Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (40 page)

The pundits started to notice. Don Martin, writing in the
National Post
during the NDP’s 2009 convention, complimented the party for being in touch with voters. “Keep in mind that on issues important to many Canadians—pension protection, employment insurance reform, credit card gouging, salvaging the auto sector, escaping Afghanistan and even attacking a carbon tax—the New Democrats lead the charge, bringing those concerns to the House of Commons floor with the Liberals playing catch-up,” Martin wrote.

Topp was keeping a close eye on how the Conservatives had tried to capture the Tim Hortons set. He read with interest, for instance, an interview that Patrick Muttart did with the American Enterprise Institute in 2010, in which Harper’s marketing whiz explained how he had framed Conservative policies to suit the Tim Hortons crowd. Topp thought this was smart “political-engineering” but fundamentally dishonest, given that conservatives, historically and around the world, had been much friendlier to wealthy constituencies. “It is Orwellian double-talk,” Topp wrote in his online
Globe and Mail
column. “The conservative agenda seeks to impoverish all of Tim Hortons’ clients and to transfer their savings and income to people who view Starbucks as pedestrian.”

New Democrats, Topp believed, had to take back the language of populism and turn it on Conservatives: imitate in approach, differentiate in substance. He also thought that the left had fallen into talking about itself in elitist tones, or as he scathingly put it, “Thirty years of impenetrable, internally-focused, liberal, academic, bureaucratic, entitlement-driven, self-absorbed ‘progressive’ language.”

To that same end, the New Democrats set about removing references to “democratic socialism” from its party constitution, simply because this wasn’t a phrase that spoke to ordinary Canadians anymore—if it ever did. The NDP brass portrayed this constitutional amendment as a mere cosmetic update, but it also represented a party shift away from talk of collectives and ideology and more toward individuals and pragmatic consumers. Or as Lavigne has argued, “the party, as with commercial marketing, needs to continue to keep pace with language and concepts that Canadians are comfortable with in their day-to-day activities. The core values of the party remain, but the language used to articulate them is constantly updated.”

Around the campaign-planning table at the Laurier Avenue headquarters in Ottawa, the NDP strategists looked closely at what other marketing lessons they could import to the project. McGrath and Lavigne believed that good marketing was all about effective communications, and knew that the Conservatives had managed this with highly centralized control from Ottawa and terse, clear language from everyone up and down the chain of command. The NDP, they realized, was going to have to be tighter in its discipline over its public pronouncements and it was going to have to simplify its platform message as well. They got out their scissors and started paring down the lengthy list of promises from the 2008 platform. Not coincidentally, they settled on a neat five commitments, or guarantees, just as Tony Blair and Stephen Harper had done, all of which were eminently pragmatic:

• • 
  Hire more doctors and nurses. “We’ll start training more doctors and nurses and give doctors that have left Canada incentives to come back home.”
  
• • 
  Strengthen your pension. “We’ll work with the provinces to double your public pension and offer you more choice over your retirement savings.”
  
• • 
  Kick-start job creation. “We’ll give small businesses a two percentage points tax cut and bring in targeted tax credits for companies that hire here in Canada.”
  
• • 
  Help out your family budget. “We’ll cap credit card fees at prime plus five [percentage points], take the federal sales tax off home heating and give consumers control over cellphone bills.
  
• • 
  Fix Ottawa for good. “We’ll stop the scandals and commit to work with other parties to get things done for you.”
  

These were simple, easy-to-understand promises, limited in scope and ambition, in part to reassure anyone nervous about the NDP’s reputation for favouring sweeping social change. The five “Practical First Steps,” as they were called, were also designed to be viewed as the opposite of what the Conservatives were promising. If the Tories were going to give tax cuts to big business, the NDP would offer tax cuts to
small
businesses. Language was also crucial. The NDP’s promises were sprinkled with consumer-friendly words like “choice” and references to lower prices. It was through that powerful consumerist “choice,” too, that Layton was going to smash through stodgy old ideas about Liberals and Conservatives being the only real options for government. The NDP leader would say repeatedly in election ads, “People will try and tell you that you have no choice but to vote for more of the same. But you do have a choice.” It became as much of a motto for him as his old favourite, “Never let them tell you it can’t be done.”

NDP Vote

Under Layton, the NDP also got very serious about collecting data, as he had so often urged his team to do. The party had a rudimentary database kicking around since the late 1990s—one they built in-house called NDP Vote. But the more the New Democrats plunged into marketing, especially after 2008, the more sophisticated they became about collecting and sorting information about Canadians, right down to individual postal codes.

The NDP database collected intelligence from everywhere, from old-fashioned phone calls and canvassers’ meetings on doorsteps, to the big “telephone town halls” they were increasingly conducting with citizens. All parties were getting into this game: phoning a mass of voters and asking whether they wanted to take part in a giant conference call with the leader or, on other occasions, a high-profile member of Parliament. It was a way to take modern politics into people’s living rooms—instead of asking them to come to you—with the added bonus that the calls yielded a treasure trove of relevant information to be collated and sorted later. It worked like this: while on the call (which sounds a bit like a radio show), participants were asked to press buttons on their phones in response to questions. “If you think you are paying too much for home heating, press one,” for instance. Later, thanks to the technology that tracked the responses, the NDP would have a detailed record of how long people stayed on the call and how they had felt about the questions posed. All these records would then be fed into the database, so the party knew which voters should receive direct-mail postcards in future or other follow-up advertising specifically “targeted” to their policy concerns.

The NDP also bought all the data it could find to stuff into the machine—anything to help the party learn more about where to find potential support. The director of operations for the party in the 2011 campaign was Nathan Rotman, a long-time NDP aide who had first worked as Layton’s assistant in Toronto then for Layton’s wife, Olivia Chow, at Toronto City Hall from 2004 to 2006. Rotman was the person largely responsible for overseeing the data collection and sorting machine, and he cast his gaze wide, looking for every speck of information the party could gather on what was important to voters. Much of it was consumerist in nature. Just as the Progressive Conservatives’ John Laschinger had done in the 1980s, going to the “list brokers” for direct-mail contacts, the NDP purchased data from several data-selling organizations, including from Environics Analytics. The dozens of demographic “clusters” from Environics, loaded with consumer data, would prove useful to the party in its bid to talk to people about their ordinary concerns. For example, the NDP knew the neighbourhoods where people were paying the highest cellphone costs, and so knew which homes would be most receptive to demands from Layton to bring down the cellphone charges. Here’s the kind of thing that the NDP was telling cellphone customers in the 2011 election:

New Democrats have been there from the beginning—fighting all forms of usage-based billing, and standing up for open, accessible internet for everyday Canadians. It’s time to give hard-working families a break. And that includes stopping the gouging from the big internet companies. New Democrats will also bring broadband to rural areas, and give consumers more control over their cellphone contracts by unlocking cellphones. Together, we can bring Canada to the leading edge of the digital economy. This election, let’s make it happen.

NDP strategists could also use the database to find neighbourhoods where there were plenty of seniors or parents with young families. Instead of sending these voters a mass-market pamphlet with the NDP’s policies listed chapter and verse, they could give them specific literature on their concerns. The New Democrats, unlike the Conservatives, didn’t use smiling or frowning faces to classify potential support, preferring instead to rank them with numbers from one to four.

Rotman was convinced that it would become more and more important to build electronic profiles of voters in future, for a very simple reason: “People are harder to find.” The old days of trying to locate voters through simple mass communication, either around the same channel on prime-time TV, or even on their home phones (many people only have cellphones) are long gone, at least in most parts of Canada. Rotman realized that political parties need to find out where the voters’ interests lie, merely to stay connected with them.

The NDP also used its data-collection techniques to design its advertising campaign. In the 2011 election, the NDP bought ads in specific time slots to reach the voters they didn’t have yet. They bought TV time during
Grey’s Anatomy
or
Amazing Race
because those shows, the data said, were watched by “sandwich generation” Canadians, caring for children and older parents, who might be open to voting for the New Democrats. The ads themselves were also pitched at the voters they didn’t yet have. One of the NDP’s more successful ads of the 2011 campaign featured a hamster spinning on a wheel as a metaphor for politics-as-usual around Ottawa. Another featured noisy dogs barking: the sound of aimless debate from the same old revolving world of Conservatives and Liberals running Canada. The “next tier” of NDP supporters strongly believed that politics was broken in Parliament, so Layton would make that point at every opportunity on the campaign trail. “Ottawa is broken. We’ll fix it,” was a handy slogan for the 140-character Twitterverse.

The NDP also had an internal database called “National Field” to connect all the partisans. Rotman had first seen it while looking over campaign technology south of the border. National Field, which boasts on its website that it’s all about “people plus data,” is basically a sophisticated networking site that organizes conversations being held across a large team. Through this internal network, the party office in Ottawa could stay on top of raw intelligence being gained on the ground across Canada. If, for instance, a local campaign manager was encountering voters who were troubled by a recent NDP policy announcement, he or she could throw a warning shot into National Field, and the party could decide how to respond.

None of this would be possible without highly centralized control from the top, imitating the Conservatives’ strong marketing head office in Ottawa. Under Rotman’s direction, the NDP dismantled the party structure that linked federal operations to the provincial branches. They hired organizers specifically dedicated to the federal NDP and gave Ottawa central control over the membership and fundraising. This is the contradiction of marketing-style politics, as we’ve seen: the more fragmented that the “market” becomes, the tighter the discipline needs to be at the top.

Election night on May 2, 2011, gave the New Democrats a historic breakthrough. For the first time ever, it had become the official opposition in the House of Commons, winning 103 seats. But for all the attention the NDP strategists paid to marketing, it was far from clear that this was the approach that had sealed the deal for the party. Almost two-thirds of their seats came from Quebec, in ridings that had not been micro-targeted or singled out for special attention by the NDP’s market researchers. A couple of the new Quebec MPs had not campaigned that much at all (one, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, was famously vacationing in Las Vegas before she won the riding of Berthier–Maskinongé).

In short, the NDP didn’t win Quebec because of modern marketing techniques. As a matter of fact, the NDP’s victory in the province came as a result of more traditional political strategies, the kind that existed before the arrival of market-researched platforms or segmenting the population into consumer bits and bytes. The NDP found an old-fashioned mass market in Quebec, organized around the appeal of the leader, “
le bon Jack
,” the Québécois term for a good guy. Layton had capitalized on that image with a much-praised mid-campaign appearance on the popular Radio-Canada show
Tout Le Monde En Parle
. While the rest of the country’s TV audience had shattered into fragments, Quebec’s political audience remained an outpost of old viewing habits in the country. It was a still a province in which politicians could count on having a large, influential mass of viewers, much like CBC’s
The National
could boast in its heyday.

In the rest of Canada, the NDP’s gains were more modest, rising from thirty-six seats to forty-four seats outside Quebec after the 2011 election, reflecting an increase of roughly 24 percent in the popular vote. Without the big mass-marketing success in Quebec, in other words, the NDP’s 2011 election story would have been a tale of how their strategists’ new approach to micro-targeting efforts yielded slow but steady progress. The NDP cobbled together its impressive 2011 election results, therefore, by playing a new marketing game in the rest of Canada, but an old, retro one in Quebec. Or as Brian Topp would put it, “The Quebec result demonstrated that a truly big win comes from speaking to feelings, themes and goals that are very broadly shared among all demographics and regions.”