Caucus support, de Jong alliance key in Liberal leadership win, team says
Thirteen MLAs backing Wilkinson worked phones hard: campaign director
Andrew Wilkinson managed VICTORIA his narrow come-from-behind win in Saturday ’s B.C. Liberal leadership race by relying on the power of his MLA endorsements and a co-operative deal with colleague Mike de Jong to narrowly put him over the top, his campaign strategists say.
Wilkinson won the six-candidate race on the fifth ballot Saturday, earning 4,621 points (53 per cent of the total) over Dianne Watts, who finished with 4,079 points (47 per cent).
“There were three elements to our path to victory,” Wilkinson campaign director Katy Merrifield said Monday. “One was caucus endorsement. Two was the deal with de Jong. And the third was the values of members. We saw early on that party members were proud of being B.C. Liberals, and the values they stood for. We made a concerted decision to go for that, instead of apologizing and watering that down.”
The power of MLA endorsements was different during the 2011 Liberal leadership vote when MLAs largely failed to get out the vote for their candidates and Christy Clark won with only one endorsement from a sitting Liberal.
Wilkinson had 13 MLAs backing him, the most of any campaign.
“Every single one of those caucus members delivered their ridings, which is in contrast to the 2011 race,” Merrifield said.
The MLAs not only helped Wilkinson win their ridings, but worked the phones hard to pick up neighbouring communities as well, she said.
Those MLAs included: Michelle Stilwell (Parksville- Qualicum); Mary Polak (Langley); Ellis Ross (Skeena); Tracy Redies (Surrey-White Rock); John Rustad (Nechako Lakes); Joan Isaacs (Coquitlam-Burke Mountain); Norm Letnick (KelownaLake Country); Laurie Throness (Chilliwack-Hope); Linda Larson (Boundary-Similkameen); Mike Morris (Prince-George Mackenzie); Doug Clovechok (Columbia River-Revelstoke); Tom Shypitka (Kootenay East); and Donna Barnett (Cariboo-Chilcotin). In addition, former Kootenay MLA and cabinet minister Bill Bennett served as campaign co-chair.
The MLAs were diverse enough to give Wilkinson a broad network of support from Day 1. That was key, said senior strategist Dimitri Pantazopoulos, because the campaign had identified early on that its path to victory required as much general support as possible across B.C., with the hopes that second-, third- and fourth-ballot votes from members would put him over the top.
“It would be hard to win with regional strength and general weakness elsewhere,” said Pantazopoulos, who also worked on Clark’s 2011 campaign. “In order to win this thing, you needed to be as high as you could in as many places as you could be ... the idea was to be as high as you can, consistently, across the board.”
Clark focused heavily on NDPheld ridings in 2011. Because of the Liberal party’s weighted vote system, influencing a few dozen members to win one of those ridings was worth the same 100 points as a heavily populated urban riding where a candidate needed hundreds of votes to win. By 2018, every campaign was trying to emulate parts of that strategy.
Another key issue in the race was the gap between membership sign-ups and voter turnout. The Michael Lee and Watts campaigns signed up the most new members to the party. But Watts’ thousands of sign-ups in the South Asian community were plagued by low turnout.
Wilkinson’s campaign signed up fewer than 5,000 new members, with a total turnout of his supporters in excess of 70 per cent. Pantazopoulos said they focused less on bulk registration and more on organic sign-ups and renewed memberships.
“These folks would turn out to vote at the end of the day,” he said.
Also key to Wilkinson’s win was a deal he signed with de Jong, in which both candidates urged their supporters to make each other their second-ballot choice. De Jong was knocked out in the second round, giving Wilkinson an almost 35-per-cent bump in his points the following round, when the second choices of de Jong voters were redistributed. The deal was “a big contributor” to the campaign’s success, Merrifield said.
“Did it win it for us? Possibly,” Pantazopoulos said.
The race ultimately came down to the fourth round, when Wilkinson finished just 30 points ahead of Lee to progress into the fifth and final round. The second choices of Lee voters were then calculated.
Some believed Lee’s votes would tend to tilt toward Watts because they were both outsider candidates, compared with former cabinet ministers Wilkinson, Todd Stone and de Jong. But Pantazopoulos said he thinks the Lee supporters helped Watts in ridings she had already won. Also, one of Lee’s South Asian organizers was federal Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal, who doesn’t support Watts, a former Conservative MP. That may have helped emphasize the swing among federal Liberals from Lee to Wilkinson.
The Liberal party released detailed statistics late Monday that emphasized Wilkinson’s strong performance in ridings in the Interior, the north, Kootenays and several Vancouver-area constituencies. The rival leadership campaigns said they needed time to analyze the stats before commenting.