Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (39 page)

THIS LITTLE PARTY WENT TO MARKET

M
arketing manuals are loaded with advice on how to handle fierce competition. One familiar refrain is, “Don’t just imitate, differentiate.” That means if you own a restaurant suddenly losing customers to a fast-food outlet, you don’t simply overhaul your menu to offer the same fare. Smart marketers know how to learn from their rivals’ strength, borrow examples when necessary, but offer consumers something distinct. The smartest marketers know how to turn this purchasing choice into a lifestyle statement, like those Apple-versus-PC ads that used to run on television, framing computer buys as an epic showdown between the cool kids and the nerds.

So here was the situation facing the Conservatives’ political competitors in the years after Stephen Harper became prime minister and elevated marketing to a tool of winning power and keeping it, too. How could they adopt marketing practices and do them better than the Conservatives? Could they market at all? And how willing were they to imitate the Conservatives’ pitch to consumer-citizens? Who would end up as the cool kids, and who would end up as the hapless nerds?

From Lemon-Aid to Orange Crush

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Canada was given a sneak preview of the future strength of the New Democratic Party, though it would take a couple of decades to unfold in full. Brian Topp, a Montrealer and former student journalist at McGill University, was the owner of a print and graphics shop called Studio Apostrophe. Some of his more political friends were dabbling in the NDP, at the margins of the back-and-forth between Liberal and Conservative dominance at the time—and using Apostrophe to print their pamphlets and posters. Through these friends, Topp met a man named Phil Edmonston, an American-born founder of the Automobile Protection Association and author of a popular series of car-buyers’ manuals called
Lemon-Aid
guides. Edmonston decided to run for election in Montreal in 1988, and eventually won a seat in a Chambly by-election in 1990. He became the first New Democrat elected in the province of Quebec, pulling off that feat with the help of a strategic organizer named Ray Guardia. Edmonston only lasted one term as an MP, and Topp went on to work as an adviser to provincial NDP governments in Saskatchewan and Ontario. But this early mix of these individuals’ particular strengths—consumer advocacy and Quebec-organizing talents—foreshadowed a recipe that would vault the NDP to unprecedented heights in the twenty-first century, and an “orange crush” of an election in 2011.

Jack Layton, who had become leader of the NDP in 2003, was in many ways the ideal person to drag the party into the modern age of marketing. Sharp, fast-talking, always “on,” Layton had the perpetual optimism and extroverted demeanour of a salesman. (His critics would regularly disparage him as a “used car salesman.”) A former Toronto councillor, he had gained his political experience in the city that was ground zero for the Canadian ad and marketing business. His own 1991 campaign for the Toronto mayoralty was seen as slick and sophisticated, complete with camera-ready photo opportunities and reams of policy papers. Although Layton spent far more money than his rival, June Rowlands, he went down to defeat. Still, Layton’s political education at the municipal level, which tends to revolve around more practical concerns, gave him a window into the “bread-and-butter” concerns of the average citizen. As NDP leader, Layton would surround himself with people who were eminently practical about putting the party on the map, and Brian Topp was at the heart of the circle.

Layton loved gadgets and data, all the hardware that political parties need to practise marketing in the digital age. Layton adored his BlackBerry and often surprised friends and acquaintances with unexpected missives, even late at night. He regularly reminded his team that well-run political parties operate on three priorities: people, money and data. After every NDP-hosted gathering, he exhorted staffers to gather contact information from attendees, so they could be tapped later to help out the party, either with cash or maybe even by serving as candidates. “He loved asking people for money,” said Anne McGrath, who started working alongside Layton when he was running for the leadership and she was rounding up supporters for him at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). “And he was always recruiting candidates.”

McGrath was recruited to work in Layton’s inner-strategist circle in 2005, joining other loyalists working on the “project” of modernizing the NDP. She would serve as the anchor to Layton in her years as chief of staff, a voice of quiet, calm competence. The others who would drive the project included Topp, as well as Drew Anderson, a talented writer and communications strategist, and Brad Lavigne, the former BC student activist who quickly rose through the NDP ranks from communications adviser to national director of the party. Ray Guardia, still plying his strategic trade a decade or so after first working with Edmonston, was in charge of building the Quebec operation. Oddly enough, the rapid succession of federal elections in Canada from 2004 through to 2011, though volatile to the country, would be a stabilizing force to this group, repeatedly testing and sealing their allegiance with each run at the polls. Layton, as leader, went through four elections before his untimely death from cancer in 2011, and each campaign taught this tight-knit group lessons they would use for the next go-around.

None of these people were romantics or ideologues about the “project.” They were well aware of the marketing universe in which they were working. Topp, particularly, had a clear-eyed view of Canada’s consumer-citizens and what it took to reach them in a multi-channel universe. “Many people make their decisions about leaders and candidates in the first ten seconds they look at them. Images are more powerful than words,” said the man whose early graphics-shop experience taught him about the importance of those images.

The transformation to a market-friendly NDP began in earnest right after the 2008 election. Layton’s team emerged somewhat dispirited from that encounter with the electorate, even though Harper had been kept to a minority for his second mandate and the Liberals were further enfeebled, knocked down to seventy-seven seats. Sure, the NDP had picked up ten more seats, giving them thirty-seven MPs. But when Layton’s strategists looked more closely at the numbers, they realized that their share of the popular vote had only climbed by 0.7 percent. Worse, 75,000 fewer people had voted for the NDP than in 2006. If this was the base, it was shrinking. The NDP strategists realized that they’d gone about as far as they could go in attracting the traditional ideological supporters of the party—all those people who liked the NDP’s well-known stands on labour unions, the environment and other progressive issues.

The more optimistic people around the table at the party’s Laurier Avenue headquarters in Ottawa turned their eye to another number: 104. In more than one-third of the ridings across Canada in the 2008 election, the NDP had placed either first or second. Now they had to persuade Canadians that they were more than just the “conscience of Parliament,” which had always been a nice way of saying the New Democrats were also-rans. The NDP needed Canadians to see the party as a serious option for government, too, as capable as Liberals or Conservatives at running the country.

In marketing language, this is called expanding the “consideration set.” Those busy Canadian consumers, shopping 24-7, are constantly sifting through all the choices out there and narrowing them down to a manageable number of options. There may be fifty cans of tomatoes on the shelves of their supermarket, but browsers usually waver between two or three labels presented for their buying consideration. In political terms, then, the NDP’s challenge was to climb into the ranks of those two or three “brands,” the ones voters viewed as serious options for government. One way of doing this would be to build a solid campaign in Quebec, where the party had been shut out since Edmonston’s brief shining moment in the 1990s. Another way was simply to keep telling the people and the pundits that the NDP was intent on being more than an opposition afterthought. Layton had been saying for some time that he was running for prime minister. Official Ottawa may have laughed, but NDP-commissioned focus groups had been saying that they believed him: “What else would he be doing?” participants would ask.

After the 2008 disappointment, Layton’s inner circle realized it was time to take the NDP into the marketing-friendly world of twenty-first century Canadian politics. They would imitate the Conservatives with strict, top-down discipline and in micro-targeting the electorate, zeroing in on consumer concerns. After all, while marketing-style politics had been championed by the right wing through history, from Thatcher to Reagan to Harper, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” experiment in Britain showed it could be pulled off on the left, too. If they wanted to get more voters in the next election, they would have to find what they called the “next tier” of NDP supporters: all those people who might see the NDP as a second choice. Like Blair, the NDP would start looking for its future among the disengaged voters—the same Tim Hortons Canadians or “bread and butter” voters that the Conservatives had been successfully courting for the past few years. So they commissioned a polling firm, Viewpoints Research, to paint a demographic portrait of people who might be swayed to the New Democrats with the right marketing effort. As a polling exercise, it was a mix of Allan Gregg–style “typologies” of voters, organized by political leaning, and the pop-psychographic look at consumer tastes and lifestyles favoured by Patrick Muttart and Martin Goldfarb. It was also the first time that the NDP spent the bulk of its research dollars learning about non-NDP voters.

According to Viewpoints’ results, this next tier of potential NDP support consisted of people who were slightly older and a bit more well-heeled than traditional New Democrat supporters. They lived in medium-sized cities, were as likely to be male as female, and they were in that so-called sandwich age group simultaneously worrying about their children and their aging parents. Most of all, these potential NDP converts were turned off politics. They didn’t have any ideology and didn’t rely too much on political news, either. From what they did know of federal political events, they weren’t crazy about Harper—they felt they couldn’t trust him. They didn’t really like Ignatieff either—something about his demeanour turned them off. Although they liked Layton, they thought his workplace, Parliament, was dysfunctional and tuned out of their everyday concerns.

In this target audience, not that far removed from Tony Blair’s Basildon Men, John Howard’s “battlers” in Australia or Stephen Harper’s Tim Hortons voters, the NDP had found the new direction for the “project.” With market research in hand, Layton and his advisers set out to overhaul the New Democrats’ product, transforming not just its image, but its policies to capture these disengaged voters. Like the Conservatives, they would come to see the voters as beleaguered consumers with very personalized complaints, whether it was credit card rates or not being able to find a family doctor. The NDP would shed its reputation for being solely the voice of groups—students, unions and protesters—and get far more precise about talking to voters as individuals. Ever-practical, his eyes on the long game, Brad Lavigne was an unapologetic proponent of taking policies to the level of transactional politics. “This approach offered the voter, as consumer, a tangible benefit in return to voting for us,” Lavigne said.

Still, this approach required a bit of a leap for the NDP rank and file, heavily invested as it was in its view of society as a collective and its optimism about the basic unselfishness of the “ordinary” Canadian. And not everyone was happy about the shift in thinking. James Laxer, a political economist and one-time leadership candidate for the party in the 1970s, was probably the most vocal critic of the party’s marketing transformation as it was under way. “The NDP has evolved into a party much like the others,” Laxer wrote in a stinging critique on rabble.ca. “There is little political ferment. Riding association meetings, party conferences and provincial and federal conventions are not occasions for basic debate and education about the state of society and what needs to be done, but rather focus on fundraising, holding raffles and showcasing the leader for the media.”

Brad Lavigne and Brian Topp shrugged off criticism such as this, believing it represented a tiny anachronistic fragment of the New Democrats, the kind who were happier to remain as a protest rump on the Canadian political landscape. The NDP wanted to play in the big leagues with the Conservatives and the Liberals, and it would have to start seeing people as these major parties had through history—through the prism of their everyday consumer wants. Bill Clinton in the United States and Blair in Britain had already proven that citizens’ material “aspirations” were neither right nor left, merely the opening to a conversation between the politicians and the voters.

The difference was obvious almost immediately after the 2008 election. Layton began to focus his rhetoric in the Commons more sharply on consumer concerns, including a crusade for lower credit card rates and lower home-heating costs.

When Harper’s newly re-elected Conservative government tabled its spring budget in 2009, for instance, Layton and the NDP came out against it, making explicit the kind of voters they were trying to reach. Layton accused the Conservatives of being more concerned with the “boardroom table than the kitchen table.” He said Harper’s government was “picking the pockets of the hard-working consumers across the country, those who are trying to buy some gas, or trying to take their money out of the bank or trying to pay their credit cards.” Layton wanted Ottawa to set upper limits on the interest charged to credit cards and to remove the goods and services tax from homeowners’ gas or oil bills.