Attacks on Ford could backfire.
It is a cliché of politics that as a governing party, you never want an election to become a referendum on you and your performance.
Until Saturday night, that was the nightmare that this election was becoming for the Kathleen Wynne government. It would face a new moderate conservative face on the right attacking on its fiscal profligacy.
It would be fighting a second front against a progressive woman leader, Andrea Horwath, now the most seasoned veteran of them all, attacking from the left.
The astonishingly inept performance of the Conservative leadership election team has delivered a one-term municipal councillor — who lost on popular vote, and in the number of ridings won — to be on the verge of taking power of Canada’s second most powerful government. This bungling conduct of something as essential as the selection of a party’s leader is a debate for another day.
Now, Horwath’s and Wynne’s strategists need to deal with a new and unprecedented reality — a right-wing populist riding a wave.
The one certain way to lose for each of them is, however, to allow this election to become merely a referendum on Doug Ford.
Each will need to struggle mightily to get the media’s attention off the potential train wreck of the Ford candidacy. It seems likely that without serious discipline, both the NDP and the Liberals will make the same mistake as the American Democrats did with a curiously similar nightmare in 2016.
Attacking U.S. President Donald Trump for a year in primaries drove into the ground a dozen serious GOP competitors’ campaigns. For every attack on his ineptitude, his vulgarity and his complete absence of preparation for the role, Trump would smirk, roll his eyes and say, “Of course, the elites will say that about me! What better proof do you need that I’m on your side, not theirs.” Ford will play the same card. The Democrats made an even worse mistake in failing to understand the power of a simplistic but emotionally powerful slogan. Hillary Clinton did not have one, while Trump’s evoked all the angst and anger of even parts of the Obama base in his ride to victory.
What is the Liberal bumper sticker going to be?
The NDP has signalled that its slogan is likely to be, “You don’t have to choose between bad and worse, there is a better alternative.” Its challenge will be to demonstrate voters can get something only from a Horwath government.
But it is the Wynne team that probably faces the most dramatic reset requirement as a result of this improbable weekend’s overturn of Ontario politics. It cannot attack only on sex education, abortion and thinly veiled homophobia and Islamophobia — though it seems likely those are social conservative buttons likely to be pushed by a Ford campaign.
Again, although we will all quickly tire of the Trump/Ford comparisons, here too, past may be prologue. Such identity politics may simply mobilize Ford’s base, and fail to energize grumpy Liberals. Nor can the Liberals present themselves as a more progressive alternative than the NDP, as that will invite a scathingly sarcastic media response.
They may believe they can present themselves as a “safer pair of progressive hands” than the Horwath team, bringing up Rae Days, etc. That might have been effective a decade ago; two successful NDP governments in Alberta and B.C. make it a harder case today.
My best guess as to where each is likely to go is to jump on gaffes that they have prodded Ford into: He is a very green, hot-tempered and unprepared candidate.
One can easily see the second-tier Team Ford being incapable of imposing enough discipline to ensure that at a talk show, evening rally or, worst of all, television debate, Ford is not goaded into saying something inappropriate on any of a dozen subjects. But that is the gamble Trump’s opponents took, and they lost.
It also risks making this election a referendum on Doug Ford, one that voter anger might enable him to win.