Political parties are getting ruthlessly efficient at finding votes. Is it bad for democracy?

Jordan Canada’s last federal election was a lot of things to a lot of people. Unnecessary, self indulgent, ill timed, critical in the climate era, mercifully quick, our first and hopefully last pandemic election. But there was another reason it was really worth paying attention to.

Trudeau Clip …there are still votes to be counted. But what we’ve seen tonight is that millions of Canadians have chosen a progressive plan…

Jordan The one thing that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t want to talk about in celebrating that win was just how many of those millions he mentioned had chosen his party. The Liberals won September’s election with the support of less than a third of voters. That’s a record, in fact. And how you feel about that goes a long way to indicate how you feel about the health of Canadian democracy. No, this isn’t a podcast about electoral reform. This is an episode about efficiency. Prized in business, sports, design, basically, any industry, getting the most results from the fewest resources is generally the goal. But should that apply to politics?

How did the Liberals become so incredibly efficient at targeting exactly the votes they need to win and ignoring the ones they don’t? If this is the weight of victory, what kind of message does it send that ignoring more and more voters to focus on your core supporters is how you get there? How much more efficient can political campaigns get? And what kind of impact could that have on the government’s Canadians choose or don’t choose if they’re not lucky enough to live in one of a handful of hotly contested ridings?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Stephen Maher is an award winning Canadian journalist, a novelist and a Harvard Nieman fellow. Hello, Steven.

Stephen How are you today?

Jordan I’m doing well. I’m glad that we’re revisiting something that I think most Canadians would prefer to forget, which is the last federal election.

Stephen Yes, there’s a sort of post election process where we need to figure out what it all meant. And I hope my article is part of that.

Jordan Well, for people who have either forgotten on purpose or who maybe didn’t pay much attention to the specifics of the results, can you quickly summarize that election and especially as it pertains to seats won versus actual votes won?

Stephen So there’s an interesting math here. People may recall that although the Liberals won the election, the Conservatives actually had a higher total vote count. So what that means is that the Liberal vote is more efficient. They get the votes where they need them and they win the close races. Whereas the Conservatives rack up huge pluralities in Western rural ridings where they have votes to burn there. But in the places where the election is won and lost, the suburbs of the big cities, especially the GTA, the Liberals are able to win a lot of close races. So what that means is that the Conservatives ended up needing an average of 46,693 votes for each seat, compared with 36,345 for the Liberals. For the NDP, it’s much worse. They need 121,000 votes for every seat. So it points to the way that this sort of electoral map is really what determines the ultimate outcome.

Jordan And we’re going to talk today about how that strategy has kind of hyper-evolved. And maybe you could start by explaining what a former strategist, David Hurley had to say right after the election, that kind of illustrated the way this has evolved over years and elections.

Stephen So Hurley made a wisecrack on Twitter, on election night, and said, If I’d known you could win an election with 31%, we’d have done it in 2006. So he was making a kind of black joke, making fun of himself, as he likes to do, for the fact that his candidate, Paul Martin, lost the election in 2006. But here we had Justin Trudeau managing to win with, in the end, it was a total of 32.6% of the vote. So it kind of points to the narrowness of the difference between the total vote won by Martin and the total vote won by Trudeau. He’s kind of commenting on the mathematical improbability in a way of what happened here with Trudeau. The mandate that Trudeau won in the popular vote is I believe the weakest such mandate by a winning party. But what’s really going on here is the share of the popular vote held by both the Liberals and the Conservatives is steadily shrinking.

Jordan So how does that create the need for new strategies? And maybe they’re not even new strategies, but just more hyper focused strategies targeting what Trudeau’s former advisor, Gerald Butts, called “vote efficiency?”

Stephen So there is something new that’s happening. We’ve seen a kind of atomization of the landscape so that the smaller parties like the Greens and the People’s Party are gobbling up more votes. But in a sense, what the parties are doing is not new. I spoke to Tom Pitfield, who is the head of Data Sciences, a company that contracts voter contact services for the Liberals, who’s credited with playing a key role in the Liberal election victory. And he pointed out that the idea is no different than what they would have been doing in the 19th century, which is you identify where you can win seats and you put the effort in there.

What’s changing because of the power of social media targeted advertising, in particular, is that the parties are able to target their advertising and organizational push in small geographic areas. So if they decide that the north end of Eglinton and Lawrence in Toronto is where they need to increase their vote, they can spend money just on rallying Liberal supporters in the north end of England and Lawrence. And that’s much more precise than what electoral tacticians would have been able to do in the 19th century. So that’s what’s changing in the same way that it’s changed all industries, including the industry we’re in. We’re micro targeting, in a sense, with podcasts that appeal to particular segments of the society. So in a sense, it’s of a piece with the way the whole society is shifting.

Jordan And what I find fascinating about that is in our jobs or in, I don’t know, retail, data science or anything else, you can make the case that there’s extreme value in figuring out how to target like that. But when you’re talking about doing it with voters that you’re speaking to, it feels existentially different to me. Like it’s not fair almost. And I understand this is a strategy that’s been going on for decades, but I feel bad for the people on the south side of that street you mentioned who are now not going to get a visit from their MP.

Stephen Yeah. No, I think it’s problematic in a sense, because what it shows is that the parties are only going to spend resources on people in swing ridings. We saw that at the end of the election campaign, Justin Trudeau spent the five final days going back and forth in Southern Ontario in areas that they needed to win. I find it particularly striking that there are fairly large numbers of Canadians who nobody really cares if they vote. So Liberals in Saskatchewan, they can just stay home. They’re not going to elect any MPs because of the first past the post system. And they might vote out of a sense of civic duty because we’re all voting, but really, there’s no point. The same thing goes for Conservatives in downtown Toronto.

And this kind of goes to a different point. But advocates of proportional representation who would like to see a change to the voting system, would point to that as problematic and say, if we had a PR system, then there would always be a Liberal or a New Democrat from Saskatchewan in the House of Commons, there would always be a Tory from downtown Toronto, and our politics would better reflect the actual sentiment in these very communities instead of having a situation as we have in Saskatchewan, where, although there are many people that are not Conservatives, they never elect a single representative to the House of Commons. There’s a sense that as the electorate has changed and become more fragmented, our voting system has not changed, and it’s still sort of functioning ideally for two party brokerage politics, which is our history. But voters are no longer behaving that way.

Post-modern consumers say, well, I don’t feel like supporting the Conservatives, I am actually going to vote for the People’s Party, even though there’s no possibility that the People’s Party will elect any MPs.

Jordan In terms of the data science itself, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but who do the parties turn to handle this kind of stuff? What other businesses are these contractors in? And I guess I’m just trying to figure out what kind of like on the ground or, I guess, on the digital ground practices they use and where else these targets are effective?

Stephen Well, it’s like any kind of digital campaign that they’re running, and Pitfield pointed out that the parties are living in an economy where they are limited in the resources they can spend by legislative spending caps. So if you’re trying to introduce a new product, for example, or rally public opinion around a community project or an environmental campaign, you’re limited in how much money you might be able to spend by the amount of money you have. In this case, you’re limited by the amount of money that you’re allowed to spend to stay within the electoral laws. So that’s one sort of difference.

A key thing in this election, so you have this ability to micro target mostly using Facebook advertising. The Liberals appear to be much more sophisticated at that. There are 14,800 iterations of ads in the three months before Election Day compared with the Conservatives who had 1400. So they appear to have placed a big bet and a successful bet on that targeted Facebook advertising.

But another key advantage that they had, they’ve got a large, dedicated army of volunteers who regularly do door knocks and phone banking for them, and they’ve got a good data game. They know where their voters are. The people who I spoke to, who’ve actually been door knocking for the Liberals talk about how you get this app on your phone, and what everyone who does this marvels at with the Liberal operation is the precision of the targeting. They tell the door knockers which houses to avoid. Somehow the company has been able to figure out where the Liberal support is and where the opponents live or supporters of the opposing parties. And when you’re campaigning, you do not want to knock on the doors of people who are not going to vote for you. You’re not trying to persuade. We sometimes think that that might be the point of these exercises. But the idea is you’re trying to find your people and make sure they vote, and people are more likely to vote if somebody has come to their door or called and said, ‘don’t forget on Tuesday’.

So that’s how the Liberals really managed to win is that they had an existing coalition that they just needed to activate. Whereas O’Toole, who was not well known before the campaign, he was trying to assemble a coalition. It briefly looked like he might succeed, but then he ran into some trouble with some issues. A lot of those people who had just recently decided to support him changed their minds.

Jordan from a Liberal point of view, and when you talk to Liberals who did those door knocks, or who work on the campaign in general, is winning this way something to be really proud of? Or does this sort of the strategy sort of preclude the chances of that kind of massive, generational, Trudeau 2015, ‘here I come’ majority that I assume all parties would want to achieve?

Stephen I’ve spent a lot of time talking to political strategists, tacticians, mechanics over the years and all the parties; they’re a cold-eyed bunch. When you’re in that business, you are very interested in winning. The difference between winning and losing is rather large. You get to run the country or you don’t get to run the country. You get to pick who gets to be ambassador to Paris, or you get to pick who’s the deputy whip for the opposition leader. Everything hinges on cinching of victory. So that kind of distinction between types of victories is much less interesting to them.

They wanted to get a majority. I think they were fooling themselves, and a lot of Liberals think this, that Trudeau and his top people had deluded themselves into thinking that a majority was in the cards. It wasn’t in the cards. They misread the mood of the public. I think they acknowledged that. It’s difficult to win majorities in this country unless the opposition is divided.

Jordan When we look at this strategy, and I’m assuming it’s only going to get more hyper targeted, though I don’t know how you can hyper target more closely than down to the House. But in general, going forward, what can this strategy help overcome? And what can’t it? Where will it run into a wall? I’m assuming that exists.

Stephen Well, what I see is happening is this continued decay of the support of the two big parties. So the results become a little bit stranger over time in that you’ve got a larger percentage of people who are voting for parties that under the first past the post system, are not able to win seats. So basically, in this case, you have the Greens and the PPC who are getting a significant number of votes and little representation. As you might imagine, the Liberals and Conservatives are okay with that, right? They kind of like the system the way it is, because every now and then they get to have a majority government.

Like, it seems to me that there’s increasingly a mismatch between the behaviours of the voters and the kind of parliaments we get because our electoral system doesn’t reflect the changing voting patterns. But that’s not really problematic for the people running the country. It’s the kind of thing that professors and activists might say, ‘well, this is wrong, this is not fair’, but it’s always been unfair, basically to the NDP, because they’re getting 10% of the vote in lots of places, but not enough to get over the top. So it’s the kind of thing where you look at and you think, okay, so we’re increasing the micro targeting, more and more people are being basically left out of the real drama of the election. And the whole thing is coming down to Liberal/Conservative vote switchers in the suburbs of big cities. So those are really the only people who matter in elections, right? I find it somewhat discouraging. But on the other hand, the country seems to be struggling along in spite of this somewhat outdated electoral system.

Jordan Well, here’s my last question then: what’s the logical end game here? I mean, let’s assume, because it seems like it’s happening, that the voting population continues to get more fractured. Maybe we even get another new small party. Are we going to see a minority government with 28% of the vote with 25% of the vote? I guess the question is, how low can you go under this system and still make your votes count?

Stephen Yeah. I can’t really guess at that. You might be right that that might be what happens. And it is possible, listeners may recall that Justin Trudeau promised to change the electoral system and then decided that he wasn’t able to do that…

Jordan Our listeners definitely recall that.

Stephen So I don’t know, I personally think that some kind of a mixed member PR system would better serve our democracy. I know there are strong arguments against it. And if you ask Liberals and Conservatives who always benefit from it, they will give you those arguments. After the failure of these many promises, I’ve kind of given up on the idea that we’ll ever see PR, because as we see in Quebec right now, Legault promised to bring it in and then they get in there and they say, ‘well, actually, it’s more complicated than we thought’, because it’s never to the benefit of a governing party to bring in a change like that.

So to see something like that happen at the federal level, I guess there could be a scenario where a weaker governing party, it would have to be the Liberals I think, would have to make a deal to get the support in the House from stronger opposition parties. So that’s one way that this could come about. But who knows what’s going to happen, the next election, it looks increasingly likely that we won’t have Trudeau or maybe O’Toole. Today’s news, he’s facing a threat from within his party. So the dynamic will be likely really different because our modern Canadian politics are so leader-centric.

We’re sort of acutely aware of the situation now because we’re in kind of a stalemate. We’ve had two elections in a row where there’s basically a big chunk of the country that thinks Trudeau is more or less okay. And then there’s big chunks of the country who can’t believe that the people in the rest of the country are voting for him. So a new leader may come along and change the dynamic entirely.

Jordan My only real concern with the next election, to be super honest with you, is that it’s at least two or three years away from now.

Stephen Yeah.

Jordan Well, at the very least, we learned about Voter Efficiency. Stephen, thank you so much for this as always.

Stephen Thank you.

Jordan Stephen Maher wrote about voter efficiency in the Walrus.

That was the Big Story. For more from us, head to [click here!]. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Email us at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And of course, find us in any podcast player, subscribe, like, rate, review, follow—whatever they call it. Do it for us and tell your friends.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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