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The Canberra Liberals often attacked by Labor as the "most conservative Liberal branch in the country" want you to believe that the appointment of Elizabeth Lee as leader is a change in direction for a party that has learned from a sixth straight election loss.

"This is a fresh new beginning," the party declared shortly after she was picked by her colleagues on Tuesday.

It's true there are some big changes afoot and her selection is a first on many fronts.

Lee and her new deputy Giulia Jones will be the first female pair to lead a party in ACT politics, and Lee is the first person of an Asian background to be at the helm of an ACT party.

Not since Kate Carnell was chief minister two decades ago has a woman led the Canberra Liberals.

In the 19 years since, six other men have led the party Gary Humphries, Brendan Smyth, Bill Stefaniak, Zed Seselja, Jeremy Hanson and now Alistair Coe. None have prevailed against Labor and the Greens.

Carnell, the only leader to ever win an election for the Liberals in the ACT, last year warned the party against pitching conservative policy to a progressive town, believing that a Liberal victory hinged on ideology.

So does the backing of Lee represent a genuine shift to the moderate wing of the party? Or is it a recognition by the conservatives of a need to recalibrate after consigning themselves to another four years in opposition?

Yesterday's leadership ballot was a moderate against a moderate and that in itself is an indication of the party's acknowledgement they need to change, or as one Liberal MLA put it: "drawing a line in the sand".

And a vote for former leader Jeremy Hanson, however popular he may be, would have signalled a retreat of sorts, so instead it was out with the old and in with the new. The numbers favoured Lee overwhelmingly.

Fronting the press for the first time as leader, Lee said that politics had been craving diversity, in both background and gender.

She admitted the party must change direction as it reviewed what went so wrong at the October 17 poll, when they suffered a 3 per cent swing away from the Liberals.

However, she wouldn't say exactly what needed to change and she made it clear that the Canberra Liberals proudly enjoyed a "broad church" of views.

It appears the 41-year-old is keen to give an impression of change and a fresh voice and, as a moderate, she'll be determined to shake the nagging perception that senior conservative figures continue to pull the strings behind the scenes.

As the party attempts to move forward Lee may have to make concessions in order to maintain her moderate agenda while also keeping the right of the party happy.

The course Lee chooses is important because the next Legislative Assembly will be as progressive as it has ever been, with a remarkable six Greens MLAs.

Greens Leader Shane Rattenbury suggests a group of moderate Liberals are seeking to wrest control of the party from key conservative forces who have controlled the party for several years.

"We'd love to have a more constructive, working relationship with the Liberal party," Rattenbury said.

"If they actually start to take up policy positions that we have more in common, we're always keen to work with them."

It's a sentiment shared by re-elected Chief Minister Andrew Barr.

"Under new leadership there may be more occasions where the Government and the Opposition can find common ground on policy matters," he said after Lee's appointment.

As Lee put it: "Canberra spoke very loudly and we must listen."

It's a basic but necessary point if the Liberals are ever to move out of the political wilderness.

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Six other Liberal leaders couldn't do it. Will Elizabeth Lee be the one to end Labor's reign in Canberra? - ABC News

The B.C. Liberals lost their share of the votein every region of the province in Saturday's election, but those losses hurt the party most in the Fraser Valley and suburban Vancouver, a CBC News analysis has found.

CBC used finalresults from 2017 and preliminaryresults from 2020 to calculate vote shift in each region and riding of the province. (This analysis excludes mail-in and absentee ballots, whichmay not be counted and reported until mid-November, according to Elections BC).

The Fraser Valley was where voters rejectedthe B.C. Liberals in favour of the NDP and Greens in the largest proportions.The orange wave swept over bothLangley and both Chilliwack ridings.North of the Fraser, the NDP also won both battleground Maple Ridge ridings.

Here's a look at where each party gained and lost ground on Saturday.

Outside the Fraser Valley, the NDP also made significant inroads in the Interior, which resulted in the riding of Boundary-Similkameen flipping from red to orange. They held on to key ridings in the Tri-Cities and won Coquitlam-Burke Mountain from the Liberals.

The NDP also pulled off historic wins in three Richmond ridings, but in two of them the margins are so close just 124 votes in Richmond South Centre that mail-in ballots could easily flip them back to the Liberals.

The riding that shifted the most in the whole province was Oak Bay-Gordon Head, which voted overwhelmingly for former B.C. Green leader Andrew Weaver in 2017. The NDP didn't win a single polling station there in 2017, but former MP Murray Rankin won the riding decisively for the party on Saturday.

There were places where the NDP lost vote share on Saturday. Three were northern ridings where the party was not competitive.

But one was David Eby's riding of Vancouver-Point Grey. The NDPstill easily carried the riding, but did so despite an eight-per-cent drop in vote share from 2017. These votes appearto have gone to the B.C. Greens, who showed an eight-per-cent increase there.

Saturday was a terrible night by any measure for the B.C. Liberals, who lost vote share in every region of the province compared with 2017.

The Liberals' most electorally significant losses were in the Fraser Valley.

But the riding where the Liberals lost the most vote share was a riding they won: Peace River South. This wasdue to a strong showing by B.C. Conservative candidate Kathleen Connolly,who placed second, and because former Liberal cabinet minister Mike Bernier won a landslidevictory there in 2017.

There were a few bright spots for the Liberals on Saturday. The party increased their vote share over 2017 in both South Surrey and South Delta. They also showed a 12-per-cent increase in the riding of Surrey-Green Timbers, but it wasn't enough to defeat the NDP.

It can unequivocally be said that the B.C.NDP had a good night on Saturday and the B.C. Liberals had a bad one.

But for the B.C. Greens, the results were more ambiguous.

The party held on with three seats in the legislature and can celebrate a breakthrough win on the Lower Mainland in the riding of West Vancouver-Sea to Sky.

Support for the party on the Sunshine Coast was also up 10 per cent over 2017.

But in Metro Vancouver, the results for the Greens were mixed. They made some gains in the City of Vancouver, most notably in Vancouver-Point Grey and Mount Pleasant, but lost vote share in the suburbs around Vancouver.

The riding where the Greens took the biggest hit was Oak Bay-Gordon Head, which they lost to the NDP.

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B.C. Liberals lose vote share in every region of province - CBC.ca

Supporters and opponents of conservative pundit Anne Coulter clash at a demonstration in Berkeley in 2017. (AP photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez)

How can the partisan divide be bridged when conservatives and liberals consume the same political content, yet interpret it through their own biased lens?

Researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University scanned the brains of more than three dozen politically left- and right-leaning adults as they viewed short videos involving hot-button immigration policies, such as the building of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and the granting of protections for undocumented immigrants under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Their findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, show that liberals and conservatives respond differently to the same videos, especially when the content being viewed contains vocabulary that frequently pops up in political campaign messaging.

Our study suggests that there is a neural basis to partisan biases, and some language especially drives polarization, said study lead author Yuan Chang Leong, a postdoctoral scholar in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. In particular, the greatest differences in neural activity across ideology occurred when people heard messages that highlight threat, morality and emotions.

Overall, the results offer a never-before-seen glimpse into the partisan brain in the weeks leading up to what is arguably the most consequential U.S. presidential election in modern history. They underscore that multiple factors, including personal experiences and the news media, contribute to what the researchers call neural polarization.

Even when presented with the same exact content, people can respond very differently, which can contribute to continued division, said study senior author Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree. Our experiences, and the media we consume, likely contribute to neural polarization.

Study shows conservative-liberal disparity in brain response to hot-button vocabulary. (Image by Yuan Chang Leong)

Specifically, the study traces the source of neural polarization to a higher-order brain region known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is believed to track and make sense of narratives, among other functions.

Another key finding is that the closer the brain activity of a study participant resembles that of the average liberal or the average conservative, as modeled in the study, the more likely it is that the participant, after watching the videos, will adopt that particular groups position.

This finding suggests that the more participants adopt the conservative interpretation of a video, the more likely they are to be persuaded to take the conservative position, and vice versa, Leong said.

Leong and fellow researchers launched the study with a couple of theories about how people with different ideological biases would differ in the way they process political information. They hypothesized that if sensory information, like sounds and visual imagery, drove polarization, they would observe differences in brain activity in the visual and auditory cortices.

However, if the narrative storytelling aspects of the political information people absorbed in the videos drove them apart ideologically, the researchers expected to see those disparities also revealed in higher-order brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. And that theory panned out.

To establish that attitudes toward hardline immigration policies predicted both conservative and liberal biases, the researchers first tested questions out on 300 people recruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk online marketplace who identified, to varying degrees, as liberal, moderate or conservative.

They then recruited 38 young and middle-aged men and women with similar socio-economic backgrounds and education levels who had rated their opposition or support for controversial immigration policies, such as those that led to the U.S.-Mexico border wall, DACA protections for undocumented immigrants, the ban on refugees from majority-Muslim countries coming to the U.S. and the cutting of federal funding to sanctuary cities.

Researchers scanned the study participants brains via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as they viewed two dozen brief videos representing liberal and conservative positions on the various immigration policies. The videos included news clips, campaign ads and snippets of speeches by prominent politicians.

After each video, the participants rated on a scale of one to five how much they agreed with the general message of the video, the credibility of the information presented and the extent to which the video made them likely to change their position and to support the policy in question.

To calculate group brain responses to the videos, the researchers used a measure known as inter-subject correlation, which can be used to measure how similarly two brains respond to the same message.

Partisans showed differences in their brain responses to political messaging. (Graphic by Yuan Chang Leong)

Their results showed a high shared response across the group in the auditory and visual cortices, regardless of the participants political attitudes. However, neural responses diverged along partisan lines in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, where semantic information, or word meanings, are processed.

Next, the researchers drilled down further to learn what specific words were driving neural polarization. To do this, they edited the videos into 87 shorter segments and placed the words in the segments into one of 50 categories. Those categories included words related to morality, emotions, threat and religion.

The researchers found that the use of words related to risk and threat, and to morality and emotions, led to greater polarization in the study participants neural responses.

An example of a risk-related statement was, I think its very dangerous, because what we want is cooperation amongst the cities and the federal government to ensure that we have safety in our communities, and to ensure that our citizens are protected.

Meanwhile, an example of a moral-emotional statement was, What are the fundamental ethical principles that are the basis of our society? Do no harm, and be compassionate, and this federal policy violates both of these principles.

Overall, the research studys results suggest that political messages that use threat-related and moral-emotional language drive partisans to interpret the same message in opposite ways, contributing to increasing polarization, Leong said.

Going forward, Leong hopes to use neuroimaging to build more precise models of how political content is interpreted and to inform interventions aimed at narrowing the divide between conservatives and liberals.

In addition to Leong and Zaki, co-authors of the study are Robb Willer at Stanford University and Janice Chen at Johns Hopkins University.

STUDY IN PNAS: Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content

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Hot-button words trigger conservatives and liberals differently - UC Berkeley

We knew it was an uphill battle, Polak told CTV News, but added there are still many mail-in ballots to count. There is a lot of dust still to settle.

And next door in Langley East, which belonged for years to Liberal Rich Coleman, his controversial replacement, Margaret Kunst, was in a tough fight to keep the riding in her party.

NDP star candidate Fin Donnelly was ahead of the Liberal incumbent in Coquitlam-Burke Mountain.

The NDP had early leads in three of the four Richmond ridings, including Richmond-Queensborough where star Liberal incumbent Jas Johal looks to be unseated.

Most of the Fraser Valley has long been reliable Liberal country. But at press time, both Chilliwack ridings were leaning orange and there was a see-saw battle in Abbotsford-Mission.

In North Vancouver-Seymour, three-term incumbent Jane Thornthwaite, who was caught making sexist comments on a party zoom call, was 1,500 votes behind her NDP competitor.

Former Liberal cabinet minister and opposition critic Michelle Stilwell was 1,000 votes behind in her Parksville-Qualicum riding.

The NDP is also significantly ahead in Boundary-Similkameen, previously a safe Liberal seat.

And the Liberal incumbent in West Vancouver-Sea to Sky appears to have lost to the Green candidate.

There were predictions the Greens would be wiped out this election, but Leader Sonia Furstenau appeared re-elected in Cowichan Valley, as was teammate Adam Olsen in Saanich North and the Islands.

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B.C. election results: What now for the Liberals and Wilkinson after a disappointing finish? - Vancouver Sun

Roberts' vote on Monday night, in a ballot dispute in the battleground state of Pennsylvania critical to President Donald Trump's reelection bid, led to a 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock. That left in place a Pennsylvania court decision allowing mailed ballots to be counted up to three days after Election Day, despite familiar yet unfounded claims from Republicans regarding "the taint of" illegal ballots.

It was not the first time Roberts, a 2005 appointee of Republican George W. Bush, has moved left in a highly charged partisan case to cinch the outcome, but it may be one of the last.

The Supreme Court is on the cusp of a transformation, less one week before it likely sees the addition of a conservative jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, and two weeks before a presidential election. Barrett, 48, has a record and approach to the law that puts her to the far right of the 65-year-old Roberts.

Trump, whose reelection fate may hinge on legal rulings, called the court's action on Pennsylvania "ridiculous" and "very strange" in an interview on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning.

The President has said he wants Barrett on the court in time to resolve any major election case. "I think this will end up at the Supreme Court," he said last month of the presidential contest. "And I think it's very important that we have nine justices."

The Supreme Court's brief order Monday night, with no explanation of its legal reasoning, belied the dramatic role of the chief justice and the likely internal turmoil that preceded it. The court had been grappling with the state GOP's emergency request to block the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision for two weeks. Democrats, defending the deadline extension and urging the justices not to intervene, highlighted the pandemic-driven demand for mail-in ballots and postal delays.

That Barrett is waiting in the wings may accelerate Roberts' long-held concerns about the institutional reputation of the bench. Trump continues to undermine the independence of the federal judiciary with his rhetorical attacks, and new possible threats have arisen from the other side, as some liberals advocate adding more seats to the court -- at nine for the past 150 years -- to try to diminish its lopsided conservatism.

On Monday night, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented. Joining Roberts were the three remaining liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Unprecedented control

Until the September 18 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Roberts had presided over a 5-4, conservative-liberal bench and sat at the center of the ideological spectrum. That gave him unprecedented control.

Despite his entrenched right-wing views dating to his work in the Reagan administration, Roberts developed a pattern of leaving the fold in highly visible, politically drenched cases. His actions reinforced his own assertion that justices cannot be defined by the president who appointed them.

That pattern counteracted the Trump message that any "Obama judge" or other Democratic appointee would automatically rule against his interests and anyone he appointed to the bench would be on his side.

In June, he spurned the Trump plan to end immediately an Obama initiative that shielded from deportation young immigrants, known as "Dreamers," who had come to the country without proper documentation with their parents.

All of those Roberts' opinions drew Republican wrath, and Monday night's action leaving in place a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision was no different.

Yet, in this tumultuous period as Trump fights a challenge for the White House from former Vice President Joe Biden, there may be a difference.

Roberts did not explain his thinking. (None of the justices did.) So, for other state ballot disputes marching toward the high court, the chief justice has not locked himself into any legal stance regarding state ballot procedures.

The canny Roberts is known for foreseeing cases headed to the high court and keeping his options open. And his overall 15-year record on voting rights is anything but liberal. He authored the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted a crucial section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval for any new voter-ID rule, redistricting map or other electoral change that could affect individuals' right to vote.

Last April, in a Wisconsin case as the coronavirus pandemic was growing, Roberts voted with the familiar conservative bloc to refuse to extend a deadline with absentee ballots. That time, Democrats, as well as dissenting liberal justices, declared the majority had undermined the franchise, especially for racial minorities, the poor and elderly.

Another ballot dispute from the Wisconsin -- a battleground state of the caliber of Pennsylvania -- is now pending before the justices.

Confounding predictions of the Roberts Court role in any major lawsuit arising from the current presidential election would be a new Justice Barrett. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Barrett this Thursday and a full Senate vote could come as soon as next Monday, just over a week before the election.

Her judicial philosophy is deeply conservative, but she has voted on scant election cases as a judge for the past three years on the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cases like Bush v. Gore, Roberts told senators when he was before them in his 2005 confirmation hearings, "don't come along all that often."

But, as he declined to answer whether he believed the justices should have intervened in that Florida-based dispute, the prescient Roberts asserted, "I do think that ... the propriety of Supreme Court review in matters of disputed electoral contests is a matter that could come up again."

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John Roberts sides with the liberals on mail-in voting but things may change once Barrett arrives - CNN