Lessons from the campaign trail

Three-and-a-half months after a bruising election, and three months into a divisive new government, the wounds were not fully healed when top strategists for Ontario’s four major political parties met for a panel discussion at Ryerson on September 26.

Titled “How the Ontario Election was Won,” the Ryerson Democracy Forum event, hosted by the Faculty of Arts, brought the strategists together for a polite post-mortem on what went right, and what went wrong, in the election that turned Doug Ford into Ontario’s 26th Premier. It was the kind of discussion where every compliment tasted just a little bitter.

Consider the responses to a question about the role of social media in campaigning. Progressive Conservative strategist Kory Teneycke regards the new digital landscape as “not a good or a bad thing, in my view. It’s just, this is how advertising is changing. … I would say campaigning today is a 75 percent digital experience, on its way to becoming a 99 percent digital experience.”

Teneycke observed that social media users consume more news information from aggregators and Facebook/Twitter shares, and less from the source. With self-curation and algorithms, “You tend to see only things that you are interested in, and you tend to be much more neutral as to where that source material comes from.”

The Conservative strategy: “We created our own news channel, and created our own news content, and propagated that to voters, where we could say exactly what it is that we wanted to communicate,” said Teneycke, who found that voters “view that very neutrally. The credibility of something coming from the Star or the CBC is not significantly better than coming from Ford Nation Live.”

Michael Balagus, strategist for the second-place NDP, acknowledged that digital advertising is cost-efficient and allows campaigns to target voters more directly. However, he cautioned that an online echo-chamber can only reverberate so far.

“It’s far more effective, as Kory described, when you’ve got a group of people who you don’t really need to persuade, but you need to keep them engaged, you need to keep them motivated. … I would argue that not a lot of hard-core New Democrats were moved by the Ford News channel, but it wasn’t targeted at them. It was targeted at the 50 percent of the vote that the Conservatives went into the campaign with, and making sure that they engaged, and were close, and were tight.”

While complimenting Teneycke on the strategy, Balagus continued to question its viability as a persuasion tool. “I’ll tell you what: if I had a 50 percent lead going into that campaign, I would have done exactly… I would have created NDP News.” Balagus then, in a jab at Ford’s governing style, expressed concern that the narrowcasting strategy is becoming the norm outside of campaign season. “I happen to believe you campaign nonstop, I’m not going to lie. … But hopefully you can find some way to do that that makes some effort to bring people together, as opposed to divide them into these tribal camps, and he who has the biggest tribe at the end wins.”

Following a disastrous campaign that saw the Liberals lose party status, strategist David Herle had plenty to be cynical about. “I think digital advertising sucks,” he said. “You can’t tell a story with it. People resent it. It’s easily ignored and dismissed. I’m far, far, far from convinced that it’s a useful persuasion tool in a campaign. It’s very much a useful head-counting tool…”

Still, even he couldn’t dismiss social media entirely: “One of the insights of the Obama people when they were building their social media apparatus is that the personal endorsement of a candidate was the strongest possible thing that could motivate somebody to change their vote. It wasn’t watching an ad on television, or it wasn’t going to an all-candidates meeting, or it wasn’t a news story. It was that somebody you know or trust or have some relationship with is telling you that that’s what they were going to do.”

Herle credited the Conservatives with being “miles ahead of us” at social media, but added, “It’s easier when you’re the opposition, but not the government, I presume.” He also paid a backhanded compliment to Ontario Proud, the “nonpartisan” right-wing content-mill that was at least as influential as the officially sanctioned Ford Nation News.

“We’ll see how many members of Ontario Proud there are four years from now, but that was, I believe, an important tool. Ontario Proud, I think, was a very important tool in delegitimizing the choice of Kathleen Wynne as a premier. I think in creating the broad consensus in the province that she was unpopular—for reasons that nobody could ever articulate—but she was unpopular, and therefore couldn’t and shouldn’t be elected, I think social media was a big, big part of that. And we didn’t know how to fight it.”

With his campaign days behind him, Herle was the least filtered onstage. When an audience member asked why the parties hadn’t reached out more to youth voters, Herle rejected the premise, insisting that youth voters were simply unengaged. He recalled focus groups during the 2015 federal election, when young voters could not identify photos of then-NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.

“I would say: ‘He’s not hiding! He’s in the news every day! … You’re not interested!’ And they would say, ‘Yeah, that’s actually right, this thing’s actually about Trudeau vs. Harper.’ So, when people aren’t interested, you can’t reach them.” When the questioner raised the issue of summer jobs, Herle mimed playing a violin.

“I think that they are engaged on really big issues, like climate change, housing, mental health,” said Green Party strategist Becky Smit. “It’s up to us to figure out how to speak to them…”

“I’m out of this game, so I can say anything without consequence,” interjected Herle. “So I’m just going to totally reject the deification of youth voters. They’re not interested. There may be a certain number of people who are signing petitions and getting involved in things—the vast majority of young people are off living young people lives. And they don’t care about politics, and they’re not following it, and when they do get engaged, they get engaged around a person they’re excited about.

Through it all, Kory Teneycke kept a poker face. When you’ve won a majority government, you can afford to.