Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (42 page)

Before becoming party leader, Justin Trudeau, son of the prime minister who presided over the Liberals’ golden age of advertising and polling, expressed uncertainty about the Liberals’ readiness to embrace a segmented view of the nation, or even that it would work for a middle-of-the-road view of politics. “Parties that are positioned on the left or right of the political spectrum can take advantage of certain constituencies that are more engaged with activism or protest,” Trudeau said in an interview in the fall of 2012. “Because we don’t have those natural constituencies, because we are trying to appeal to that broad swath of regular folks, the micro-targeting just doesn’t appeal to us.” In Trudeau’s view, breaking down the electorate into component parts is a departure from a national vision. “We’ve sort of bound ourselves as a party to saying the same things from one end of the country to the other, saying the same thing from one room to another, and trying to govern for all the people, not just the people who voted for us.”

But when Trudeau campaigned to become Liberal leader and eventually won the job, he would be forced to grapple with the conundrum of how to sell that one-nation, mass-market concept in a micro-targeted universe. In an interview with Canadian Press, days before his leadership win in April 2013, Trudeau acknowledged he was taking a gamble with this approach. “I refuse to win in such a way that would hamper my ability to govern responsibly for the entire country,” he said. Yet even if Trudeau and his Liberals were not sold on the idea of breaking down the electorate into micro-targets, they seemed to recognize that they would have to arm themselves for the data war, in which they had somehow fallen perilously behind their rivals in the twenty-first century.

Red-Listed

Despite their laggardly progress to micro-targeting, federal Liberals had not been sitting out the revolution in database politics in Canada, at least not in the early days. They were actually among the first to see the possibilities of matching the national voters list to customized maps provided by Compusearch in the early 1990s and then a system called ManagElect about a decade later. They also engaged the services of direct-dialling firms such as First Contact Voter Management to fundraise, identify support and get out the vote on election days, just as all the other parties were doing.

In 2009, after Ignatieff became leader and Toronto lawyer Alf Apps became the party president, the Liberals became very serious about getting state-of-the-art technology to keep up with their Conservative rivals. They were well aware of the power of CIMS and wanted to stay in the game, even beat the Conservatives in this race for sophisticated research of the electorate. Fundraising was a primary goal, of course. Liberals were still trying to adjust to the new political-finance reality in the country, which rewarded the parties who were best at gathering small donations from a wide pool of the electorate. They needed a super-powered machine to catch up to the Conservatives and the New Democrats, as well as a dedicated staff to oversee the effort. Ignatieff asked Issie Berish, a former Liberal staffer extremely familiar with databases, to serve as director of digital operations.

The next job for the party was to find the best database out there. After some shopping around, they landed at NGP VAN, which was the main voter-management machine for the US Democrats and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The Liberals liked this system because it was capable of tracking people according to their concerns about issues. So they imported NGP VAN to Canada, with a few customizing tweaks, and dubbed it “Liberalist.”

In many ways, this system was similar to CIMS and NDP Vote. When it comes right down to it, after all, most political parties have the same hardware requirements for fighting election campaigns, raising money and getting out the vote. So it isn’t surprising that their party machines would be outfitted with the same gadgets. In perfect keeping with the consumerist nature of these databases, they often work with the same kind of barcode-scanning machinery that merchandisers use for products. All the databases are constantly updating their software to work with new generations of technology, such as smartphones and iPads. They all keep track of people who agreed to lawn signs or donations or volunteer duties in the past. They all try to sort people by their top-of-mind interests. In Liberalist, a person who tells the party about his or her concerns about employment insurance, either with an email or a phone call or a conversation at the doorstep, will have that interest logged into the database. Later, party workers could search the database for people with the same interests, and target them for mass mailings or one of those “town hall” conference calls.

But the Liberals’ system had several interesting differences, which served to highlight the party’s ambivalent relationship with modern micro-targeting and marketing, at least as it was being practised by their rivals. In the first place, Liberals didn’t go out and purchase consumer data. Berish said he wasn’t sure it would be all that useful to the party database, even if the Liberals had the money to buy the information. Knowing what kind of car a voter buys did not give the party any clue as to whether this person would vote Liberal. A Volvo owner in Toronto might vote Liberal, for instance, but the same may not be true for a Volvo owner in Calgary. Berish said he could point to any number of voter profiles, identical in their lifestyles and consumer choices, but one would be Liberal and the other would be Conservative or NDP. Geography and tradition, rather than buying decisions, were usually stronger indicators for Liberals in looking for possible votes. The Liberals did purchase some database software from Pitney Bowes, which helped them sort last names by cultural origin, but that was a reflection of the Liberals’ long-term association with immigrants and multicultural communities.

The Liberals’ system was also wide open to view online. Anyone could log on to liberalist.ca to see how the machine runs. The actual details about voters, naturally, were privacy-protected, but the workings of the database, including the user manual, were posted online. Liberalist didn’t categorize voters, either, with smiling or frowning faces like the Conservatives do, or with numbers, as the NDP does. The system had the capacity to sort neighbourhoods for canvassing, to identify which houses were worth visiting and which houses were not. This is a handy device in the United States, where there are registered voters for the parties in advance, and where it’s a waste of time for Democrats to visit registered Republicans and vice versa. But Berish claimed it hadn’t proven that useful for federal Liberal volunteers, who appeared to favour canvassing all houses in a block or polling district, regardless of whether some doors were useless prospects: “We’re not at that level where we say ‘only selectively knock on doors.’”

The most important difference between the Liberals’ database and those of their big rivals, though, was one that would be more troublesome to the party. The machinery itself was state of the art, but the wealth of the data, even after two years in Liberal hands, was substandard. By 2011, when they were knocked back to third place in the federal election, the Liberals had only entered data into their system about a paltry 1.3 million voters, and not very thorough information at that. Conservatives and New Democrats didn’t give out comparable figures on their data rolls, but they are widely assumed to be larger than one million. This was an enduring frustration to party president Alf Apps, who wrote in his post-mortem of the 2011 defeat:

Rank and file Liberal supporters need to understand what the party is up against. The same political party that prefers to govern the country without reference to data and evidence has in fact pioneered a form of campaigning in Canada that turns politics into a highly sophisticated science, based almost exclusively on data and evidence, with its political messaging based on detailed individualized and aggregated intelligence. The CPC is able to calibrate its voter contact to each voter’s profile with laser-like focus… LPC is flying half-blind and well behind when it comes to election technology and digital know-how.

Apps was highlighting a strange irony in Canadian politics. The ruling Conservatives displayed an almost visceral distaste for government-run databases—they dismantled the long-gun registry established by Chrétien’s government and they made the long-form census no longer mandatory in Canada in 2010. The Liberals, in reply, proclaimed themselves the party in favour of facts, evidence, records and science. Yet in terms of political-party databases, the situation was flipped. The Conservatives, for the most part, seemed to love CIMS and accumulating all the data they could. They were hard at work on a second-generation database after the 2011 election, too, reportedly turning CIMS into a new system called “C-Vote.” The Liberals, however, seemed to have deep reservations about loading Liberalist with information, perhaps because of the skepticism about micro-targeting that Trudeau and Ignatieff also voiced. It also could have been that the Liberals, in power for so long through the twentieth century, had just not cultivated the grassroots energy to be in opposition.

Bought, But Not Totally Sold

The 2011 election, which reduced the Liberals to third-place status in the Commons for the first time in history, was the most vivid illustration of the party’s inability or unwillingness to come fully into this age of micro-targeting and marketing. It continued to see itself as the voice of the mass-market middle in a fragmented, polarized world.

It’s not as if the party was averse to seeing voters as consumers. The Liberal platform was carefully crafted around this approach, and even named after a fast-food consumable: “The Family Pack.” With their own market research, the Liberals cast themselves as the friends of Canadian families, just as Conservatives and New Democrats were trying to do. And in a direct nod to the success of the Conservatives’ 2006 platform, the Liberals were waving their own cheques for families in this campaign—up to $1,350 a year for anyone caring for aged or ill relatives in their homes. It was the same strategy as the Conservatives’ “choice in child care” promise from 2006, except that the Liberals’ cheque giveaway was aimed at the other end of the demographic spectrum, toward older voters.

Ignatieff, launching the 2011 Liberal campaign, was even careful to sprinkle some colourful, shopping-friendly words in his opening statement to reporters. “Folks, in the election that’s coming up, there is a blue door. You go through the blue door and you get jets, you get jails, you get corporate tax cuts, and you get miserable knock-offs of the real article. But, you go through the red door and you get compassion, you get fiscal responsibility, and you get a government relentlessly focused on the real priorities of Canadian families.” And then Ignatieff added, fatefully, “There are only two choices.”

Choice is a big deal to consumer-citizens, so any suggestion that their choice is limited is probably ill-advised. Sure enough, Ignatieff’s remark played right into the hands of the New Democrats, engaged as they were in expanding the “consideration set.” Layton was able to portray Liberals as people who didn’t believe in choice at the ballot box. “People will try and tell you that you have no choice but to vote for more of the same,” he would say. Meanwhile, the NDP could busily keep pursuing its campaign to reposition Canadian politics for the next election as a whole new kind of colour choice: between the blue door and the orange door. After May 2, 2011, the House of Commons was painted blue on the governing side, orange on the opposition side, with a mere splash of Liberal red at the margins.

Hardcore political marketing, especially as it has been developed in the United States, works best in polarized, partisan climates. It thrives on that vaunted consumer virtue of choice, but it has to be a sharp, well-defined choice: left versus right, good versus bad, no ambivalent middle. To do micro-targeting with any kind of success or efficiency, the electorate has to be separated into “people who may vote for us” and “people who will never vote for us.” All the better, if those differences turn up in their consumer choices, too: buyers of
Field and Stream
magazine versus
The New Yorker
, for instance, or Tim Hortons versus Starbucks. Parties can then concentrate their efforts on prospective voters and forget about the others. This type of sorting is more difficult to do for parties who are still trying to be all things to all voters, as Canada’s Liberals continued to believe they could be. Up against the political-marketing colossus of the Harper Conservatives, one party, the NDP, went to market and another, the Liberals, mostly stayed in their traditional home.

Even after Trudeau won the leadership in April 2013, he said his party’s aim was to once again be the home, as it had been in his father’s time, of the mass-market middle class in Canada. “I say this to the millions of middle-class Canadians, and the millions more who work hard every day to join the middle-class. Under my leadership, the purpose of the Liberal Party of Canada will be you. I promise that I will begin, spend and end every day thinking about and working hard to solve your problems,” Trudeau said in his victory speech.

So the question in 2013 was whether the Liberals, under new leader Trudeau, could play a mass-market game, albeit with the tools that their rivals had used to do micro-targeting of the electorate. Whether the Liberals liked it or not, they were going to have to amass the data to compete with the Conservatives and New Democrats. Some of that work was done through the Trudeau leadership campaign itself. One of the main missions of the Trudeau leadership team was to accumulate as much data as possible on potential Liberal voters for the 2015 election. And at several points during the campaign, the Trudeau team also consulted with US Democrat experts to see whether there were lessons to be learned from Barack Obama’s example. Mitch Stewart, a “battleground-states” director for the winning Obama campaign in 2012, was one of the Democrats who gave the Trudeau strategists some advice. Trudeau’s Liberals were particularly interested in how Obama had won votes of people who had never cast ballots before.