National Post (National Edition)
Tory contenders’ pitch: Let me be your 2nd pick
Ranked ballots will be cast in advance
OTTAWA • Brian Mulroney came from behind to win the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1983. He placed second in each of the first three rounds of voting, but his support grew steadily each time.
On the fourth ballot, Mulroney emerged victorious over incumbent Joe Clark. Mulroney would go on to become prime minister in 1984.
Mulroney’s victory was fuelled by a flurry of lastminute deals to secure the support of the also-ran candidates, and by winning the support of a big chunk of third-place John Crosbie’s delegates when Crosbie dropped off the ballot without making an endorsement.
But at this year’s Conservative Party leadership convention in Toronto on May 27, there will be no dramatic floor-crossing. Party members will have cast their ranked ballots in advance; their choices will be locked in, and the math will determine the winner.
So already, three months before the vote, the 14 candidates for the leadership are making the pitch to be voters’ second choice.
It’s a challenge for any candidate, however, to manage the messaging around portraying themselves as a winner while also making a public appeal to voters to be their fallback option.
“Anybody who can solve that dilemma of how you accumulate second-choice support is a potential winner,” said Tom Flanagan, who ran several successful campaigns for Stephen Harper, including his party leadership win in 2004.
Party members will rank their preferred candidates on a ballot submitted by election day, May 27.
There are 10 lines on the ballot for each voters to rank their preferred candidates. After every round of vote-counting, the candidate who fares least well in the complicated points system will be eliminated, and their votes will be assigned to the candidates whom their voters had ranked as their second choice. If that second-choice candidate has been eliminated, their vote will be assigned to their third-choice candidate, and so on down the list. A candidate will be eliminated each round until somebody earns over 50 per cent of the vote.
The deadline to sign up new members eligible to vote is March 28. Candidates will then get the final membership list, and will have only until March 31 to drop off the ballot. As the membership cutoff date approaches, Flanagan says this kind of manoeuvring will be “crucial” for victory.
“Probably the most effective mechanism would be for a candidate to drop out and urge his supporters to throw their support behind somebody else,” Flanagan said.
“The second thing you could do would be what the Australians call exchanging preferences. I haven’t seen this form in a Canadian race before, but it could be done. Two or more candidates could say, ‘You know, we’re staying in the race until the end but we’d like your second choice vote,’” he said, suggesting “moderates” could work together — an approach some middle-ofthe-pack candidates are now saying they’d consider.
“It’s to candidates’ advantage to get people to think along those lines — first, second, third, fourth choice,” said former Conservative cabinet minister Monte Solberg. “It’s a lot harder in a situation like this where supporters are very anonymous. You don’t have that direct contact like you would have at a convention, where you could go and pull 250 people into a room.”
Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer said he would find it “helpful” if others dropped out of the race. Without naming names, he said: “I would think at this point it would be probably more beneficial to those individuals and to the race in general if they took a look and thought, ‘Maybe it would be better to get behind somebody who likely has a better shot at winning.’”
The iPolitics CPC Leadership Tracker, powered by Mainstreet Research, offers some insight into the opportunity that exists for candidates hoping to be voters’ second choice.
A poll of 1,457 party members, conducted from Feb. 20-24, shows O’Leary in the lead after the first round of voting with 23.6 per cent of support, followed by Maxime Bernier at 17.3 per cent and Kellie Leitch at 12.3 per cent, then Scheer and Raitt both at about six per cent, closely followed by Chris Alexander. (The survey found 11.5 per cent are still undecided.)
Here’s where the data gets interesting for candidates seeking strategic support: for their second choice, almost 30 per cent of members polled are undecided, and for their third, that goes up to about 47 per cent.
It remains hard to predict which way the race will break.
Membership lists are neither final nor public; campaigns are using social media micro-targeting to reach specific demographics, something that inherently flies under the radar of media coverage; and all 338 ridings are being weighted, so that what Flanagan calls “rotten boroughs” with scant Tory support, like some in Quebec, Newfoundland and downtown Toronto, will matter just as much as Conservative strongholds like Alberta.
As he was getting ready to go door-knocking in Harper’s old Calgary riding Thursday, Quebec MP Steven Blaney, considered a long-shot by most observers, wouldn’t concede anything. “This is such a crowded race that it’s hard to predict,” he said.
“I trust the members.”