Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (13 page)

With all the naive confidence of youth, Gregg volunteered to help the Conservatives develop their own polling expertise, north of the forty-ninth parallel. His working partners in this enterprise were two smart young aides named Ian Green and Stephen Probyn, who were also just in their twenties, also fresh from the halls of academe. They weren’t entirely sure what they were doing, but they were having a good time, and amassing new skills and expertise for the party. “We basically cobbled together an in-house polling program,” Gregg said. As a bonus, the new Conservative leader, Joe Clark, was impressed with their work, and he rewarded Gregg with promotions, titles and research junkets to the United States to build the party’s polling expertise. Gregg became the national campaign secretary for the Conservatives, boldly and unabashedly enthusiastic for the potential of polls to be forces for good in politics. “Polls are our only empirical tie to the real world,” Gregg told the
Toronto Star
in 1978.

Back in Canada, Gregg tried to find a Canadian pollster to handle the Conservatives’ needs. He tried every available researcher in the marketing world and none of them were suited to the task. For Gregg, political polling was a field in itself, with marked differences from the consumer world. So, for the moment anyway, the Conservatives re-entered into their contract with the American pollster, Teeter. Gregg was put in charge at the Ottawa end of things. In those days before people had personal computers, Gregg had something they called an online printer in his office, but it was really a mobile hookup with Teeter’s computers—then, huge hulking beasts of machinery stored at Wayne State University in Michigan. Gregg’s keyboard was about the size of a small electric piano, and like a virtuoso he would tap in the codes and the questions he wanted answered. With his long tresses, leather pants, trademark red shoes and earring, Gregg was seen as an eccentric young genius—anything but conservative, in fact. Older, more seasoned Conservatives were still suspicious of polling, seeing it as little more than voodoo.

Dalton Camp, the ad-guru pioneer for the Conservative party, told author Claire Hoy in his book about polling,
Margin of Error
, “When polling started, it wasn’t taken all that seriously… It was something equivalent to doing an enumeration. Interesting, but not critical. The system was such that we took only one poll, before the election of course. It was too expensive to do more. I used to run the national [Conservative] office for $30,000 a month in the mid-1960s. A poll then would cost $20,000. That was big money to me.”

Because computers and technology were alien to most Canadians in those days, it was Gregg’s technical mastery—not to mention his wardrobe—that prompted much of the awe and/or suspicion. Journalist and author John Sawatsky dubbed him the “punk pollster.” But Gregg’s real aptitude at the time was in understanding what lay beneath the numbers, as well—their potential to be moved, given the proper cues.

Up until Gregg came along, the standard Conservative polling questions were blunt and revolved around voting intent: “Who are you going to vote for?” Polling was focused extensively on leadership. Gregg, through his research, started to plumb what it would take to change people’s voting intent, and also what factors, beyond leadership, would influence their vote. As well, he was the first pollster in Canada to incorporate individual-riding data into the overall research, thus making his findings more microscopically accurate.

Zooming right down to the ground, Gregg came up with “typologies” of the electorate, slotting them into categories based on their likelihood to add to Conservative support. There were the “hard Tories,” the people who would vote Conservative no matter what, and who had no real second choice at the ballot box. There were “soft Tories,” people who were voting Conservative, but whose support could be swayed to their second choice. Then there were “soft others” and “hard others,” sorted according to the strength of their allegiance to parties other than the Tories. The “soft” voters, the Canadians out shopping for political preference, were the most interesting to the Conservatives, and Gregg had managed to isolate the two dozen or so ridings where these newly malleable members of the electorate might turn the tide for the party. Consumer marketers were looking for much the same thing in this era: people willing to put the vaunted value of choice over their old habits or loyalties. They were then still a rare breed in politics and the grocery stores. About three-quarters of the people who headed out to the stores in the 1970s already knew what brands they were going to buy. If they had come home with Tide detergent on the last grocery trip, they were pretty likely to buy it again. Brand loyalty could still generally be counted upon by purveyors of soap and politics, though as Goldfarb had noticed, Canadians were starting to wonder why they were sticking with the same old choices when they bought their cars and detergent. Politics wouldn’t be far behind.

Certainly, loyalty to Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals was wavering—enough that the Conservatives were able to eke out a minority-government win in 1979. Joe Clark, with Gregg’s market research, focused his campaign on the grumpy consumer mood in the country. Conservatives kept asking the voters, “Do you want the next four years to be like the last eleven?” The answer, however briefly, was “No.” Then, just six months after gaining power in May 1979, Clark’s government made a fateful decision that put them on the wrong side of Canadians and their wallets, delivering a budget that imposed an eighteen-cents-a-gallon increase in the price of gas. In the snap election that followed, Liberals managed to get on the right side of consumer citizens again by promising to delay energy price increases and harsh budget cuts that would discourage spending. That was apparently what Canadians needed to hear, and it was enough to put the Liberals and Trudeau back in office.

As luck would have it, though, Clark’s loss to Trudeau in 1980 actually helped Gregg build his homegrown polling machine for the Conservatives. It also freed him up to help out in some important provincial elections. When Gregg went down to Toronto to lend his services to the Big Blue Machine in the 1981 election, for instance, he chose twenty-five “volatile” ridings, province-wide, to poll every night. The findings were fed into direct-mail efforts to targeted regions and phone-bank campaigns to woo Conservatives to the Davis campaign. Everything that the Conservatives were learning about modern campaigning in that provincial election was blazing a trail for Tory politicking on the big Canadian stage for the coming decades, and into the next century. On election night in 1981, Davis won a majority, and Gregg’s twenty-five ridings were part of the bandwagon. Just six of those ridings had been Conservative before the election, and only six were
not
Conservative after the vote.

During that 1981 Ontario campaign, the polling costs alone were $1.5 million. Gregg had never spent that much before—and never would again, despite going on to run some impressive polling for the federal Conservatives and their provincial allies across the country over the next decade or so.

Gregg and Goldfarb were early adopters, as we’d say today, in the application of polling to politics in this country. But their ascent was also fuelled by the fact that popular culture in Canada, like in most industrializing democracies around the world, had been swept up since the Second World War in the worship of science, evidence and psychology. Science and measurement were replies to a world that felt far too unpredictable in the first half of the twentieth century.

Polling, in effect, was seen as an applied psychological science, whether the application was to benefit profit or politics. Early polls Davey commissioned for the Liberal party were called “motivational research” studies and used language such as the following in describing their methodology: “The depth interview is a psychological technique, similar to that used by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in a clinical situation. Few direct questions are asked by the interviewer. The depth interview instead encourages the respondent to express his thoughts and feelings about the topic freely, at length, and in a conversational manner.”

Goldfarb and Gregg stood out as pollsters for their respective parties because they brought new layers of science to their trade. Goldfarb merged anthropology with polling—his studies were as much ethnographies as they were research reports. He studied modern Canadian civilization in the same way that other anthropologists studied faraway cultures in remote countries. He understood material culture—how society could define itself around its belongings, including its consumer goods.

Goldfarb liked focus groups because they provided stories behind the numbers and gave him access to rare articulate voters. “You need to spend time listening to people, not just typical voters, but articulate people; people who can tell you how they feel, who can describe their inner feelings. Most people cannot. Most people have a rough time expressing affection overtly. They have a rough time expressing how they feel—why they feel hurt, why they are euphoric. And they don’t like to talk about their financial circumstances.” So on matters of emotion and money, two very important factors in consumer-citizenship, focus groups tended to give Goldfarb the deep psychological research he needed.

Gregg, on the other hand, was more of a numbers guy. He had come to polling via the statistical route, and he brought to the Conservatives a rigour and a dazzling understanding they hadn’t seen before. He was immersed in what they called the “quantitative” side of things and cutting-edge ways of doing research surveys. It actually took Gregg a bit of time to figure out the value of qualitative research, as the focus groups were called. Gregg’s real glimpse into the value of focus groups came when he worked with Nancy McLean, who had produced game shows and other early TV successes on top of her work with the Big Blue Machine. Innovative in her thinking about TV, McLean had been doing all the advertising-production work for the Ontario Conservatives, including those “man-in-the-street” interviews, and then had migrated to Ottawa to help out the new crowd around Clark for the 1979 election.

McLean and Gregg became inseparable as friends and colleagues. Gregg would do his quantitative polling and then, with McLean, the two would review consumer-like feedback to their efforts, through lots and lots of focus groups. McLean was instinctively adept at sifting through the feedback they were getting, knowing how to delve under the literal or off-the-cuff critiques of their efforts—and plumb what people were really saying about their gut reactions. Like Goldfarb, she understood that rare is the individual who could talk articulately about emotions and feelings. McLean was a big fan of clarity and simplicity in political communication, according to Gregg. “She was smart enough to know that sometimes being too creative can get in the way of things like comprehension and believability and trustworthiness and message.”

In the 1979 election, for instance, the Progressive Conservatives were toying with the idea of negative TV ads against the Trudeau government. Gregg’s numbers told him that people didn’t like those ads in principle; that when poll respondents were asked whether they were a good idea, they almost universally said “No.” But focus groups, watching rough cuts of the ads, told a different story. Canadians may have been telling the pollsters they didn’t like negative campaigning, but they were open to the “We’ve had enough of Trudeau” message contained in the Tory ads.

The more that Gregg started to see how focus groups worked, the more he also realized they could serve another, unexpected purpose—as a reality check on politicians and the top campaign strategists. They were perfect ways to illustrate the distance between the abstract world of politics and the real lives of Canadian citizens. Gregg got in the habit of doing some focus group sessions every Wednesday night in Toronto and inviting the senior Conservative strategists to watch. There, safe behind the one-way glass, they’d see some hard truths for themselves, right from the mouths of the citizens they were trying to lead. It often stunned them into changes of tactics. In the 1979 campaign, the PCs had done up a TV ad featuring a hockey goalie in a net, fending off flying pucks. Every time a puck flew, the narrator would recite a line or snippet of a controversy from Trudeau’s years in power. The hope was that Canadians would see themselves or the country as the goalie and the net. But the focus groups were confused. Were the Conservatives trying to say that Trudeau hated hockey? The ad campaign was abandoned.

In this way, with research moving to the gut level of voters’ reactions, Canadian politics was moving farther along the path from advertising to true marketing.