Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (11 page)

Davey’s career path, however, would take the opposite route—politics would become his business, while advertising and public opinion would be his passionate hobby. In later years, people would often mistakenly believe that Davey had had a lengthy career in advertising. Within a year or two of that presentation to CKFH on the chilly May day, Davey was sent to Ottawa, installed as the national organizer of the Liberal party for leader Lester Pearson and given a free hand to explore how politics could benefit from a more rigorous understanding of Canada’s demographic, consumer realities. In this, Davey became a Canadian pioneer in merging politics and the market research world. And his work would start with the introduction of polling to the central Liberal campaign apparatus in Canada.

With his well-thumbed Ted White “textbook” in hand, Davey almost immediately set about recruiting Kennedy’s pollster, Lou Harris, to come and do some work for the Liberal party. Harris ran his own polling firm, called Penetration Research, based in Bronxville, New York. But he set up a Canadian subsidiary to do his surveying north of the border and sealed the deal with the Liberals when he promised to personally do the analysis of the numbers.

The Liberals, many of whom were keen Canadian nationalists, were well aware that having a pollster from south of the border might send the wrong signals about their own patriotism. But this American invasion was too hard to resist for Canadian political marketers in training, who were seized with the desire to put the modern methods of science and organization used in the commercial world into the dusty old world of politics. Davey himself, in his autobiography
The Rainmaker
, described polling as the tool with the power to turn baser political tactics into the more exalted “political strategy.”

“Most people knocking on doors during campaigns have a difficult time sorting out strategy from tactics. They become consumed with the tactical side of campaigning which, of course, is a very significant component. Far more important, of course, is the overall strategic game plan. In the final analysis any campaign comes down to the major issue, whether it is a personality or a policy… Having determined the best issue, then that becomes the issue of the campaign. Polling is extremely useful in making this determination.”

Even though polls had been kicking around in Canadian politics for a couple of decades, the 1962 election was the first real faceoff between modern political polling methods. In the
Financial Post
in April of that year, journalist Richard Gwyn wrote that Canada was about to have its “first scientific election.” He described the public opinion surveys and statistical analysis as “completely new weapons” in the political arsenal. As Gwyn saw it, this would be the campaign in which the imprecise arts of politics would be challenged by “the skills of sociologists, statisticians, advertising experts, pollsters and mass-communications experts.”

The “science” in that election was mainly on the Liberal side, and it clearly wasn’t sufficient. Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker, who had famously said that “dogs know best what to do with polls” and “polls are for dogs,” still put his trust in the old-fashioned, populist arts of politics. (He never forgot that the Gallup organization had put the Liberals fourteen points ahead on the eve of the 1957 election that brought him to office.) Conservatives were able to hang on to power in the 1962 election, despite all the fancy poll-work and science that Davey was trying to bring to the Liberal side. Part of that victory was owed to a much more complicated electoral dynamic. A newly formed New Democratic Party had arrived on the scene in time for the 1962 campaign, strongly backed by organized labour and fed by western, rural populism and a demand for medicare. But a year later, with Davey still investing tens of thousands of dollars in repeated national polls by Harris, the Liberals finally wrested power from the Conservatives.

Harris’s firm would continue to supply the Liberals with polling material and insights into the minds of voters through the 1960s—even if some of these insights were also gained through extensive work in the United States. Periodically in its reports, Penetration Research would acknowledge its Americanisms for its Canadian Liberal party readers. “Through years of pounding out hundreds of reports for candidates scattered through the fifty United States, our typewriters have become habituated to spellings such as ‘labor,’ ‘connection’ and ‘defense’ and to such locutions as ‘the government is’; we will attempt to correct these mannerisms, but habit dies hard and we apologize for the slips that will undoubtedly clutter the report,” the writers noted in one of their 1960s-era surveys on the political climate in Ontario.

Lou Harris’s firm also had some blunt convictions about the limits of voters’ interest or enthusiasm for matters of state, just as Philip Spencer had warned readers of the
Canadian Forum
a couple of decades earlier. Repeatedly in its reports to the Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Penetration Research would stress the pre-eminence of “bread-and-butter” issues in the minds of citizens. Consumer concerns would always trump weightier matters, Harris’s analysts kept telling the Liberals, despite what the media or the political class maintain to be priorities.

“Nor is there any hint of the frequent suggestion from the press, pulpit and soapbox that university educational opportunities and facilities must be expanded to meet the challenge of the Russians in science and technology,” an October 1960 study said, when the US and Soviet Union were in the midst of the space race.

In other words, the opinion-leaders may be seized with science and the Cold War, but ordinary working folks, the young marrieds, just wanted their consumer needs met, maybe with some mellow, non-excitable music on their afternoon commute home to the suburbs. There were echoes here of Spencer’s findings in 1940s Toronto and foreshadowing too for what would become a political-polling truism for decades ahead: matters of high politics hold little interest for “ordinary” Canadians. (In tone and intent, it’s not all that different from the populist rhetoric that ran through the Mike Harris “Common Sense Revolution” in Ontario in the 1990s or the federal Conservatives’ conviction in the 2008 and 2011 elections that Canadians cared more about pocketbook issues than pointy-headed debates about the environment, parliamentary democracy or Afghan detainees. It’s probably the kind of advice that went into Stephen Harper’s decision to skip the UN meeting in 2009 and head to Tim Hortons instead.)

A decade after Davey had embraced polling in earnest as a basic implement in the Liberal campaign toolkit, this notion of Canadians as selfish consumers, above all, had solidified in findings of the Liberals’ American pollsters. Here’s a July 1971 bit of analysis from Penetration Research, passed along in what was titled “A Survey of the Political Climate in Canada”:

The other side of the coin is unemployment, or jobs. This is unquestionably the top issue in the nation today. A great number of Canadians regard themselves as living in hard times and this concern dwarfs their concern about everything else. Sometimes we tend to forget that human beings are basically and instinctively selfish. Those in the press and in government tend to talk to each other to the exclusion of the masses. In the process, such people often convince themselves that what they regard to be important is what people generally regard to be important. A major finding of this survey is that foreign policy, Canadian unity, relations with the US, Constitutional reform, pollution and other such matters are not at all the big issues, any of them. All other issues are secondary to the wish for better times in Canada, and this issue is more important today than it has ever been in the nine years we have been conducting surveys of public opinion in this nation.

Davey, despite his sales background, believed there was a distinction between selling a product and selling a politician. For him, politics was more like sports, or at times a religion. But for the man who would become one of Davey’s chief allies in the Liberal inner circle, Martin Goldfarb, there was valuable political information in how Canadians behaved in the consumer marketplace. He’d been the one, after all, who in 1971 made the link between selling politicians and selling tomatoes. In that same article, he said that this newfangled polling business could be crucial in reaching as much as 10 percent of the electorate, whose vote swings could determine the fate of an election. At the time, 10 percent was considered a large figure—most Canadians’ loyalty to their chosen political parties was long and deep, often going back generations, and they didn’t tend to use election campaigns to “shop” for another preference.

The Anthropologist

Martin Goldfarb had grown up with his two brothers in a tiny apartment over a grocery store that his parents operated on Dundas Street West in Toronto. He had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Toronto. For a while after graduating he taught high school, but then he started doing some survey work on the side with MacLaren Advertising. He saw this moonlighting job as the perfect outlet for his anthropology training and started to apply many of the analytical skills he had learned at university to his work. Within five years, he’d given up teaching to dive into market research full time, operating his business first out of his own home, then in a small office at Bathurst and Lawrence in Toronto.

Martin Goldfarb and Keith Davey had met while working on Paul Hellyer’s 1968 Liberal leadership campaign, which they lost to Pierre Trudeau, and had come to be friends and political allies. When Davey was put in charge of a royal commission into the state of Canada’s media in 1969, he hired Goldfarb to do the research surveys.

Davey wanted to make Goldfarb the official Liberal party pollster, but he had to overcome some hurdles first with Trudeau. The prime minister hadn’t appreciated Goldfarb’s tomato comparison. He was also ticked off by an article that Goldfarb had written in
Maclean’s
magazine, outlining how Trudeau could be beaten at the polls and how he was contributing to a “moral breakdown” in Canadian society. This was after the infamous “fuddle-duddle” furor, in which the prime minister had been caught uttering a four-letter word in the House of Commons. The first meeting between Goldfarb and Trudeau, arranged by Davey, didn’t go well at all. Trudeau had the
Maclean’s
magazine in front of him. He asked Goldfarb if he stuck by his words. The pollster did: “You can’t say f— off in public.” Goldfarb also had some blunt views about how Trudeau was handling Quebec, believing he had put the wrong people in charge. After a short, frosty conversation about whether Trudeau needed any more of this kind of advice, the pollster was asked to leave.

Somehow, though, Goldfarb overcame this initial hostility from Trudeau and went on to enjoy a long and influential career as the official Liberal party pollster. Between 1970 and 1980, Goldfarb’s firm raked in $1.3 million in government contracts, on top of its work for private-sector clients. In 1984, Goldfarb would be called “Canada’s most influential private citizen” on the front cover of
Saturday Night
magazine. So cozy was the relationship between the Liberals and their pollster, in fact, that “government by Goldfarb” became an accusatory cry on the Conservative opposition benches in the 1970s and 1980s. “Government by Goldfarb” became a form of political shorthand in Canada for a while, for any government accused of taking its marching orders from pollsters.

Goldfarb believed that people revealed themselves with their choices, whether they were consumer choices or political choices. Anthropologists study material culture for clues about civilizations; so should political researchers. “A brand is a promise you make consistently over time. What’s the promise? That’s the essence of a politician,” Goldfarb stated. Throughout his time as the Liberals’ pollster, Goldfarb would apply what he was learning in his marketing research to the marketing of politics. Like all pollsters, he would make his money in the private sector—a lot of money, in fact—but earn his reputation in the political realm. The knowledge he was building, information gleaned from people’s attitudes toward the political and commercial markets, would form the emerging profile of a Canadian consumer-citizen, from the 1970s all the way through to the twenty-first century.

Much of Goldfarb’s work was also being used at the time by Terry O’Malley and the gang at Vickers and Benson, thus solidifying the politics-advertising-polling triumvirate that fuelled much of the Liberals’ political successes. It was Goldfarb’s data that helped Vickers and Benson come up with the pitch for butter as a sensuous product for the Dairy Bureau. Goldfarb also did the research for the ad agency’s accounts with corporate giants Ford and the Bank of Montreal.

One of Goldfarb’s larger successes in the corporate sector came with his client Wonderbra. The Canadian manufacturer was creating undergarments that boasted of camouflage and restriction—“foundation” clothing, as it was called. Goldfarb, however, went off on a little field-research expedition, to San Francisco, where he took careful note of the city’s more liberal attitudes to nudity and strip clubs. Nothing about the temper of the times convinced Goldfarb that women were interested in more restriction. He persuaded Wonderbra to turn its thinking upside down: freedom was in the air, he said. Wonderbra created something called “Dicey”—the “no-bra bra,” which was a runaway success and much mimicked by competitors. What does underwear have to do with politics? Goldfarb, the anthropologist, saw the connection: “They wanted freedom. They did not want government to impose restrictions on how they behaved and this was a way of expressing it.”