#EP19 Daily Crack: All stories told, it is over to the voters of Northern Ireland to make their difference…

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So, the eighth (and final edition) of our election round ups (if we miss anything important, just stick it in the comment zone, or email me or David on the side)…

Last night was probably the best managed debate so far, although it had the noisiest audience participation. I’m sceptical of how much they change minds, especially so close to polling day, when people have less opportunity to change their minds.

Lucid Talk live polling scored it marginally for Colum over Naomi with Jim Allister in third place.

Then again I remember Ed Miliband beat David Cameron in the head to head format in 2015 and the election of course went the other way. It was raucous at times, with a studio full of activists (TUV being loudest) who may not have the effect on the voting public they hope for.

For one long suffering member of the Slugger team it was all too much…

For Jim Allister it provided a wake the base moment that he could barely resist, but whatever you think Martina’s lost sense of irony, when she claims at that she solely represents Remain minded unionists, there’s more than one message here:

For Clare Bailey and the Greens, who despite having two MLAs to Jim’s  one and after the local elections has considerably more councillors, she went on to Facebook to field the questions that should have been answered by the ones who went on Spotlight debate.

#HeresClare:

Bit of a coup for the SDLP to have the FT mention the poll from LucidTalk that puts Colum ahead of Naomi to take the third seat. Under PR STV (the vagaries of which it is likely the FT knows little) the seat is probably a tight three way tie, but no party lets such detail stop them.

Colum’s message was clear enough:

Election Maps clearly do understand STV, and have flipped it for Naomi:

Naomi is for a people’s vote (and she sent me this clarifying tweet, after I queried her support for the backstop during the programme) :

Danny Kennedy is in there. Whilst I don’t claim any special knowledge neither do hear any reports of his party base refusing to come out and vote for him. If anything could be the beneficiary of Jim Allister’s televised and barnstorming attacks on Martina’s IRA background.

Doug Beattie’s oped in the Belfast Telegraph on the open use of guns by Republican paramilitaries in Belfast recently will serve to reinforce a common unionist cause that fits with the pan unionist strategy being employed by all three major unionist candidates.

And as noted above, the right message and wrong messenger from last night is a gift being grabbed with both hands:

As for the DUP, whatever people say about her televisual presence (and whatever I may personally think of Brexit) Diane Dodds has stayed clear of trouble and kept the messages clear, clean and consistent. More importantly, Brexit and the backstop gave her an iterative story to tell:

As for Martina, her pinned tweet shows exactly where her party’s key strength lies:

Finally, I don’t quite buy the latest polling. Unionism may poll better and Martina more weakly than predicted (perhaps on or just under quota and with very little to share). SF planned for these elections with the March 2017 surge in mind, but in the locals that failed to materialise.

LT missed the DUP surge in 2017 completely, and I’m not convinced it’s picking up any underlying changes there might be out there. Is Danny really going to drop three points on the UU’s LE figures? I really don’t doubt Colum when he tells people not to write the UU man off.

So who’s going to win the third seat? I honestly don’t know and I don’t know anyone who really does. I think we’re all forgetting what a stretch it would be for Naomi to get enough 1st preferences, particularly since much of that new ground out west is still very thin.

She’s run a good campaign, often the most dominant voice in the TV debates. But it was one that seemed to rely heavily on the momentum created by the party’s most successful ever local election, but her party was still fifth in that race.

Danny may not have set the world alight, but I don’t hear anyone saying that his party’s base is planning not to vote for him. The Unionist side of the house is noticeably undivided in its instruction to vote down the three candidate card.

In this respect, Sinn Féin’s Martina Anderson candidacy has made it relatively easy for unionists to score points off. One of the opening acts of her campaign, lauding McCreesh play park, could have been designed specifically to get Danny’s base of border protestant’s blood up.

From the start Colum had the toughest road ahead of him, but he has overshot most of my own personal expectations. He’s done something no leader of the SDLP has since Hume, which is to make himself relevant to voters. He’s gone to places no SDLP leader has been since Hume.

That intense political industry alone means he deserves something. But taking the seat will depend on him getting 1st preference margins everywhere which is necessarily hard to map or pick up in polling. And yet he has run exactly the right sort of campaign for that to happen.

For the reasons outlined above, he may regret not taking on Sinn Féin more directly. Unionists need clear proof that not every nationalist backs the smash and grab politics of Sinn Féin. That said he’s given himself a chance, not least by having by far the clearest anti Brexit message.

Afterword

Thanks for coming along on the ride. I started the Daily Crack to stop myself from whining about what other people weren’t doing. I hope you’ve found the otherwise unregarded trifles here useful, fun or enlightening. I hope we’ve helped render visible what might have gone unseen.

Perhaps in future we’ll fundraise to put our own coverage in the field to accompany the candidates and talk to voters. But in the meantime, you might like to join the growing band of the Friends of Slugger who help us keep our heads up and above the water.

Thanks, and those of you who have one: get out there and vote for your choice. Don’t leave it to others then whinge about the result!

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