How Singh became the new leader of the NDP in convincing fashion
‘Grassroots’ campaign got out the vote
The cheers started before Jagmeet Singh’s name was announced, from those in the crowd who were quick at math.
At a conference centre in Toronto on Sunday, the results of the NDP leadership race were delivered in alphabetical order: Charlie Angus with 12,705 out of 65,782 votes, then Niki Ashton with 11,374. When Guy Caron’s 6,164 votes were announced, people knew.
With 35,266 votes, Singh had shot past 50 per cent to win the leadership with a majority of first-ballot support.
Singh’s win isn’t much of a surprise — he led in fundraising and claimed to have sold the most memberships, and seemed to be a front-runner even before he entered the race in May.
But the decisiveness of his victory came as a surprise to many. Even members of his campaign team weren’t sure they had it in the bag.
“Our numbers showed that it might be possible on the first ballot,” said Michal Hay, Singh’s campaign director. “We knew it was a possibility, but we planned for all scenarios.”
The final numbers — Singh won 53.8 per cent of the vote — speak to the candidate’s appeal, but also to the effectiveness of his vast network of volunteers and organizers across the country.
Hay said the campaign used hundreds of “captains,” volunteers responsible for signing up small groups of 20 or 30 members, then making sure they cast their ballots.
“It’s like a distributed model of leadership and organizing,” she said.
They also used Hustle, a mass texting tool popularized by Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, to start conversations with potential voters.
Robin MacLachlan, a former NDP strategist who supported Singh, said the tool allowed volunteers to have personalized interactions with voters.
“I could feel the energy on the other end of a digital conversation,” he said.
MacLachlan said Singh had the largest number of volunteers spread across Canada — at least 2,500, Hay said — and they were made to feel they were part of the campaign, using tools like Slack and WhatsApp to communicate internally.
“A lot of our strategy and our planning happened right at the grassroots,” said Hay, who previously ran Olivia Chow’s 2014 Toronto mayoral bid. “It’s not like a closed committee room.”
Angus’s and Ashton’s campaigns also used Hustle to reach voters, but weren’t able to leverage the technology into the same kind of voter turnout. The results Sunday came as a particular surprise to Angus’s team, who were still hoping for victory on a second ballot, but finished with just 19.4 per cent of the vote.
“We were pretty confident about being in the number two and three slots with the other two candidates (Ashton and Caron),” said an official on Angus’s campaign, suggesting Angus stood to gain second-choice votes after Caron or Ashton dropped off the ballot. “We figured if we could get to that point, even if we were a rather distant second, we had a lot of potential for growth.”
The official said calls to members in the last days of the campaign seemed to show much more support for Angus.
“It’s strange, to be honest,” he said. “At the end of the day, our vote didn’t come out, for one reason or another.”
He said Angus may have suffered because he wasn’t able to target any one particular demographic.
“Charlie had very broad appeal throughout the party, but he didn’t have that core constituency that some of the other candidates had,” the official said. “While that’s great going in, when you’re trying to pull the vote and get people out, it takes a lot more resources.”
Jenn Prosser, Ashton’s campaign manager, speculated that Singh has more concentrated support in certain parts of the country, which might have been easier to mobilize.
Provincial voter turnouts show 59 per cent of members in Singh’s home province of Ontario cast their ballots, and 51 per cent in British Columbia. Turnout was also high in Quebec, where 66 per cent of the province’s 5,000 members voted.
But Hay disputes the suggestion that Singh’s support is concentrated among the new members he signed up in regions like Brampton, Ont., and Surrey, B.C.
By her count, about 50 per cent of the 47,000 members Singh signed up cast ballots. The remainder of his support — about 12,000 votes — came from existing members or new members who didn’t sign up through his campaign, she said.
“That’s my indication of broad-based support in the party.” She said.
Singh’s campaign signed up members in 250 of the country’s 338 ridings.
Several of the campaigns pointed to the viral video of Singh addressing an antiMuslim heckler at an event in Brampton as a gamechanging moment in his campaign.
“They were able to use that strong moment and turn it into something,” Prosser said. “Jagmeet’s campaign was able to capture those opportunities very effectively.”
But Farouk Karim, a spokesperson for Caron, said the real game-changing moment was when Singh entered the race in May. Karim was expecting Singh’s firstballot victory on Sunday.
“They basically took over the campaign and they just rolled with it,” he said. “That’s quite the machine.”
Machine or not, the platform is only as effective as the message, MacLachlan said, and Singh had a message people wanted to hear.
“He has a way of inspiring those around him.”
“There were people that really like Charlie,” said Angus’s campaign official. “But I think what Jagmeet brought was … he was able to bring that enthusiasm for voting. And that’s difficult. I don’t think we were able to capture that.”
OUR NUMBERS SHOWED THAT IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE ON THE FIRST BALLOT. — MICHAL HAY, CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR