BC Liberals Advertising for the Greens in Victoria!

Vote Green! Brought to you by the BC Liberals

I was tooling around on Facebook this morning, and some of my Green Party of BC FaceBook friends were talking about this full-page advertisement for Jane Sterk and the BC Greens in the Times Colony. You know, one of the most read newspapers on Vancouver Island. The thing is, this advertisement is bought and paid for by the BC Liberals. What I know about Provincial politics in BC could fit into a medium-sized tea-cup. I do know that it is a hypercompetitive, take no prisoners environment, and this ad highlights that fact. The purpose of the ad is obvious. The Liberal Party believes that the NDP and Greens are feeding from the same plate. There are two tactical outcomes this ad is promoting. The most favourable would be that the NDP and Green split is even enough that the Liberals can achieve a plurality in some, or all of the Island ridings. The second, deeper game is that the Greens should tip the balance and elect Andrew Weaver MPP for Oak Bay. This secondary objective denies the seat to the NDP, and establishes a Green presence in the Legislature.

The benefit of that first outcome is obvious. Every dipper who votes Green is one vote closer to the coveted Governing Mandate for the BC Liberals. The second outcome is useful in a tactical sense, (Like helping decide whether the Liberals or the NDP have more seats on E-Day). Strategically, there is probably some more subtle thinking at play. If there is not, there surely ought to be!  The most likely winning Green candidate, Andrew Weaver (Oak Bay – Gordon Head) is a heavy hitter. His election to the BC Assembly will represent a coming of age for the BC Greens. There is no doubt that adding Provincial representation to the Federal presence of Elizabeth May will be a big boon to building up a considerably stronger regional Green stronghold in BC. There will be another constituency office, staffed to the max, generating plenty of column inches in earned media over the coming years. The BC Greens definitely eat from the same plate as the NDP. If the BC Greens do in fact elect Weaver, then the Greens are going to consolidate that win, gain credibility, and build for the next election from a much stronger base. The BC Liberals will be a major beneficiary of a stronger BC Green Party, as the bulk of the growth in Green support will come at the expense of the NDP. Put it all together, and an enhanced BC Green Party will in the long run be a huge boon to the BC Liberals. The implications for the Federal Liberals in BC are a little more ambiguous. You see, they have serious prospects of eating from the same plate as the Greens and Dippers come 2015, so strengthening the Green brand in BC will cost them only a little less than it costs the Dippers, but that federal analysis will have to wait for a more opportune time.

Anyway, I think that most of what I said here today is pretty obvious and un-remarkable. What was remarkable to me is this big media buy by one Party on behalf of another Party in a General Election. I think it is unprecedented, can anybody else think of similar examples? I would be interested in knowing, as a student of the dark arts of Canadian electoral politics, lol.

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Liberal Party open contested nominations: Awesome plan, but Pro-Life is the fly in the ointment.

At great risk to life and limb, I am going to open a can of worms that the Liberal Party is just going to HAVE to deal with soon. Over the course of the leadership contest, the bold experiment of opening up the vote for all Canadians through the supporter category of Liberal membership has quite impressive and positive results. In fact it was so succesful, that for a short while, the Liberal Party is going to match the Conservative Party fundraising prowess, by tapping into this new pool of friends for monetary contributions. Justin Trudeau re-inforced the Liberals movement in a more open direction in his acceptance speech. Trudeau categorically stated that ALL nomination contests would be precisely that, an openly contested election of the Liberal Party’s candidate for each riding.

For very practical reasons, and a few philosophical ones, I applauded that iron-clad commitment. Philosophy aside, the biggest practical reason is that the Liberal Party has a long way to go before Liberalist has enough committed and motivated supporters to build the monetary and organisational strength of the Conservative Party. Over the coming 2 years, there will be 338 candidates selected, one for each federal riding across Canada. Whether those candidates are selected by closed membership votes, or Primary style supporter votes as I hope, there are going to be a LOT of new members and/or supporters keyed up and ready to GO in the next General Election. It is not unreasonable to expect anywhere from a few hundred new supporters in smaller weaker ridings up to thousands of supporters in perhaps 100 Liberal hotbeds. When added to the hundreds of supporters already identified, many EDA’s will have literally thousands of formally ‘registered’ supporters to call upon for their votes, for their volunteer hours and skills, and yes, for their money. With this kind of boost to the numbers, I would anticipate great gobs of cash, badly needed to fight the next election. This is the positive aspect of contested nominations, and it is hard to refute its significance.

In another vein, I have watched the leadership of the Conservative Party, and I have always been vitally interested in just which constituencies their prowess, and electoral strength actually comes from. From the early days of the Reform Party, the Alliance iteration, and the final destruction of the vestiges of Progressive Conservatism with the birth of the CPC,  the Pro-Life movement has been front and centre. According to this Angus Reid Poll, “…one-in-twenty respondents (5%) would actually forbid women from having an abortion.” I do not think it will take much convincing for you to agree with me that this 5% is probably one of the best organised issues based group in the country. I mean, seriously, for most of the pro-life movement, they are literally on a mission from GOD. 20 years ago, this was an issue that divided Canadians right across Party lines, and geographical areas. It was treated pretty gingerly by politicians, and was characterised by open votes in Parliament for that very reason. If you CANNOT whip the vote, you better not even try to. Over the ensuing decades, the Reform Party (think Stockwell Day) and the successor party’s managed to turn this issue into what looked like a partisan issue. There is little doubt that Pro-Life movement has come to be associated with the Conservative Party, and that association has been integral to the fundraising, volunteer, and resulting organisational strength of the CPC. You see, it may only motivate 5% of the populace, but that motivation is strong. Strong enough to get thousands of volunteers out of bed early every day during an election, and hit the streets canvassing kits in hand. The long association of the Reformers and Alliance Party with the Pro-Life movement carried those supporters, and the Party they adhered to through to the grail itself. Majority Government!

Now that is where the wheels are starting to come off the bus for the Conservatives. It is not news that abortion is truly a third rail for the Harper Conservatives. Yes, their Party cannot survive in its current form without the organisational muscle the pro-life movement brings to their ranks, but at the same time this is a divisive issue, where passions run high on both sides. The fact is that it is not possible to win a majority from the electorate while openly seeking to re-regulate abortions in Canada. I would go a step further, and say that even a back-door attempt to pass a major pro-life bill would paralyse the Canadian government by mobilising literally millions of pro-choice men and women across the country to take to the streets. So it is perhaps not surprising that Stephen Harper has categorically rejected any and all attempts to introduce legislation, but he is definitely walking a tightrope, with the fiery pits of political oblivion boiling below. The danger for the CPC is pretty clear. The pro-Life movement might well feel an affinity for the Conservative Party after long association, but their primary motivation, their driving force is predominantly the drive to criminalize abortion. By taking away any hope that a majority meant their victory, their motivation has been removed, and THAT makes for a pretty shaky loyalty to the Conservative brand.

Back to the discussion about open contested nominations, and the potential of the supporter category of Liberal membership. I doubt I need to say it by now, but I think that any Liberal with half a brain knows what is likely to happen when the nominations are thrown wide open. If the nomination contests are open to paid Liberal members only, then a significant number of pro-life activists are going to be joining the Liberal Party, and they will bring little in the way of loyalty to the Liberals with them. If the nomination contests are open for the supporter category to vote, I think that Joyce Murray’s Leadership campaign has amply demonstrated that it is easy for people with zero interest in the Liberal brand to sign up on the spot, and they will do so to support pro-life nomination candidates. I would be willing to bet that Rob Anders for example, or his ideological clones will step forward. They will sweep the nominations in a number of ridings, and be standing for Parliament as Liberal Candidates all over the place. It will mean the death of the Conservative Party, but I suggest that it would be the death of Liberal Party hopes for a majority, or even a coalition government anytime soon. The only un-ambiguously pro-choice Party in Canada is the NDP, and I suggest that if the Liberals field a strong and vocal pro-life caucus of candidates, Canada through a plurality of pro-choice electors would engage in an interesting experiment with the first majority NDP government at the Federal level.

So there it is, and a major conundrum it is. The pro-lifers are motivated to bail from the Conservative Party, provided a credible path to criminalize abortion exists elsewhere. The Liberal Party has an awesome opportunity to engage many hundreds of thousands of Canadians in open primary style nomination contests, but it is probable that this will draw in a fifth column of highly motivated social conservatives. Thats the problem with democratic processes isn’t it? Even the folks we do not like get to have their say. What to do, oh what to do? All I can suggest at this time, is do not simply turn away from the idea of open primary style nominations. That is one potential key for a majority Liberal Government in 2015. Lets try to figure out how to have our cake, and eat it too, ok?

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Actually, jury is still out on efficacy of Attack ads against Trudeau

Hmm, this is a bit embarrassing. Yesterday I posted that the Ipsos Reid poll commissioned by postmedia and CTV demonstrated that the attack ads were not working. The word I used was emphatically not working. Well I have to climb down a little (a lot) from that statement. I argued that because the sample that had seen the attack ads had significantly higher Liberal voting intentions it showed that the attack ads were actually backfiring on the CPC. Acrtually, the evidence does not suport that conclusion. The attack ads were presumably targetted at Liberal voters in the first place, given the fact that attack ads are intended to suppress support of the intended victim. That is presumably the reason why those CPC media buys were concentrated in the Maritimes, and Ontario in the first place. The proper conclusion to draw was that the CPC were effective in their targeting. To determine if the ads were effective or not, we would need to see what happened to Trudeaus support amongst that subset of the population that saw the ads.  One interesting conclusion that may still be supported by that data is the migration of support from the NDP to the Liberals in the sample of those people who had seen the attack ads prior to being surveyed:

-”Wright says the numbers indicate the ads may have actually helped the Liberals by having a handful of New Democrats “switch their soft support from the NDP to soft support for Justin Trudeau.”

Anyway, I guess we shall be reduced to reading opinion poll tea-leaves still with respect to the efficacy of attack ads, unless someone wants to spend a whack of money on a publicly released poll or survey examining the question properly. At the end of the day, that particulr Ipsos poll is just another voting intention story. Good news for Liberals no doubt, but nothing quite so earth shattering as proof that Trudeau is negating a major attack ad campaign.

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An Opinion poll actually worth noting: Conservative Attack ads emphatically are NOT working.

Opinion polls can be extremely significant when they are used properly. When you are quantifying what things are of interest to specific people, you can garner useful actionable data, useful for political purposes that is. But the opinion polls that new organisations typically commission are next to useless. I mean, how can anybody gain anything useful from the hypothetical question beginning with: ‘If an election were held tomorrow’, when there is no question that an election will NOT be held tomorrow? Certainly you do not see Political Party’s blowing their hard-won dollars on such questions. Politicians want to know Which people can be swayed by Which message, and the polls they commission sure as heck do not make it into the daily papers.

All that said, I have been waiting for the next published poll for a week or so, because there is a question I wanted answered to my satisfaction. Are the Conservative advertisements attacking Justin Trudeau having the desired impact? Well much to my delight, that specific question has been answered today by one of the best pollsters out there. Ipsos Reid was commissioned by Postmedia and CTV to survey 1059 Canadians in an online survey on precisely that question. Incidentally, Canada.com has recently started doing something very clever. Instead of just printing poll results, they are creating interactive graphs and displays of digital data. It is clever, because by investing on better quality data, and then presenting it in a much more useable format, they are rendering standard presentation of such news obsolete. Who will bother going to read a National Post, or Toronto Star article on a poll, when they can see decent data, sortable on demographic, or geographic basis online? Go and have a look, click the ‘by region’  and ‘by gender and age’ tabs, and ask yourself  if you will be looking at future polls that are clickable and sortable like this.

To make a long story short, the survey invited Canadians to review the ads first, then questioned the respondents as to what impact the attack ads had on their voting intentions. The headline result is that for those Canadians who had previously seen the attack ads, (39%) there was a significantly higher probability that they would support the LIBERAL Party! I guess that means that Justin Trudeau’s ‘Mr. Positive’ campaign is working very well. It is not just vaccinating Trudeau against negative ads. The ads are turning viewers into Trudeau supporters! This is a pretty significant outcome. We have all been bombarded with wise punditry claiming the only effective response to an attack is to hit back, hard and low. Well, I think that the jury, the voting public has returned the verdict, and that verdict is that positive can work too. What does this mean for the future? Hell, I don’t know. We are in un-charted territory. All I can say is hat’s off to Trudeau, and his team. Just keep on turning that positive image into new supporters, and donors, and Hope and Hard work might just win the day!

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Attack ads are not the issue for the Liberals. It is the lack of money.

All this focus on attack ads!

I do not normally have much to say about Air War aspects of political campaigning. Broadcast and media aspects of campaigns are important, but they are really outside my area of expertise. What I do know is that when the public gets engaged, money and volunteers flow into Party coffers, so naturally I always want to see the Air War driving traffic to websites and events where money and people can be solicited. What I can say positively is that earned media (meaning press coverage) that drives traffic to websites is unequivocably GOOD, while paid media (meaning paid advertising) seldom, if ever brings in enough resources to cover the costs. That paid media had better be performing some really vital function, because advertising has an impact only for so long as the money is flowing, and the money is NOT small. Lesson number one, media buys COST money, they do not generate it.

Earned media galore

So my question now is how Trudeau should respond to the CPC advertising campaign just starting this week? Trudeau knew it was coming. He spent the entire leadership race, with absolute SHIPLOADS of earned media inoculating against it as best he may, by defining himself as an ‘anti-politician’ all positive and sweetness, with just a hint of  ‘tough as nails’. There are a number of polls say that it has worked pretty well as he might have hoped for, because for his supporters (and they are legion), they are so far calling foul instead of doubting. Trudeau shall continue to get earned media and will do his best I am sure to counteract the attack, but undoubtedly he will still suffer from those ads, and those yet to come. In fact, we can count on it, because it is easier and cheaper for the CPC to suppress support than it is for Trudeau to build it up.

There are people whose professional opinions I respect who call those polls rubbish. Warren Kinsella, arguably one of the Liberal Partys most succesful war room operatives and communications experts has said repeatedly that those attack ads are going to be devastating, and that the only solution is to fight fire with fire, and quickly. I guess he earns the big bucks by being right about his trade. I do have to ask a simple question though. For everybody calling on the Liberals to ‘counter-attack’, I am scratching my head and wondering what do you call 6 months of inoculations that have gone before? Are you suggesting adding paid attack ads into the mix, going against the grain of everything Trudeau has uttered to date by suppressing Conservative support? TWO years before the next election? With money that the Liberal Party does not really have? I am dead sure that Stephen Harper can be attacked effectively, and his support suppressed. But if and when that happens, Trudeau’s’ promises to stay positive, and all that earned media that went with it are gone, gone, gone, along with a large chunk of $$. inoculation effect vanishes, and Trudeau sinks like a stone. And the payoff? The CPC drops a couple of points in the polls, TWO YEARS before the next general election… Mulcair chortles and says ‘Thank you very much!’ Lesson number two, genuine attack ads will hurt the ‘anti-politician’ image so carefully built.

Maybe fighting back means that Trudeau should drop a few million of paid advertising into supporting his ‘anti-politician’ meme built with earned media? With TWO years to go until the next election? It is true that the only way to reach many of those seeing CPC attack ads today is to respond in the same media, in the same time slots. Normal people do not read blogs like this, or avidly consume media reports about Trudeau, or any other politician. They are emphatically NOT inoculated against anything. Those millions of people are getting their first strong impressions about Trudeau from the CPC spots they are seeing now. That is quite a dilemma for the Liberals isn’t it? They need to reach those folks who are less engaged, but they are lacking the basic requirement for a sustained effort. To whit, a steady supply of money.

If you ask me, the fundamental problem is that the Liberal Partys options are limited by their relative weakness in fundraising. Trudeau has popped maybe a $million into the bank to ‘fight back’ against those inevitable attack ads. The Conservatives are holding their breath and hoping he will respond to them in kind. Why? Because $1 million is chump change for them. They will see his million, and raise him two, and bleed the Liberals dry. The CPC do this because their donors deliver like clockwork. The Liberals are on an upwards trajectory in their fundraising, but they are not ready to compete with the Conservatives in a sustained Air War. If there were $2mm rolling in per month, then there would be any number of responses possible. The Liberals could while away the months beating the crap out of the CPC and the Dippers, or build gold statues of Trudeau in every city, lol, so job number one is creating the systems to systematically fill the coffers. I see some very positive signs in that direction, so positive that I think it may be possible to go toe to toe in an Air War next year. Time will tell.

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The Real world of Electoral Politics: Coming soon to a Liberal Party near you!

Every time I think about the long decline of the Liberal Party, I recall vividly a conversation I had over coffee with my local Liberal counterpart back in 2007. We were discussing a municipal election, and the conversation turned to local Green Party ‘doings’. I was pretty chuffed at the time. My constant harping and lobbying of the GPC central office was having an impact, as the Green party was actually working on a couple of different voter contact databases. (CiviCRM, and GRIMES). It was looking like we would soon have a viable tool to upload and preserve all our local electoral data in. The municipal election was providing us with reams of data on local voter issues, and key little tidbits on the electorate like School Board affiliation, home ownership status, voting intentions and current updates on the raw contact info like addresses and current phone numbers. I will paraphrase my Liberal counterparts response: ‘I don’t know why you are making such a fuss about ID’ing and GOTV. It is not complicated. All you need is lots of volunteers on EDAY and bang doors getting people to the polling booth.’ At that time, I was a partisan Green, so I bit my tongue and nodded vaguely back to him. My mind was boiling though. Could it really be true that my Alma Mater, the Liberal Party was led by people who just did not understand what was happening to electoral politics in front of their noses?

So there is the context for my impulsive decision to rejoin the Liberal Party in 2012. I had read that Liberalist was purchased, and that the age-old Liberal practice of hoarding electoral data locally was on its last legs. When I learned that a solid, effective measure had been adopted to shoehorn ALL the data from the next leadership contest into Liberalist, through the good offices of the Supporter category, I became a supporter on the spot. You see, I am terrified by the prospect of Canadian electoral politics being polarised between two ideological extremes. If my children are to grow up in a country that seeks to implement policies that work for ALL Canadians, rather than chomping on ideological popcorn policies that reward one or the other extreme, then the Liberal Party MUST succeed in adapting to the political paradigm shift that is sweeping them away. The shift in essence is to leave behind the idea that ‘all politics is local’ and the corollary that location-based data is what it is all about. The new paradigm is that all politics is affinity based, with location being relegated to second tier tactical mapping of polling stations, EDA boundaries and a basket of important, but secondary highly distributed ‘local issues’. Please understand, I am not arguing that location-based politics is dead. It is alive and well, but there is a whole another world of much broader communities of interests, and communications tools that strike out across ALL physical locations. It is this ‘higher plane’ of electoral politics that has determined who wins elections in Canada, because it strikes closer to the root of individual motivations, and determines where increasing numbers of Canadians place the X on the ballot on EDAY.

In the past, this higher plane was crudely called ‘demographics’. In essence, Politicians segmented their electorate along broad lines like age groupings, Sex, and to a much lesser extent ethnicity and mother tongue. The means of communicating with these segments was called the ‘Air War’ because it largely consisted of crafting messages targeting specific demographic groups, and delivering those messages through the print, and broadcast media. This was inefficient, because the message intended for, say senior citizens had to be delivered simultaneously to ALL Canadians through a press conference. Nuance and careful parsing of the message was critical, so as to attract the intended recipients, without turning off the balance of the population. The politicians (and the War Room) eagerly awaited the next days newspapers, and the evening news broadcasts, crossing their fingers that the media did not alter the message too much, and that appealing to the seniors did not leave everybody else cold. It was, at best a crude instrument. The means of communications dictated the message, and methodology. The interlocutors, (the Press) were all-powerful brokers, shaping and defining who gets to hold power. There was incremental progress towards more sharply defined electoral groupings that were NOT based strictly upon where, how old, or which sex. Much of that was lumped under the heading ‘Ethnic Press’, or specialty publications, and the power of that particular set of interlocutors rested on the fact that a more carefully honed message could be delivered, without worrying about offending a broad demographic. Despite all the attention paid to, and importance of the Air War, elections were fought primarily on the ground, because the only way to communicate an un-filtered message was to knock on a door, deliver a pamphlet, and starting in the seventies and eighties, to telephone electors.

So what is the paradigm shift of which I speak? Simple, the process of segmenting the population into ever more discrete groupings has been made virtually free by the low costs of computer power. The means of enabling two-way communications between really large, or small numbers of people has evolved due to the essentially zero costs of  electronic communications, and near universal access to the same. Instead of a focus on broad demographic groups, it is now possible to segregate databases into ever shrinking subsets of people, and store actionable data on those subsets for instant retrieval. When I say ‘actionable data’ what I mean is that you can now DO SOMETHING useful with those little subsets, or segments of the electorate. To whit, you can send them a message for free, that they can react to instantly with a tangible, useful outcome. Now given my past assertions that people are motivated by things other than a broad affinity, the logical conclusion is that political databases can be used to segment a broad population according to what turns their crank, and drives their political actions (voting, donating, volunteering, policy wonking, lol). It does not matter WHERE those people are physically located anymore. You can dialogue directly on the basis of what really matters and motivates, engage and draw political resources from them in perpetual campaign mode, and then `outsource`the reaping of their votes to the geographically organised Electoral District Associations come election time. Oh Lord, the means and methods of doing this effectively are as boundless as human imagination! This is the present in which chunks of the Conservative Party dwells, but it truly BELONGS to the Political Party that dwells at the centre. The pragmatic Party that eats from whatever policy plate is serving the best meal today. The Party that can appeal, without reservation, to ordinary Canadians with ordinary desires and motivations across this great country. The Party that can solicit their feedback and input, and then craft pragmatic policy prescriptions that are intended to WORK, as opposed to narrow, futilel, ideological policy failures. And the whole g`damned thing rests with the creation of a political database soon to be populated with large quantities of actionable data, namely Liberalist.

So the basic tool has been created, and the process of populating it with contacts and supporters with the means of communications (email addresses) is underway, but hold on a minute… That process just hit a brick wall. The Party that is struggling to enter the real world of politics has conceived of the supporter category as an effective means of collecting data, but what happens now that the leadership contest is over? Well, the Liberal Party now has 300,000 members and supporters, spread across 308 local Electoral District associations. I am guessing that it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time within a National organisation like this. Creating and growing the population within Liberalist is directly analogous to a media organisation building it`s circulation. The media builds circulation and readership because the more people are exposed to their message, the more tasty results they can enjoy. To whit, they can charge advertisers more money. For the same reasons, one of the primary objectives of the Liberal Party must be to build up the sheer volume of people whose email addresses are stored safely within Liberalist. Guess what? Individual units of the Liberal Party posses reams of exactly this kind of data that have never made it into Liberalist. Prospective candidates possess standalone databases, which they are jealously guarding to wage nomination battles. I personally know of several of these, which number in the tens of thousands of unique contacts. They do not have huge numbers of email addresses, but hey, every incremental addition counts. Many EDA`s also possess standalone databases, perhaps they are older, and polluted with a lot of bad data, but it is surely worth the exercise of scrubbing that data, and fixing the holes in it, when building circulation and national success is the objective isn`t it? There are like minded, or loosely affiliated politicians, and interest groups that can give Liberalist a hefty shot in the arm. The Provincial units, and Provincial Liberal Party`s spring to mind. Canada`s privacy acts specifically permit the sharing of personal contact information, provided it is `used for political purposes`, so brokering agreements to pool and share data with say the Liberal Party of Ontario, or the Smitherman mayoral campaign are prospective sources of really large chunks of data. So the most obvious pools of data are those which already exist. If YOU my reader possess such data, then perhaps you should be contacting the Liberal Party to arrange a transfer?

Moving forward, I shall draw on my media circulation building analogy for inspiration. Ever been to the Exhibition in Toronto? Ever noticed how at public gatherings, radio stations, and sometimes print publications have booths promoting contests, giving free subscriptions, and gathering names and emails on lists? They do not make money on that activity, right? WRONG! They are building their circulation in order to charge advertisers more money. Now it costs folding money to set up and staff booths at the Ex, but what about online venues, where the `booth`can be virtually created, and staffed by a happy little database app. and a sign-up page, busily collecting email addresses, and data on the interests of visitors for almost zero cost? Now imagine that the `booth` is located on an issues related website or portal. The visitors can be reliably assumed to have an interest that can be associated with their unique record within Liberalist. I mean, come on folks. Anybody can create and `staff`such a booth. Here is one right now: JOIN THE LIBERAL PARTY DUMBASS!  Ok, not much of an effort, and I do not anticipate a whole lot of new Liberal memberships generated by it, but everybody who DID follow that link would be identifiable as someone with a sense of humour, with an interest in political databases, because of the context in which they clicked on the link. Now imagine for a moment that there were Liberal Party members and activists who had a burning policy interest that they shared with many other Canadians. Could these members not create interesting, even totally absorbing websites complete with policy forums where fellow Canadians could argue about their interests, and, say, formulate policy prescriptions to present to the electorate come election day? Imagine that there were reams of links to articles and journals concerned largely with their shared interest. Imagine that Liberal Party Shadow Cabinet members were tasked with delivering speeches, touring the country promoting membership in their forums and issues based websites. Imagine that policy announcements did not happen through sorry assed press releases, but were released through dedicated online communities. Would these virtual communities not be the perfect venue to gather data about supporters, while simultaneously engaging people continuously in something that really matters to them? So long as something like the supporter category exists within Liberalist, the processes to deliver a flow of new subscribers can be created and enhanced every time a Liberal organiser with her head screwed on tight figures out a new venue or channel.

Does that sound far-fetched? The real world of politics I describe is there in plain view for all to see. How do you think it is that the long gun registry managed to shoe-horn the Conservative Party into a majority government position? The Conservatives sure did not pooh-pooh the idea of organising people around a single issue. Jason Kenney does not whine that it is complicated and time-consuming to campaign in between elections. They rolled up their sleeves, and recruited people to organise long gun owners into a massive voting block, collecting email addresses and data as they went. They created a community of people with a moderately burning issue, for the express purpose of influencing electoral outcomes. Then they learned a salutary lesson. As much as they did not want to lose this community, they had to deliver the goods, and eliminate the Long Gun registry, and all vestiges of it. Then they did something painful, but necessary. With the long gun registry gone, the community they created tried to become a Canadian NRA, with a machine gun in every closet. The Conservatives recognised it was not useful any longer, and they threw it under the bus. No more NRA light activists on advisory committees, or gadding about the globe at arms trade conferences. Goodbye to the second best issues based community they ever created. However the extremely succesful community they have created around the pro-life movement shall NEVER suffer the same fate. The Conservative Party will string them along for decades to come. There will be private members bills galore, carefully orchestrated to keep the issue in the TARGET publics eye, while NEVER achieving it`s objective. There will continue to be hundreds of websites, churches and religious groups, abortion clinic protestors, massive electronic mailing lists, and fundraising circles. Even though they could criminalize abortion at their whim, they would never allow this die-hard constituency to win, because then they would go their separate ways, and they might actually start voting according to other issues, issues that are NOT owned lock stock and barrel by the CPC.

So there it is, the real world of Canadian politics in action. And all that is needed for the Liberal Party to take on, and beat the crap out of their political opponents is for them to recognise in what way the world has changed, to create the tools to engage and motivate the electorate, and start the arduous process of stuffing Liberalist full of identified Liberal Supporters, engaged through their policy interests, and continuously being fleshed out with calls to action.

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Liberal Party Supporter woes, And Joyce Murrays turbo booster.

So yesterday there was some `bad news` for Liberals in the media, naturally followed by further revelations and commentary today. Well I have news for you, it is not as big a deal as some would have us think.

As I have repeated many times, the real value of the Supporter category to the Liberal Party is that it makes it very easy for ordinary Canadians to declare an affinity to the Liberal Party, and provide the means to communicate for free, namely their email addresses. How many of them actually vote for the Leadership candidate of their choice, while a pressing issue for the candidates, is nowhere near as important as the bare fact of their entry into Liberalist database, with a few tidbits of data to tell us more about them. The important things for the Liberal Party moving forward will be firstly in finding another good excuse to draw Supporters into the Party now the Leadership recruiting drive is over. Secondly, and at this juncture in time the more pressing thing is to develop processes for engaging all those new contacts more deeply, and turning their declared affinity to the Liberals into a deeper commitment. In my opinion, the best tools for both these purposes are to reach out with policy messages, and calls to action that will engage supporters on a personal level. Ideally, this outreach will provide people with a means to DIALOGUE, perhaps through online policy formulation and discussion forums, or even a series of policy events, speeches etc that can draw the really committed in person. But I will put that off for a future post, as I have some pointed criticisms and observations to make.

Observation number one is that, as far as I am concerned, a Supporter is only a supporter when the means to register, and vote exist. In other words, the entire logic of harvesting supporters for the Liberal Party, and Liberalist, is that with an email address, and the self-declared affinity for the Liberal Party, the Party has a free means of communication. That is groovy, and will pay off in spades every single time a supporter clicks on a link in an email, or at the very least receives and acts on a GOTV email on some future election day. For the Leadership contestant the value of the supporter is as a prospective ballot in the upcoming vote. This is the what provides the incentive for the leadership campaigns to mobilise lots and lots of volunteers, network etc., and sign those supporters up. In past contests, the campaigns were selling memberships, so there was a monetary incentive that was shared by the Party and the leadership campaigns. While I love the supporter category because of it`s ease, simplicity and guaranteed means of cheap communication, there is no question that an actual membership fee, and the increased level of commitment to the Party that comes with it is of significant value to the Party. When I read the Trudeau team has signed up approximately 100,000 `supporters`without an email address, I scratched my head and asked myself`In what way are those supporters any better than a random voter whose vote has been identified in a regular election campaign?` I am afraid that for the candidate, they are far more important, but to the Party, they are no different really. There is absolutely no way that the Liberal Party should be dishing out very large amounts of money to send mail to that many people, solely for the purpose of having them vote in the leadership contest.

It actually bothers me to make that assertion. I spent some time volunteering at the Trudeau office in downtown Toronto, and I really do believe that Trudeau is the best leader for the Liberal Party, due to his ability to attract large numbers of people to swell the Party`s ranks. I am not spilling any secrets when I say that there were a significant number (very surprising actually) of people who did not have email addresses being tagged as supporters at the end of a phone call. Personally, I was very meticulous in securing, and verifying email addresses, but every time some sweet elderly lady from, say, Pictou told me she had never used a computer, I wondered why I was bothering to tag her as a supporter. Really, those contacts should have been asked to purchase a $10 membership, because the logic of the category is defeated when there is no electronic communications possible. Aside from those without email addresses, the volunteers were not always overly meticulous in recording, and verifying email addresses over the phone. As anybody who has worked in or managed a call centre environment can tell you, the data collected over the phone is always liberally sprinkled with errors from mis-hearing, or simple keyboarding errors. You have to ask for email address, then spell out and record it letter by letter, because if you do not, then a significant proportion of contacts will have incorrect email addresses entered into the system. I was pretty taken aback when I read yesterday that the Liberal Party was actually mailing stuff out to supporters to enable them to vote when there was no email address. Snail mail costs real money! There are printing costs, envelopes, and the actual postage to pay for. The time frames are just too short to realise a return in terms of people responding to the call to action, and then the call to action does not include asking for money to pay for the whole exercise! Notice I do not say that mail shots are worthless. They are not, when they are carefully targeted, a message painstakingly crafted, and designed to raise money, they can sometimes be very effective. In this instance though, NONE of those things are in place, so the money will be spent for an un-measurable return to the Liberal Party that is footing the bill.

OK, I have beaten that theme to death. Mail shots are expensive, and have to be carefully managed to yield funds, not consume them. In defence of the Liberal Party, the whole logic of the supporter category is foreign and new to the Liberal Party. It will take some time for the cost-benefit equation to be internalized, so I will not sit here, an armchair critic and hurl brickbats at those who made this error. It will not be the first time mistakes are made, and the experiment with unpaid `membership lite` supporters will inevitably contain many errors and successes to learn from.  That is the key, learn from the errors, and do not repeat them in the future. The lessons to take home so far are: Supporters value = email addresses. Collecting and verifying that address is the most important thing for the Party in populating Liberalist with actionable data.

Now I am going to indulge in some speculation, and draw a surprising conclusion. The Trudeau campaign has just lost the lions share of those 170,000 odd supporters they claimed. Should the Party be footing the bill for mail shots to un-contactable supporters? I guess if that was their promise, then the Trudeau campaign was relying on them to stick to the deal, and the mail should go out. Forget for a moment if that is an error, or whose fault that is, and consider that the entire calculus of the front-runner has been overturned (in my mind anyway). The mail will go out, and based upon my past experience, PERHAPS 10% or 15% of the recipients will answer the call to action in time to secure the right to vote for the candidate of their choice. I doubt it will be that many. The response rate will depend on how well designed the call to action is, and it will depend far more on how many follow-up calls the Trudeau campaign can make between the dates people receive their mailer, and the response needs to be postmarked. Turn your thoughts instead to actual turnouts when the voting starts, and who shall take the crown.

I recently blogged about how effective the supporter category could be moving forward, if prospective supporters were being recruited based upon dearly held beliefs, rather than a vague affinity for a candidate or the Liberal Party. Any such recruit would not only self-identify with the Liberal party, and provide the means of free communications, but they would also provide a richer base of information about themselves. To whit, they would tell us the policy that they joined the Party to support, and it would almost certainly be something much dearer to their hearts than a simple and impulsive affinity. Any call to action directed to people based upon a dearly held belief is going to have a response several orders of magnitude stronger than the response of a generic supporter. I also recently blogged on how Joyce Murray has based her camapign on appealing to Canadians on several policy fronts. Most notably, she has enlisted several electoral reform organisations, that are PRIMARILY BASED ONLINE, those being, Leadnow, Fair Vote Canada, AZAAZ, and I believe other like-minded groups. I can tell you based upon my experience in the Green Party, that Democratic Reformers in Canada are probably the most earnest, zealous, and politically MOTIVATED  people in Canada. They rank up their with the Conservatives abortion nut-clubs for dedication and motivation. (I apologise for the analogy there to all my democratic reform minded friends.) I do not actually know  just how many supporters Joyce recruited from these sources, but she claims `tens of thousands`. The Trudeau Team claims about 70,000 supporters with email addresses, plus 100,000 sitting at home waiting for a letter until they can register. I think you can see where I am going with this.

There are TWO separate calls to action that really matter to the leadership contestants. The first step is to complete the registration to vote, and the second is to actually cast a ballot. As I said above, Joyce Murray has a small army of highly motivated supporters, who signed up as supporters for this express purpose. The response rates of Joyce`s supporters to both of these calls to action is going to be an order of magnitude stronger than that of the Trudeau supporters. Trudeau has a large army of supporters, who like him, some of them a whole lot. But the overwhelming edge I, and most other Canadians thought he enjoyed is actually 100,000 supporters lower than anticipated. Let us hypothesise that Joyce sheds 30% of her supporters from failing to register, and Trudeau sheds 60%. The odds just shortened dramatically. If the same thing happens in actual turnouts, it`s getting pretty damned close. Folks, I think that this contest has just become a real horse race, at least as far as raw numbers are concerned. The task for the Trudeau team is to carefully focus on those people waiting for their letter from the Liberal Party, with all their supporter registration info within. Even with all those phone banks cranking out calls, the Trudeau campaign does not have enough time to contact all 100,000 of them, so they are going to be focusing their efforts on all the ridings where their mail registered supporters equate to a majority of votes. For Joyce`s campaign, they shall be doing the same thing, with the important exception that they can walk their supporters through the registration process over the phone, with `ìnstant gratifcation` when the supporter clicks the last button online. When the ballots are being cast, once again, the ease of communications of a predominantly electronic communications channel will play out in Joyce`s favour. I will be VERY surprised if Trudeau’s supporters actually turn out in numbers exceeding 25% or so. That is not based on evidence I can share,  but I have managed GOTV`s for this type of Leadership contest before when I was Ontario organiser, and ran Elizabeth Mays national canvas and GOTV for the leadership of the Green Party back in the day. I can tell you that hero worshiping acolytes do not vote in the numbers that hardened policy advocates do. That is not dissing Trudeau`s supporters, it is a straight observation of facts. On Balance, I think that the powerful Trudeau organisation will tip the balance by focusing on those mailed registrations in key ridings, but I seriously think that this is not going to be a cakewalk for anyone.

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Micro-Targeting, Liberalist and the Liberal Party’s opportunity.

Bullseye Communications

Today, I sat down in the morning to check out the news, and found two articles in the Hill Times about, and by Conservatives, that are extremely revealing to the careful reader. I joined the Liberal Party last year when they created the Supporter category of membership, because I saw immediately that they were (finally) waking up to the fact that large reams of actionable data on the electorate was the ultimate key to electoral success. By this I mean that they had created a national database, (Liberalist) where information on Canadian voters could be collected and collated, and they had figured out a clever way to fill it with email addresses and lots of data on Liberal supporters (the Supporter category). It seems a shallow basis for throwing my support behind a political Party, but hey, I have always been liberal at heart, even when I was a Green in practice. All I needed was some reassurance that it would not be a waste of time putting my efforts into a dying Party.

So I will get straight to the meat. The first Hill Times article is entitled: “Conservatives must be better at microtargeting voters and communicating ideas to win more seats: data experts“. The article is largely based on a Poly Sci Prof. (Professor Turcotte), and a  data expert (Mitch Wexler of Politrain Consulting) who addressed the Manning Centres big Conservative do in Ottawa on Friday. They presented critiques of broadcast media messaging, and hammered home the theme that direct communications, to a targeted audience would be the key to building on the Conservative Party’s majority come 2015. In a nutshell, the article describes how Government advertising through broadcast media ( whether by TV, Radio, or Newspaper) was in essence a waste of money. You just cannot dribble a sound bite sized message into the eyes and ears of masses of random people, and expect them to take anything home from the message. You need to hit them with a message that is not filtered through media. You need to hit them with a message that speaks directly to their own personal bread and butter interests. The database dude was more specific. He addressed the theme that data management presented the opportunity to segment the electorate according to demographic variables, so that you could tailor your message to ever shrinking, but more closely targeted groups of people. The article itself was a little disingenuous. They talked about segregating data based upon broad demographics like house ownership status, religion, and ethnicity. For some reason (lol) they did not get into the meatier criteria for segmenting, like affinities for ideas and ideals, or professional designations, union memberships etc, etc.

The way I would present the argument to the Liberal Party is with an analogy. You can tell the entire electorate that your Party favours more mental health care spending through a press conference. The media filters and presents (on page 6), whatever part of your message they feel like, and a million Canadians yawn, while a few thousand say ‘great, at least someone is talking about it’. Sounds familiar? That’s because this is how the Liberal Party does politics. An alternative to that is to filter out a list of Canadians from your kick-ass political database. Create a list of people who have a family member or friend with a mental illness, plus perhaps mental health professionals. Create a custom email with a specific message that the Liberal Party is proposing a mental health care strategy that will create new mental Health care centres, hire many new mental health professionals, and fund it through measures A, B, C, etc. etc. etc. The email contains links to  a Liberal website with forums to discuss, and detailed discussions on and around mental health care in Canada. Both the email, and the issues based website will have direct calls to action to donate money to help promote this policy. Membership, and supporter sign up buttons; The all important,” Invite your Friends to join the conversation” button; Volunteer page links etc. So tell me, which communications policy do YOU think would be more effective? The press conference that reaches a million Canadians, or the highly targeted email blast that reaches 10,000 people HURTING from a dearth of mental health care options? Please, stretch your mind a little bit, and imagine other policy areas, and ways to gather names of interested people. There are as many equally powerful different segments as there are policy areas and issues in Canadian politics.

The second article in the Hill Times was centred on Jason Kenney’s address to the same conference. It is entitled: “Kenney recalls Dief’s historic 1958 majority election win, says Conservatives can win even bigger next time too“. You have to filter what he says a wee bit to take home something for the Liberal Party, but it isn’t too difficult if you have absorbed what I have to say. Kenney points to a ‘hostile media’, that is opposed to Conservative values. What he is really saying is that when he spins his web of lies, the media dares to publish articles that do not parrot his message. They filter it, and critique it, instead of presenting it un-watered. Kenney then goes on to describe specific Conservative values, and messages that have gone a long, long way to capturing specific immigrant, and ethnic communities for the Conservative Party. Slamming ‘queue jumpers’ who wafted through the immigration system collecting freebies is a typical hit policy for the CPC. It is a hit because many immigrants got into Canada the hard way. They really resent people who milked the system, and this resentment is easy to capitalise on. Now what Kenney did NOT discuss so much is the mechanics of creating and selling these ‘hit policies’. No worries though, any Canadian who follows politics knows how Kenney, the acknowledged master of segmented political data usage does it. He works really hard on outreach to very highly targeted groups. He speaks again, and again to Religious groups, ethnic press, specific cultural associations. Basically, any targetable group with a common identity, and he collects names and email addresses. Relentlessly he collects contact data on more and more Canadians. Petitions in favour of policy prescriptions. Borrowed’ membership lists to invite to events. Assistance in internal election campaigns for non-profits, community and professional associations, which yield a bonanza in data on policy preferences, and actionable email lists, etc.  Sure, it is a lot of hard work, but what he ends up with is large numbers of email addresses, connected to names, and merged into the Conservative database (CIMS), with an electronic definition of what turns that individuals crank.

So a second concrete example for you on HOW this won the last election for the CPC. Have you ever wondered just how it is that Kenney, and the CPC has simultaneously won over Christian religious fundamentalist, major Jewish groups, and Islamic organisations at the same time? The answer is simple, they narrowcast separate messages to each group through targeted ethnic press, and even better through direct email communications. You can call it talking out of both sides of your mouth at once, or more accurately, out of ‘n’ sides of your mouth, where n=the number of different segments in your database. Jason Kenney can send an email message to relatively right-wing Jewish groups correctly claiming that Likud has never had a better friend than the CPC, and that the Conservatives will support every effort to grind those lousy Islamo-fascist Palestinians into the dirt. Ten seconds later, he can hit the send button on an email to Conservative Islamic groups and mosques cheerleading for Conservative backbenchers efforts to legislate abortion back into the criminal code, and slamming same-sex marriage. I can tell you, neither of those messages would work very well if they were delivered through the broadcast media! Boy, would they get ‘filtered’ before presentation on the pages and screens! Now imagine, if you dare, if the Liberal Party ALSO had actionable, and segmented databases with the same, or similar distribution lists. How difficult would it be to send a copy of the ‘we LOVE Israeli’s Likud party and down with Palestinians’ email to the Islamic lists? Then turn around and send a copy of the anti-abortion message to LIBERAL  Jewish organisations that Conservatives stand four-square against legal abortions? I am not proposing that this should be the exact modus operandi of the Liberal Party, but it sure would be nice to have the option, wouldn’t it?

So these are the fruits of my Saturday mornings news fix. And, as usual, I have specific suggestions for you to take away and ponder. The Liberal Party is just finishing up the most succesful recruiting drive in its history. The new(ish) national database, Liberalist has been stuffed with a quarter million new names and email addresses of people with a self-declared affinity to the Liberal Party. Why not take a page from Kenney, follow the advice of Professor Turcotte, and leapfrog directly over the CPC’s commanding lead? First of all, do NOT STOP recruiting supporters now. The more names are attached to email addresses, the more opportunities there are to strike a chord within the hearts of individual Canadians. Appeal directly to Canadians to support the specific things that turn their crank. Invite them to become supporters, not strictly based upon broader demographic criteria, but on specific policy prescriptions that touch them deep down, where they live. Circulate online petitions in support of specific Liberal policy goals. Segment people, not only by the colour of their skin, or the address where they live, but by what they care about. Above all, collect their email addresses, so that the Liberal Party can speak directly, without the interference of broadcast media reporters and editors. Establish point persons who can make it their business to collect and collate reams of actionable data in specific policy areas (and yes, broader demographics as well). Imagine 15 or 20 Jason Kenneys, whose mission in life is to build communities of like-minded people through free email and electronic communications. Create the simple tools, like forums, and dedicated issues based websites to engage Canadians and involve them in discussions, and positive actions to support their dearly held beliefs and political objectives, all WITHIN the Liberal tent.

P.S.   The reason I write these blogs is that I am fundamentally a liberal. I want to be a catalyst to promote effective organising tactics to my fellow Liberals. I have requested, on three separate occasions to be included in the Liblogs blog roll, without ever receiving a response. If you know who actually administers Liblogs, and you think this is a conversation worth having, could you prod them to include my blog there? In the meantime, please do share this post with like-minded friends through the social media share buttons below!

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Trudeau gets it too: Introducing the next Prime Minister.

I just followed a link to a Globe & Mail article: “Inside Justin Trudeau’s war room“. I was elated at what I read, because it confirms my belief that the Liberal Party is going to re-write the book on electoral politics in Canada. That is not a shallow conclusion based upon Trudeau partisanship. It is a conclusion arrived at after nearly a decade of close observation of, and occasional close involvement in political organising and electoral politics. There are a range of considerations underlying my conclusion.

I have blogged repeatedly on the significance of the supporter category to the Liberal Party. I start from the simple and obvious premise that electoral politics is no longer about ‘broadcasting’ a one size fits all message through traditional media channels. Broadcast politics is quickly being replaced by ‘narrow-cast’ communications, direct to the voter without the inconvenience of the media filtering, massaging, and altering the message before presenting it to the electorate on the screen or headline.  If this is indeed the case (and the success of the CPC amply proves it is), then the corollary is that no political party can hope to succeed without possessing the means to communicate directly, one on one with masses of people. Enter the Supporter category of membership introduced by the Liberal Party early last year. As I blogged here, and here, by creating a dead nuts simple method to collect the name, email address, and location of people with an affinity for the Liberal Party, the Liberal Party has managed to create a direct channel to literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

This first step, of creating the tool, (Liberalist), and populating it with data, (through the leadership contests massive Supporter recruiting drive) is not the end of the road by any stretch. The process is actually pretty dynamic. As the communications tool is utilised, with targeted email communications being directed at Supporters, the responses, and feedback from the recipients of the communications serves to enrich, and broaden the information the Liberal Parry holds about a growing number of Canadians.  To illustrate my point, let us consider a putative email that relates to a specific policy message. The policy message does not matter, but hypothetically, let us assume it is a call to support democratic reform, in the shape of a preferential ballot in future elections. The call to action could readily be to donate a few bucks to fund a policy workshop, and advertising campaign supporting the concept. Every supporter or member who responds to the call to action has now been identified and quantified within Liberalist, as an issue advocate in this policy area. This broadening of the data allows future calls to action in this policy area to be directed specifically towards those Liberals, and Canadians in general who are passionate about the issue, and are most likely to support the principle with their money, volunteer hours, and policy expertise. Multiply this across different policy areas, and you have multi-channel communications medium, direct to the electorate, with simple feedback mechanism continually enriching your data.

At this moment in time, the Liberal Party is re-tracing ground covered by the Conservative Party years ago. That of building direct contact lists of  Canadians complete with enriched data about their political tastes and preferences. The Liberals are able to catch up with, and overtake the Conservatives by virtue of the fact that the Supporter category is free, electronically based, and offers value to subscribers by gifting them with a vote for the next leader. I have argued recently that the ability to build a massive actionable database of supporters is far too important for the Liberal Party to discard once the Leadership race recruiting drive comes to a close. It will in all likelihood be expanded, and continued over the coming years to continue the dynamic process of building and enriching the communications link directly onto the screens of Canadians. The explicit exchange of value currently offered is for Supporters to be rewarded for providing their contact information to Liberalist, by receiving in exchange the right to vote for the next leader of the Liberal Party. An historic opportunity now exists for the Liberal Party to move beyond catching up with a clever twist, and innovate their way into a truly awesome juggernaut.

Trudeau has proposed that the Liberal Party can make a connection with the Canadian public by selecting ALL Candidates through an open and contested nomination process. Well, that is not a bad idea, and I am sure that it would help by mirroring the success of the supporter category in 338 local contests, but IMHO it has serious limitations. To whit, it does NOT create a continuous process of building Liberalist, enriching the data on Canadian voters and engaging the Canadian electorate. It is basically a one-off gimmick, that will come and go the same way the leadership Supporter drive is about to end. It`s a slick, and potentially rewarding tactic, but because of it`s transitory nature, it is empty of strategic significance. What is needed IS a continuous process, that chugs along day and night yielding positive outcomes.

Please indulge me for a moment in fast forwarding to a hypothetical Fall 2014 policy convention. Server after server is coming online as the number of viewers and participants ramps up 100,000 – 200,000 , 350,000. Joyce Murray, the Liberal Party’s Democratic Reform advocate has taken the stage to speak in favour of the preferential ballot election plank. The petition to the policy convention is presented. 217,000 pledges from Proportional Representation Supporters pledging $10 each to support the Prop Rep plank in the 2015 campaign. The tension is palpable, the votes are being counted…. Victory! In an historic moment, the Liberal Party has adopted the preferential ballot plank for their 2015 election campaign! The pledges are being redeemed quicker than they can be counted, and slowly the blurred numbers on the screen are settling down to readable numbers. $3,500,000 raised in 1 hour! Justin Trudeau takes the stage to announce Marc Garneau, the Liberal Party Employment and Jobs strategy advocate speaking in favour of EI reforms to provide skills training for 1.2 million unemployed Canadians… The number of viewers drops by 100,000 then starts to ramp up again, as unemployed Canadians flock to their computers to cast their supporter ballots, and redeem their pledges…

Does this sound far-fetched to you? Well maybe it is unlikely, but it is not a difficult outcome to achieve if the will and leadership is present, and the reason is pretty darned simple. People have an affinity for political brands, but they are well and truly motivated by policy issues that strike closer to home than that. The Liberal Party, under (I presume) Justin Trudeau is going to want to keep building their supporter lists, and in Trudeau’s own words, will be looking for ways and means to reach out to Canadians, and entice them into the Liberal Party fold. To quote yesterdays Globe article:“Organization is key,” Mr. Trudeau says. “To me, it means creating a structure in which every single citizen can connect directly and easily if they want.””. Now that can mean a lot of different things, but it is further re-inforced by a second quote from Gerald Butts, a senior Trudeau strategist: `Mr. Butts says, that the traditional levers of government have become ineffective and the only way to make change is to “develop and maintain a national, grassroots, volunteer movement.”`. I will take them both at their words for now, because enlightened self-interest is going to drive the Liberal Party to extend and expand upon their recent success with the Supporter category, and I cannot think of any stronger motivational tool and process than an explicit bargain to mutually support the Party on the one hand, and the policy aspirations of Canadians on the other. The mechanisms for achieving the kind of outcome I envision are actually pretty simple. Think of Jason Kenney, but spread your mental wings a little and multi-task with an even dozen Liberal policy advocates. Each advocate is going to have to work pretty darned hard networking, and making contact with advocacy and interest groups. They will need to have online tools to foster participation, and the consequent policy development, but the prospective rewards are significant.  The focus, as with Kenney is to build up the Party database with a rich collection of policy preferences of large numbers of Canadians, and with the correct focus, it is entirely possible to leave Kenney and the Conservatives eating Liberal  Party dust.

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Joyce Murray campaign is a FASCINATING example of how the Liberals can win the next election.

I have been preaching the virtues of the ‘new’ supporter category of Liberal Party ‘memberships’ ever since the Liberal Party announced it nearly a year ago. It is such an innocuous seeming innovation, but the implications are profoundly exciting. I am not at all surprised at the turn of events over the course of this Federal Liberal Party leadership race, in fact, I feel vindicated in my predictions of an enormous electoral juggernaut in the making, in the form and shape of Liberalist, the National contact database licensed from the Obama team.

I will quickly re-iterate my past arguments about the importance of a free, and simple way to register support for the Liberal Party, complete with name, email address, and postal code.

The starting point for any political database is the electronic register of all enumerated voters given to every Party, and contestant at the outset of an election campaign. The dataset provided by Elections Canada includes names, addresses, and poll numbers for the entire electorate. Please note that the Privacy act exempts political users of data from the prohibition against sharing personal and private data, so ANY DATA from ANY ELECTION or ( Municipal, Provincial, or Federal), or ANY ‘political purpose’, can be imported into a database like Liberalist. I mention that because, for example, a Municipal candidate in Toronto would also receive the residency status of each voter (Owner, Renter), as well as the School board affiliation where relevant. (Separate school board or Public school board). Someone like, say, Smitherman is perfectly entitled to hand over his database to the Liberal Party, and like magic (well, with a lot of back-end work), Liberalist now has a whole lot more actionable data on every voter in Toronto.

That data is enriched for free over the course of any election, as electronic updates are provided with the names of those who voted at advance polls, and people who register to vote during the writ period. Most political campaigns also dedicate a huge effort to enriching the data through telephone and door to door canvassing the electorate for voting intentions, and to a lesser extent issues of interest, willingness to accept a lawn sign, etc. So, over the course of an election, the database has a large chunk of people identified as voters in the advance polls. There are lists of people who are dedicated enough to take a lawn sign for your Party, (and the opposition). There are hopefully large numbers of people who have expressed the intention to vote for your Party, and a great many people have been identified as supporters for the other party’s as well. This is what I mean when I say the data is enriched. There is a growing level of detail about the electorate, built up for each and every voter.

I have argued that the KEY to winning elections is the ability to communicate directly, one-on-one with the electorate. The reason is that you do not need to rely on the Media to filter your message, and pass on half of what you want to say to every Tom, Dick, and Sally. You can control the timing of what you want to say. You can control the content of what you want to say. You can NARROWCAST a message to those electors most receptive to your message, provided you have sufficient data to segment your contests by relevant criteria. For example, if you have integrated all the free information provided to candidates at all levels in Toronto, you can create a list of Catholic home owners, who live in the polls adjacent to the Conservatives hypothetical new radioactive waste dump. Hmmm, I can think of a few political messages that could be delivered to such a list of people.

But the trick of it is, how do you communicate with those people once you have enough depth of data to segment? There are commercial data vendors who will happily sell the Party every phone number in Canada. It is cheap, and every political party shells out a few bucks to get this info into the database. But telephoning really large numbers of people is expensive, and time-consuming. That is why robo-calling is so popular, because it is a cheap way to reach out to loads and loads of people, even if it is not hugely effective. You can mail stuff to people, but that is pretty expensive too. It is much more effective than robo-calling, so there is definitely a place for the targeted mail-shot, but the major constraint is the availability of $. Then there is the magical, almost free medium of e-mail. That is the perfect political communications tool. It is so cheap as to be nearly free. It is perfectly suited to provide the means (hot links) to generate an IMMEDIATE response to your call to action embedded in an email. It can be adapted for huge mailings, or very small, highly targeted messages. In short, it is the shangri-la of organisers, and political field workers everywhere.

So this brings me to the exchange of value between the Supporter and the Liberal Party. Supporters are enticed to provide their name, email address, and postal code by the promise that they can influence the selection of the next leader by being given a vote. The value to the Liberal Party is that with those three pieces of information, they can match the supporters name to their list of electors, and attach the fact that THIS voter supports the Liberal Party, along with a virtually free means to contact them directly via their email address. Because of the nature of an electronic sign-up, it is also possible to gather a little more information about THIS supporter. When somebody fills out an online form, the page, or link within an email that brought them to the sign-up form can be traced, and attached to the actual data collected from the new supporter. So, for example, if a website that promotes electoral co-operation refers somebody to a Liberal Party supporter sign-up form (called a ‘landing page’), then Liberalist can be coaxed to make note of the fact that THIS supporter frequents electoral co-operation websites. If the referral came from a link in an email sent out by an organisation like, oh, lets say Leadnow, that fact should definitely be tagged in Liberalist. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal to most people, but it is this added DEPTH of data that allows the database to be segmented for targeted communications.

Which brings me to the theme of this post. Joyce Murray is the Liberal Leadership candidate whose main claim to fame (for now), is that she is proposing a controversial measure for the non-Conservative Party’s to co-operate by selecting joint candidates in specific ridings. The intent is to ensure that the anti-Conservatives do not suffer from vote splitting, and get to boot the Conservative candidate to the curb. This electoral co-operation will be consummated when the next (presumably NOT Conservative government) reforms the elections process to mandate preferential ballots be used in Federal elections.

So how is that working out for Joyce? Well, I have no axe to grind, but I think I speak for most Liberals when I say that Joyce was not considered one of the front ranked candidates. That has changed in a hurry though, because she has done the ABSOLUTE BEST JOB of leveraging the supporter category to strengthen her campaign. She has crafted a policy message that resonates with many, many, thousands of Canadians. She has worked the phones hard, and drawn a number of third parties into the fray on her behalf. Leadnow, FairVote Canada, and a number of other electoral reform organisations have been targeting their huge memberships with emails, and communications encouraging them to join the Liberal Party as supporters, so as to support their dearly held beliefs. Last week, she even pulled an endorsement from David Suzuki, encouraging Canadians to join the Liberal Party as supporters. I know a lot of democratic reform

What motivates YOU?

advocates from my Green Party days, and I can categorically state that they are HIGHLY motivated, and the turnout of her voters will embarrass the other candidates come time to count the ballots. ( I expect maybe a 20%-30% turnout of all Supporters in Liberalist, but Joyce will score better than 50%). That is because a general interest and affinity for the Liberal Party which most Supporters will evince comes nowhere near the motivational potential of a deeply held policy interest. I am pretty certain that Justin Trudeau will still win, because his campaign is signing up hundreds of thousands of supporters, but Joyce will probably surprise the hell out of everybody when the ballots are counted.

So that is Joyce Murray, the fascinating example. Now to how this example illustrates the coming Liberal election victory in 2015. The leadership race is fast approaching it’s conclusion, and with that the supporter category will come to an end.., or will it? I will ask a question, is the Liberal Party stupid enough to throw away the most important innovation in Canadian politics since the Conservatives created CIMS? Nope, I submit that the Liberal Party wants to WIN the next election, and they will figure out that they already have the tool in the drawer that will make this happen. The extraordinary results I anticipate for Joyce are a direct result of empowering motivated Canadians to support their policy ideals, within the ranks of the Liberal Party. In order to maintain the momentum created by the Leadership contest, it would take a pretty foolish organiser to ignore the demonstrated potential of a quick, free, and easy recruiting tool. A long time ago, I blogged that the Green Party could leverage the policy aspirations of Canadians, by creating forums, and vehicles for people who shared a common interest to gather together and share their passion under a Green Party umbrella. Well, the Green Party is toast now, but this is a far more viable proposal for the Liberal Party. Civil society in Canada includes a great many advocacy groups, whose values are not incompatible with the Liberal Party. With a little creativity, those advocacy groups, or more specifically THEIR MEMBERSHIP can be enticed into the Liberal fold by an offer to allow the public to help formulate policy for the Liberal Party to carry into the next general election. This is nothing new, but the big difference is that with a supporter category, the Liberal Party can inherit the contact data of advocacy groups, and assume direct access to large numbers of Canadians with an explicit understanding of their primary policy interest. The bargain that will have to be established should be fair. The post leadership Supporters should be granted a genuine opportunity to help shape the next election platform. Provided the sign-up remains free, and that the bargain is fair and open, it is not only possible, but it is likely that the Liberal Party will build the most comprehensive, and readily targeted political database in Canada over the next couple of years. Set a target of 2-3 million Canadian Supporters, and then make it happen. The improvements in money, volunteer hours, the high quality candidates, even the increased voter turnouts will  be significant. The competitive advantage will only happen once, because the Dippers, and Conservatives will follow the Liberal lead pretty darned quickly, but we can worry about winning in 2020 when we get to 2019. It will be a lot easier to contemplate after 4 plus years of a Liberal majority.

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