where each candidate sits comparatively. One company, iPolitics, has been running a rolling average for several weeks and has over 4,000 UCP member responses. In this poll, Danielle Smith leads with 43.07% Travis Toews is second with 29.55%, and Brian Jean is third with 11.86%. None of the other four candidates breaks through to double digits. But given this race is a ranked ballot, the winner of these races can be unpredictable. For example, in the 2017 federal Conservative Party of Canada race, Maxime Bernier was ahead in the vote for twelve rounds. On the thirteenth round of the ranked ballot system, Bernier lost by 1.9% when Andrew Scheer received 50.95% of the vote. 

The winner of this race will be decided based on how campaigns run their Get Out To Vote (GOTV). A campaign that relies too heavily on assuming people will mail in their ballots may lose to a campaign that focuses on collecting their supporters' ballots. Case in point - in the UCP leadership review held in May, several thousand votes (apparently) arrived after the deadline and were not counted. Those votes could have drastically changed the outcome and should be a lesson to every leadership campaign. A good GOTV can boost a campaign's vote percentage by quite a large margin, and in a ranked mail-in ballot system, every vote matters. 

The winner of this race will be announced on October 6th in Calgary at the BMO Centre.