Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (15 page)

It’s probably not an accident that marketing-style politics were pioneered by market-friendly politicians dubbed the “neoliberals.” Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both came to power in their countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s with promises to make government more businesslike and accommodating to the private sector. Famously, Thatcher told a newspaper interviewer during her long reign that “there was no such thing as society.” Reagan, meanwhile, installed pollsters and market researchers within his inner circle, just as Thatcher had done with the Saatchi & Saatchi folks. They went beyond merely using ad people for political campaigns, and relied on them to make governing decisions.

“Values Research”

By 1980, Americans were getting ready to vote Republican again in large numbers, for the first time since Richard Nixon’s Watergate fiasco and resignation in 1974. The leading contender was former Hollywood actor and soap salesman Ronald Reagan. His run for the White House had begun in earnest during his stint as governor of California, and gained fuel and credibility with the help of some pioneering pollsters.

Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, was a practitioner of something called “values research.” The idea was to gauge not just what people thought or said they thought, but the underlying values that motivated them to make the decisions they did. Wirthlin would equip test audiences with dials, so they could register their emotional reactions to Reagan speeches. The results of this real-time testing would then be used to refine the speeches, so that Reagan could tailor his remarks to elicit maximum approval from his listeners. Wirthlin, a behavioural economist by training, borrowed this wisdom in large part from the commercial world, and he was honoured in 1981 with the prestigious “Ad Man of the Year” award—just to underline how much consumerist research had found its way into American politics. He was the first public opinion researcher to be so honoured and the
Wall Street Journal
called him “the prince of pollsters.”

Wirthlin is credited for figuring out that Americans didn’t have to like everything a politician represented to vote for him; that the impression created was maybe more important than the nuts and bolts of platforms, beliefs or ideology. People would vote for Reagan even if they didn’t exactly endorse his strong, pro-capitalist Republicanism. People would vote for Reagan even if they had been historically Democrats—hence the term “Reagan Democrats” was born. Reagan developed ways to talk to Americans as consumers, on the emotional, gut level. He won the 1980 election against incumbent president Jimmy Carter, in fact, with this pointed question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

That slogan, not so coincidentally, was borrowed from Wirthlin’s Canadian business partner, Allan Gregg, who had already tried a variation of it for Joe Clark in the 1979 election campaign, when Conservatives had asked Canadians to choose between the Trudeau record and the hope that a change of government would deliver. The two pollsters had met a few years earlier, when Gregg went on his polling-study junket to the United States to see what state-of-the-art practices might be imported to help Clark and the Progressive Conservatives. And when Gregg decided to set up his Decima polling firm in 1980—destined to become the same kind of powerhouse that Martin Goldfarb’s firm was in the 1970s—he invited Wirthlin into a business partnership, to expand his polling sights beyond the Canadian border. It was through Wirthlin that Gregg learned about what was called “values research.” What was revolutionary about this approach, said Gregg, was that it recognized the complexity behind people’s voting choices. Up until then, pollsters mainly believed that simple demographic statistics, based on class or socioeconomic data, predicted how people would vote. Or, as Gregg liked to put it, people were being simplistically sorted by “ageness or maleness or Italian-ness.”

“His level of sophistication was so much more than anyone else’s, by a long shot,” Gregg said. “All the other pollsters at the time were basically ad men. They’d come more out of a communications background, but they didn’t have really strong methodological skills.” Gregg, with this kind of training and his background in statistics, would become part of the first generation of Canadian political pollsters to be strongly steeped in the methodology: sampling probability, standard deviation and all those other techniques relatively new to the business as it was evolving. But he was also learning the importance of consumer “values” in the political equation.

Throwaway Politics

Just as politics was getting into mass-marketing techniques, the private sector was rethinking those same approaches: who was the mass, and where was the market? Here was the chief mass-marketing problem in the commercial world: once the market is saturated with your product, how do you create demand for more? “Planned obsolescence” was one way to get around the saturation issue. The president of General Motors, Frederic Donner, in a burst of candour, admitted in 1959 that his auto firm changed its models every year to artificially create demand for replacements. “If it had not been for the annual model change, the automobile as we know it today would not be produced in volume and would be priced so that relatively few could afford to own one,” Donner told
Sales Management
magazine.

Disposable items also forced the mass market to keep replacing products they had already purchased once. In the 1970s and 1980s, people weren’t thinking as much in terms of buying things for a lifetime. The new buzzword in manufacturing and marketing was “flexibility”—the businesses of tomorrow would be those that were nimble enough to adapt to the changing market trends. And “flexible specialization”—adapting your product to meet a niche of the market, would start to come into fashion. Just as radio had saved itself from obsolescence by bursting into niche markets in the 1950s and 1960s, other industries were learning the same lessons and dividing up the mass market to find particular bands of consumer loyalists. Two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, were the leading voices at the head of this major shift in market thinking, ultimately laying out their case in a book called
The Second Industrial Divide
. Flexible specialization, they declared, would be a “a strategy of permanent innovation: accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an effort to control it.”

On top of all of this, some sober second thought was being expressed about the waste and credit carnage of North America’s decades-long spending spree. In Alberta, for instance, the oil-fuelled economic boom had also seen record rises in personal debt. On average, each Albertan was carrying about $1,700 in debt in 1978, Statistics Canada reported—$379 more than the national average. Alberta’s provincial government was so concerned that it began to launch programs for debt counselling and money management, as well as debt-warning TV ads—one featuring a young man up to his neck in mud.

Conrad Black, then head of the Argus Corporation, cast a disapproving eye over the rampant consumerism invading Canada during a McMaster University convocation address in June 1979. “Mass consumption installed selling, peddling, as the principal avocation of the Western world. Prodigality reigned until most governments, corporations and individuals were awash with debt. Credit sales, which had formerly offended the middle class aversion to borrowing, and had been chiefly identified with the poor who made installment purchases because they couldn’t afford cash on the barrelhead, flooded the economy. The idea of saving to buy something gave way to instant gratification.”

But in the 1980s the political class, by and large, was still using most of the tactics of the mass-marketing school, looking for ways to appeal to as broad a section of the political marketplace as possible. That made sense. After all, civic life is all about the masses, isn’t it? Yet the challenges of using mass-market style seemed to have limited application to the practice of politics. Obsolescence? Niche marketing? Disposable products? What place could these concepts have in a world where the institutions span centuries, and where democracy applies to all citizens, regardless of how much money they have to spend or where they live? If there is any field that should be concerned with the mass populace, never mind the market, it should be politics, right?

“We all wanted a big-tent party,” said Gregg. “We all wanted more voters. I remember the early days of the Conservatives, they would agonize over why they didn’t have the ethnic vote. It bugged them. It bugged them terribly.”

The people who didn’t have much attachment to politics were increasing in ranks, and they were making their voting choices more on emotion, leadership and personality than they were on issues of policy or ideology. Fortunately for politicians, emotional pitches were exactly the kind of things that advertisers and marketing experts excel at creating. As voters were becoming more disengaged from politics, it was becoming more important to pay attention to the ad folks than the policy people. Complex, nuanced policy debates were for those who already had a view on politics, whose votes were already committed, for the most part. As Dalton Camp had discovered decades earlier, voters didn’t want to be bored with reams of text; they wanted pictures and images and slogans. The more that political advertising resembled consumer advertising (as long as it wasn’t too slick) the better. Politicians, whether in Canada or Britain or the United States, needed to grab the attention of the voters who merely shrugged at the affairs of state, who might determine their political preferences the same way they chose their soap.

Meet “Essex Man”

In Britain, Thatcher’s political-marketing team had distilled their target audience down to a disaffected constituency as well. Thatcher wanted former Labour voters who had checked out of British politics either because of cynicism or simple lack of interest or education. This type of voter would come to be known as “Essex Man.”

“Essex Man,” in Thatcher’s Britain, was an archetype for a new class of young men who lived in the suburbs, surrounded by consumerist trappings, right-leaning more by instinct than ideology—exactly the kind of people to whom Thatcher’s hard-right conservatism would have appeal. The “Essex Man” was most vividly described in a 1990 piece in the
Sunday Telegraph
by Simon Heffer, himself a right-wing denizen of this suburban county sixty kilometres from London. Thatcher’s Essex Man was a voter who was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren.” An Essex Man, Heffer wrote, was more attracted to democracy as a sport, with winners and losers. Or, as he put it, Essex Man “uses instinct and energy rather than contacts and education… He is unencumbered by any ‘may the best man win’ philosophy. He expects to win whether he’s the best man or not.”

With Reagan, meanwhile, the mass-marketing effort was all about reaching out beyond his party’s political market share, appealing to disaffected Democrats—playing to their growing cynicism and disengagement with politics altogether to turn them into Republicans.

Research and marketing in politics had become more sophisticated by the 1980s, and Reagan’s advisers were able to shape their politician to appeal to this disgruntled, checked-out voter base, whose ranks were expanding across North America. They weren’t just selling Reagan like soap; they were creating the product on offer to the citizens—marketing. They didn’t need to make people feel good about Republicanism or its policies, just Reagan and his sunny disposition.

Reagan and Thatcher, along with their sophisticated political-marketing teams, were the pioneers of politics for the apolitical—democracy for checked-out voters in the 1980s. The Essex Men and the Reagan Democrats, coincidentally, bore a remarkable resemblance to the hypothetical voters in that
Canadian Forum
series of the 1940s, more interested in the pedestrian realities of life than in lofty politics. The ad machines for the US Republicans and the British Conservatives designed their pitches around those concerns, to engage these voters not in debates of the head, but emotions of the gut, positive or negative. Each word of their ads was carefully market-tested.

“Whatever else history may say about my candidacy, I hope it will be recorded that I appealed to our best hopes, not our worst fears. To our confidence, rather than our doubts. To the facts, not the fantasies. And these three—hope, confidence and facts—are at the heart of my vision of peace,” Reagan said in a highly effective 1980 TV ad that was little more than a potpourri of “values” words, such as “strength,” “restraint” and “inspired leadership.”

It worked dazzlingly well through two elections in the United States in the 1980s. “It’s Morning Again in America” was Reagan’s sunny, value-saturated 1984 campaign slogan. Thatcher and her ad team were aiming their ad messages at the gut level, too. “Labour Isn’t Working,” blared the words on Thatcher’s 1979 campaign posters, atop a picture of citizens lined up at the unemployment office.

Forget Shopping—We Have a Country to Save

Canadian politics was largely insulated, however, from the political-marketing revolution taking place in the United States and Britain throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Canada had started to see a trickling decline in voter turnout, which slipped below 70 percent in the 1980 election. But Canadian politics was still caught up with loftier, more existential democratic questions in the 1980s, mainly revolving around the constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The election of René Lévesque’s separatist government in Quebec and the resulting 1980 sovereignty referendum had focused the collective political mind on keeping the country together. First with Trudeau’s patriation of the constitution, and then with Brian Mulroney’s efforts to reconcile Quebec to the constitutional deal, Canadian politics through the 1980s was far more focused on the traditional stuff of politics: rights, powers and national unity. So Canadian politics wouldn’t be making the full transition into the marketing realm for a while.