Candidates matter and the unexpected can happen: lessons from 2017's elections

With upsets, underdogs, failures and successes, 2017 was an election year with a few surprises.

The B.C. Liberals narrowly won the most seats in the province's May vote, but its minority government was defeated by an alliance of New Democrats and Greens.

The federal Liberals wrestled two seats away from the Conservatives in fall byelections.

Jason Kenney pulled off the triple feat of taking over the Alberta Progressive Conservatives, mergingthem with theWildrosepartyand then winningthe leadership of the newly formed United Conservatives.

Naheed Nenshisecured re-election as the mayor of Calgary when one pollster said it couldn't happen.

Andrew Scheertrailed Maxime Bernier on 12 ballots before finally winning on the 13thto become the new leader of the Conservative Party while JagmeetSingh needed only one ballot to become the leader of the NDP.

And in Alabama, a Democrat won a Senate seat.

The coming year could see a few elections with enormous implications. Long-running governments in Ontario and Quebec are on the ropes while U.S. President Donald Trump could see his party lose control of both houses of Congress.

But before that, let's cast back to the elections of 2017 and look atwhat lessons can be drawn from these votes.

Candidates matter

At the right moment, under theright circumstancesand with the right candidate, almost any party can win anywhere.

The Liberals demonstrated this when theywere able to win two seats away from the Conservatives in byelectionsheld in the ridings of Lac-Saint-Jean,Que.and South SurreyWhite Rock,B.C.

The Liberals took just 18 per cent of the vote in 2015 in Lac-Saint-Jean before winning it by a margin of nearly 14 points in October, taking a riding the Liberalshaven't won since the 1980s. In South SurreyWhite Rock, the Liberals won a riding that had been held by the Conservatives and their predecessors without interruption since the 1970s.

In both cases, the Liberals were able to win thanks to strongcandidates. Richard Hbert was a local mayor in Lac-Saint-Jeanwhile Gordie Hogghad been theB.C. Liberal MLA forSurreyWhite Rockfor 20 years.

But bad candidates can have just as much of an impact as good ones.

In the Quebec provincial riding of Louis-Hbert, the Coalition Avenir Qubec won theformer Liberal stronghold by more than 32 pointsin October in part due to the turmoil surrounding both parties' candidates. The Liberals and the CAQ had to replace both of their original candidates due to past cases of harassment.

The CAQ found a good replacement in Genevive Guilbault. But the Liberals had to settle for their reported eighth choice, Ihssane El Ghernati. Voters were not much impressed, handingthe Liberals their worst performance in Louis-Hbert in over 50 years.

And then there was the Republican's Senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore. With controversial statements about homosexuals and slavery, he was already a flawed candidate for the Republicans before allegations of sexual misconduct with underage girls emerged.

The result? A state that preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 28 points in 2016 handed Democratic candidate Doug Jones a victory in one of the reddest red states in the Union.

Small parties can defy first-past-the-post

While 2017 was the year that the Liberals backed away from their campaign promise to end Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system, it was also a year in which small parties showed they could still win in a system that has traditionally been stacked against them.

The Greens in B.C. secured three seats in the May provincial election, while in Prince Edward Island the party captured its secondseat in a provincial byelection in November.

Qubec Solidaire, a small left-wing sovereignist party, held on to one of its seats in abyelectionthat put co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in the National Assembly. The party currently holds three seats andpolls suggest it could jump to five or more in next year's provincial vote.

Nevertheless, after taking 16.8 per cent of the vote in May, the B.C. Greens still hold just3.4 per cent of seats in B.C.'slegislative assembly. And even if Qubec Solidaire does win five seats in 2018, that'sjust four per cent of Quebec's 125 seats compared to the party's 11 to 15 per cent support in the polls.

The good, the bad and the ugly in polling

Polls had their usual string of close calls punctuated by one big miss.

The polls were close to the mark in the provincial elections in Nova Scotia and B.C. the latter an act of redemption after the spectacular error pollsters made in B.C.'s 2013 election. They were also able to call the results closely in a few municipal votes, including in Montreal and Edmonton.

But polling performance grabbed the headlines due to the miss in the Calgary municipal election. MainstreetResearch projected Nenshi would lose to rival Bill Smith by 13 points. Instead, Nenshi was re-elected by a margin of eight points.

Mainstreet's polling in Calgary sparkeda heated war of words between Quito Maggi, president of Mainstreet Research, and critical academics and politicos. In the end, Maggiapologized for his behaviour and his polling firm's performance and has taken steps to improve both. The next year of elections might show whether those efforts will bear fruit.

Jason Kenney wins elections

It was a good year for Jason Kenney.

The former Conservative MP and cabinet minister secured his first victory of 2017 in March, taking75 per cent of the vote to win the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives on a platform ofmerging it with Wildrose, then the province's official opposition.

In July, Kenney managed to convince 95 per cent of PC and Wildrosemembersto merge the two parties andcreate the United Conservative Party. A few months later, Kenney won the leadership of the UCP, taking 61 per cent of the vote and defeating former Wildrose leader Brian Jean.

And in December, Kenneywona seat in theAlberta legislature in the Calgary-Lougheedbyelection in a landslide, taking 71.5 per cent of the vote.

Winning one electoral contest is hard enough. Winning four is something else entirely.

Expect the unexpected

The past year proved that somecandidates and parties are able to follow the most unlikely paths to victory.

Scheerbecame leader of the Conservative Party on the 13th and final ballot, defeating Bernier by less than two percentage points. He trailed Bernier throughout but just eked out a victorythanks to a confluence of factors Bernier's weak performance in Quebec andthe strong showing for social conservative candidates Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost.

In October, Singh won the NDP leadership on the first ballot, signing up just enough new members to carry him over the top.

With the Greens being a small third party, only a very limited number of scenarios could produce a minority legislature in B.C. But that is what happenedwith the B.C. Liberals falling one seat short of a majority government and the Greens winning just enough seats to hold the balance of power.

And in Alabama, Jones was able to defeat Moore thanks to a high turnout among African Americans and low turnout in counties that have traditionally voted Republican. Even with the allegations against Moore, a Jonesvictory required everything to go right for him on election night and it did, giving him the win by just 1.5 points.

This doesn't mean that underdogs always win or that expectations are always wrong. But every now and then, the polls miss the mark, candidates pull off upsets and a series of events produce the least likely of outcomes. And it could happen again in 2018.