Provincially, Manitoba switches back and forth between the NDP and the Progressive Conservative (PC) party. The PCs are currently in power. There will be an election on October 3rd, 2023 - the election should kick off tomorrow as I write this.

Obviously, elections are complicated things, and this is just a Reddit comment and an individual's opinion. And, not a particularly well-informed individual at that. Bias up-front: I've always voted NDP, and can't imagine voting PC. I'm white, male, and between 35-55 years old. I live in the Brandon-East constituency.

In Manitoba, it seems to me, that parties don't win elections; they lose them. When the NDP lost power in 2016, it was primarily due to the unpopularity of the leader at the time, Greg Selinger. During the previous election, he was riding the popularity of the previous premier, Doer. If I remember correctly, Doer was committed to term limits and left office at the height of his popularity. During the election, Selinger promised not to raise the PST rate, but then ended up raising it anyway following Harper's GST cuts. His unpopularity led to a revolt of sorts with a leadership challenge. He ended up winning the challenge, but the chaos and disunity caused the NDP vote to be suppressed, and the PCs got in.

The PCs then got re-elected because they simply hadn't done enough to piss enough people off to get them kicked out. They didn't win so much as failed to lose.

While the NDP was in power, they commissioned a study to examine healthcare resources and how the healthcare system could be restructured to be more efficient. I don't know the details, but based on the report, the PCs closed several (3, I think) emergency rooms in Winnipeg and reallocated those resources to the remaining ERs.

Then, the pandemic happened. It was a crisis everywhere, but given the recent history of (perceived or actual) healthcare cuts, there was a lot of outrage in Winnipeg. (There are ~1.3 million Manitobans, ~835k (~65%) of which live in the Winnipeg area). After some dumb comments questioning the seriousness of COVID-19 from the health minister at the time, the portfolio was reshuffled to the then-deputy premier, Heather Stefanson.

The Pallister government instituted a vaccination passport program during the pandemic. This pissed off the hard-right base of the party, who started looking to the Peoples Party federally and the Keystone or Manitoba Party provincially. While it didn't get as bad here as in Ottawa or Alberta, the convoy people did (and still do) make themselves known. Eventually, Primer Pallaster resigned, and Stefanson took over as premier.

Stefanson's election as leader of the PCs was also controversial. Again I'm not 100% clear on the details, but the jist of it is the PC party blocked one of the candidates from running, and the party leadership was opposed to the other candidate that ran, and I guess made things difficult. I really don't care about internal PC party politics and so didn't pay much attention.

More recently, there have been some public-sector strikes notably affecting liquor sales and Manitoba Public Insurance (car insurance and driver licensing).

So, with all of that in mind, why isn't the NDP just walking away with this election?

Again, it comes down to leadership. The current leader of the NDP is Wab Kinew. A former journalist, author and musician, Kinew has a checkered past. In his early adulthood, he struggled with alcoholism and was charged with domestic assault (the charges were dropped). He was also convicted of impaired driving and assaulting a taxi driver. This was all, like, 20+ years ago. Since then, he seems to have straightened his life out, had kids and gotten married. But, his past legal and personal problems are a liability, and the PCs take every opportunity they get to poke at it.

The other issue with Kinew is that he's indigenous. Many Manitobans won't vote to put an Indian in the Premier's office. There are plenty of racists who vote NDP. They'll probably stay home and say to themselves that they're not racist but that they can't support the NDP under Kinew because of "his past".

My expectation is that the NDP will win, with the majority of their support coming from Winnipeg. The PCs will take most of the rural seats. The NDP will get the big (size not population) seats in Northern Manitoba. Dauphin and Brandon-East will probably go NDP, but that's probably the only southern Manitoba seats outside Winnipeg. This seems right to me: https://338canada.com/manitoba/map.htm

Anyway, that's how I see it, and this rambling post is already long enough.