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'Im a little bit jittery,' Laurie Throness, seen here in Port Moody, B.C. on March 22, 2012, said in an interview Thursday.

John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail

A final count of ballots this weekend will determine whether Laurie Throness, the Liberal candidate forced to resign from his party in the middle of the B.C. election campaign, will have a seat in the legislature.

Im a little bit jittery, Mr. Throness said in an interview Thursday. We prepared our scrutineers, and were all ready to go.

For most candidates in this falls B.C. election, the verdict from voters was clear on Oct. 24, but in at least four ridings where the preliminary count is close, the final count that begins Friday will determine winners and losers.

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Mr. Throness, who won the riding of Chilliwack-Kent in 2013 and 2017, was pressed to quit his party just 10 days before election day following a string of controversies, including his remarks at an all-candidates meeting where he equated free contraceptives with eugenics.

He remained on the ballot listed as the Liberal candidate and many voters had already voted by mail before he quit a factor that could give him an edge. On the preliminary count, he was 195 votes behind New Democrat Kelli Paddon, and elections officials in the riding still have more than 7,300 ballots to count.

He would sit as an Independent if he does manage to keep his seat, and although he doesnt anticipate a warm welcome in Victoria from his former caucus colleagues, he said he would enjoy the freedom of being politically independent.

Across the province, Elections BC has more than 640,000 absentee or mail-in ballots to count an unprecedented number that may slow the final results.

We expect the count to take at least three days, but there still is some uncertainty. We have never counted this many mail-in and absentee ballots before, said Andrew Watson, communications director for Elections BC.

Premier John Horgans NDP secured enough support in the preliminary count to be assured of a majority government, but the final shape of the legislature has yet to be determined. The NDP lead in 55 ridings, while the Liberals lead in 29 and the Greens in three.

But four of those ridings were deemed too close to call on election night, and they are all traditionally strong Liberal seats.

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The Liberals governed British Columbia for 16 consecutive years until the 2017 election produced a minority NDP government supported by the Greens. Now the Liberals face a reckoning after their worst showing in the popular vote and lowest seat count in seven provincial elections.

The scale of the Liberals' defeat will be clear after the final count. While they cant hold Chilliwack-Kent, they hope to keep the other three.

The riding of Richmond-South Centre was held by Linda Reid, who represented the Liberals since 1996. Ms. Reid didnt run again and the Liberals ran a star candidate, Olympic athlete and Richmond councillor Alexa Loo. After the preliminary results, Ms. Loo is trailing NDP candidate Henry Yao by 124 votes. There are more than 5,200 ballots to count.

Another bedrock Liberal riding that could change hands is Vernon-Monashee. Incumbent Eric Foster has held this riding since 2009, and won by a wide margin in 2017. This time he is leading by a razor-thin margin of 183 votes over the NDPs Harwinder Sandhu, and Elections BC has more than 8,500 ballots left to count.

With more than 7,300 ballots yet to count in Abbotsford-Mission, Liberal incumbent Simon Gibson is leading by 188 votes over New Democrat candidate Pam Alexis. Mr. Gibson held the riding since 2013, and it has been a safe Liberal seat long before that.

Jordan Reid, the NDPs field director, said her party will have more than 300 scrutineers on deck this weekend, including a number of lawyers, to watch the final count in each riding.

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Certainly our priority is, of course, the tightest races where there are those chances that margins may shift and change, she said.

The NDP encouraged its supporters to take advantage of the mail-in ballot options, she added. Were cautiously optimistic about the results.

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Final counts of B.C. election ballots to determine if Liberal Laurie Throness will have seat in Legislature - The Globe and Mail

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The mainstream media began circling the wagons even as the votes were being counted on Tuesday. CNNs Jake Tapper saw what was happening early and began telling viewers that all that talk about a Biden landslide was always a pipe dream. By Thursday, The Washington Post was beginning what most would view as the Herculean task of rehabilitating the pollsters whose predictions they had been citing to predict the very landslide Mr. Tapper was now dismissing as a pipe dream.

Nate Silver, the liberals odds-maker-in-chief, had been predicting that it was basically all over long before the votes were counted. Just prior to Election Day he said the data gave Joe Biden a 90% chance of winning. His acolytes were predicting not only that the former vice president would sweep President Trump from office, but that a massive Blue Wave would give Democrats control of the Senate and allow them to increase and further consolidate their control of the House. The Washington Post reported a week before the election that Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in Wisconsin by 17 points, and CNN gloated that same week that Mr. Biden had an 11-point popular vote lead nationally.

They were gleeful and hardly contained themselves as they predicted the demise of the hated GOP as visions of 1964 and 1974 danced in their heads.

Oh, there were a few spoil-sports out there suggesting that pollsters had learned little if anything from their failure four years earlier, but their betters dismissed them as third-raters or in the bag for Mr. Trump. They knew from the data that Democrats would beat Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and that Texas was a toss-up within reach of the Biden campaign. Mr. Bidens people and Democratic strategists obviously believed their pollsters as they poured tens of millions of dollars into states they insisted they could flip.

Following the 2016 elections, Democrats and progressives decided they had to try to understand rather than simply demonize the folks who living outside their urban oases. The deplorables who had inexplicably rejected Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump were a mystery they knew they had to figure out to return to power. Democrats even organized what one called safaris to flyover country to see what might be going on out there. The effort was short-lived, however, as they opted instead to simply attack the new president as Vladimir Putins racist, traitorous stooge rather than to try to come to grips with the problems and feelings of those drawn to an outsiders message.

To them, Mr. Trump was a dangerous, racist buffoon and before long they convinced themselves that even those under-educated deplorables they just could not understand shared their views. They managed to persuade themselves and those living with them in the bubble they inhabited that impeachment, embarrassing the president and calling him names would make them popular with a public they believed just had to share their opinions, News outlets from MSNBC to PBS and from The Washington Post to The New York Times carried report after report detailing their view that rural, small-town voters, farmers and miners were discovering that Mr. Trump hadnt delivered for them and would abandon him this year.

All this collapsed on Election Day. Mr. Trumps base hadnt vanished; indeed, one was hard pressed to find a voter who had supported him four years ago who wasnt ready to vote for him again. As the votes were being counted, the pipe dream was revealed to be either just that or something far more sinister; an attempt by anti-Trump progressives in the media and elsewhere to suppress the Trump vote. It didnt work and they were shocked to learn that the man they had spent so much time demonizing as a racist got more non-White votes than any Republican in 60 years.

In the end, their favored candidate, Joe Biden, may win the White House in a squeaker because we still live in an evenly divided nation, but Republicans held the Senate, increased their strength in the House and even netted a new governor and held or even increased their hold on state houses across the country. Voters denied progressives the unified government they sought in an election that will leave at least half of the nations voters feeling cheated, the media and the pollsters who cook the books for them with virtually no credibility and progressive billionaires who made this the most expensive election in U.S. history wondering what they got for their money.

If the pollsters had been right and liberals had run the table, the progressive dream of remaking the country and the U.S. Supreme Court would have been in reach. But as various news organizations began reporting just a few days after the election, Democrats are revising the Biden transition plan and wish list as it belatedly dawns on them that their pipe dream was little more than that.

David A. Keene is an editor at large for The Washington Times.

More here:
Democratic strategists and their expensive liberal pipe dreams - Washington Times

U.S. Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville told out-of-state donors to Sen. Doug Jones campaign to go to hell during his victory speech Tuesday night after defeating Jones in a bitterly fought Alabama Senate race.

Tuberville, the first-time candidate and former Auburn football coach, made the comment at the Renaissance Hotel in Montgomery when he came out to address cheering supporters shortly after the Associated Press declared him the winner Tuesday night.

"Tonight, the liberals in California, New York, and Washington, D.C., learned the hard way that Alabamas Senate seat cannot be bought, Tuberville said. If youll allow me to quote one of my opponents many campaign ads: They can all go to hell and get a job as far as Im concerned.

The crowd roared its approval.

The Jones' campaign spent almost $25 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, about four times what the Tuberville campaign spent.

Tuberville referred to a Jones ad critical of the way Tuberville left coaching jobs at Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech, and Cincinnati, calling him a quitter. The ad shows a clip of Tuberville leaving the field after a loss at Cincinnati in 2016, yelling into the stands at a heckling fan, Go to hell. Get a job.

The incident was widely publicized at the time. Tuberville resigned at the end of the 2016 season, ending his coaching career.

Read this article:
Tommy Tuberville to out-of-state 'liberals who gave to Jones: Go to hell - AL.com

According to Liberal sources, party officials have consulted Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the most senior Victorian Liberal in federal parliament, and he strongly supports suspending Mr Duong from the party.

Victorian senator James Paterson and Victorian MP Tim Wilson - long-standing critics of the Chinese Communist Party - also support the move to suspend Mr Duong.

Senator Paterson said he supported suspending Mr Duong, but all Australians deserve due process and "only the courts can determine guilt or innocence".

"Any party member facing serious charges like these should be suspended until the facts of the case are clearly established," Senator Paterson said.

Mr Duong, also known as Sunny Duong, is suspected to have links with Beijing's overseas influence arm, the United Front Work Department.

The investigation by counter-espionage agency ASIO and the Australian Federal Police at least partly focuses on Mr Duong's alleged activities in trying to influence figures in the Liberal Party's Victorian branch, security sources have confirmed. The evidence won't suggest alleged plans to engage in foreign interference were advanced, but only preparatory.

The AFP alleges Mr Duong has a connection to a foreign intelligence agency, but has not named which country.

Mr Duong has been connected to the Liberal Party since the 1980s and ran as a candidate for the party in the state seat of Richmond in 1996.

While he has been involved with the party for a number of decades, senior Liberals played down his influence, saying he was never a major figure.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg supports suspending Mr Duong from the party.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The 65-year-old had not been returning associates' phone calls in the months leading up to his arrest on Thursday. He was granted bail in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Thursday afternoon and will appear for a committal mention hearing on March 11 next year.

Mr Duong had complained to one associate that he had been stopped by authorities when returning from an overseas trip and had his computer and phone searched.

The arrest followed a year-long investigation by the Counter Foreign Interference taskforce, led by ASIO and the AFP. A number of Melbourne properties connected to Mr Duong were raided by the AFP on October 16.

If convicted, Mr Doung faces a maximum 10-year jail term.

He is the first person charged under Australia's foreign interference laws enacted by the Turnbull government in 2018, which criminalised the act of working with a foreign country to influence Australia's democracy.

The most important news, analysis and insights delivered to your inbox at the start and end of each day. Sign up to The Sydney Morning Heralds newsletter here, The Ages newsletter here, Brisbane Times' here and WAtoday's here.

Anthony is foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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Frydenberg supports suspension of Liberal Party member charged with foreign interference - Sydney Morning Herald

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

One of the recurring themes from the left about the election results is that they lost or didnt do as well as they had hoped not because their ideas are terrible, but because about half of all Americans are racists or morons or illiterate or just plain bad people.

Whatever else it is, it is certainly a different approach to persuasion.

Part of the liberals problem is that they were misled by their own pollsters, who told them repeatedly in a variety of ways that most of America agreed with them on most issues. They were so convincing that donors (looking at you, Mike Bloomberg) were persuaded to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on races that were never really close.

Ive already noted in this column that among the losers in this election cycle are opinion researchers. But the extent of the inaccuracy is worth examining.

Opinion researchers spent a lot of time talking about the shy Trump voter and they will blame those voters for missing the actual results so badly. But thats nonsense. The real problem is that pollsters systematically oversampled Democrats because thats who they thought would actually show up or because it made their numbers look better.

The bias-driven inaccuracy spread well beyond the presidential race. In the North Carolina Senate race, Real Clear Politics had Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham ahead of Sen. Thom Tillis in every survey leading up to election, with the average 2.6%. Mr. Tillis is ahead by a point.

In South Carolina, Ron Faucheuxs average of surveys had Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham up by 3 points; he won by 10. In Montana, Mr. Faucheuxs average had Republican Sen. Steve Daines and Democratic challenger Steve Bullock even. Mr. Daines won by 10. In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was supposed to win by 10, while he won by 20. In Kansas, Republican Roger Marshall was supposed to win by 3; he won by 12.

You get the point. In every instance and at every turn in this campaign, the polling bias was in one direction and was based not only on a misapprehension of Trump voters, but also on a misapprehension of all voters.

The intellectual and moral collapse of opinion research was widespread and uniform.

The job of the opinion researchers in any campaign is to tell the truth, especially when its ugly. He or she is supposed to tell a candidate: Thats a great idea, unfortunately, everyone hates it.

In this cycle, few of those conversations happened. Consequently, folks on the left in places as diverse as MSNBC and The New York Times expressed their outrage or disgust at the election results and the idea that their countrymen might not be as woke as they had imagined or been told by their pollsters.

But really, they are angry because they were surprised and looked foolish because they expected something that was never going to happen the mass acquiescence of ordinary Americans to the more daffy and dangerous parts of the liberal agenda.

Thats the risk when the one person in politics who is supposed to tell the truth the researcher becomes just another cog in the propaganda machine.

Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.

Link:
Liberal propagandist pollsters predicted blue wave that was never going to happen - Washington Times