Ontario’s 2018 vote fought on a digital battlefield
The 2018 election changed Ontario fundamentally.
Now, Ontario’s experience is destined to change the face of future electioneering.
Brace yourself for more of the unconventional campaigning that crowned Doug Ford as premier. For better or for worse, behold — and beware — digital democracy.
That means dramatically more online outreach through social media channels featuring “news” coverage generated by the parties, and more tailored ads like Ford’s breakthrough “buck-a-beer” pitch. And it means far less scrutiny by traditional mass media as audiences fragment into sometimes “tribal” camps.
That was the rare consensus of rival campaign managers who came together for a remarkably candid, post-election Ryerson Democracy Forum I moderated this week against the backdrop of depressing election turnouts in Ontario. Barely half of all eligible voters turned out in the previous two elections, but that number climbed to 58 per cent in 2018 thanks to the polarizing impact of Ford and then-Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne.
As voters tune out party politics, how can the major campaigns boost their turnout — especially for the vanishing youth vote? Kory Teneycke, who engineered a majority Progressive Conservative victory, won kudos from his NDP, Liberal and Green counterparts for a breakthrough campaign. But even while gracious in defeat, his counterparts voiced fears about what digitization portends for democratization if voters end up in self-reinforcing silos.
“Campaigning today is a 75 per cent digital experience on its way to being a 99 per cent digital experience,” Teneycke told the audience.
The Tories didn’t merely “curate” their messages with sophisticated algorithms aimed at target audiences. Voters are doing their own “self-curation” — or self-selection — thanks to their past browsing histories that predetermine future browsing (and advertising) exposure.
“What it means is you tend to see only things that you are interested in,” Teneycke told students and professors at Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts, which sponsored the meeting of rivals.
If you are more interested in “the world of the Kardashians and celebrity stories,” your browser cookies won’t identify you as receptive to campaign material, he said. “If you don’t have an interest in that, you are way less likely to see it.”
Penetrating that disconnect requires political parties to reach voters on the platforms where they play online. Which is precisely what Teneycke did.
“We created our own news channel, and created our own news content, and propagated that to voters, where we could say exactly what it is that we wanted to communicate.”
The Tories’ “Ford Nation Live” news channel was not only unfiltered by outside media, but offered the feel and format of conventional newscasts — and PC audiences found it no less trustworthy. As for voters who prefer video games to political games, the Tories played on Xbox with buck-a-beer.
“We did a ton of advertising on that, on Xbox, because it was something of greater interest to 18- to 45-year-old men,” he said. The challenge is to locate and serve audiences “in the correct window, I guess, where they’re going to be hanging out.”
NDP campaign chief Michael Balagus acknowledged that online advertising is “a great tool, it’s cost efficient ... very well done” by the Tories. Had he been running a frontrunner’s campaign, seeking the “path to victory ... I would’ve done exactly that — I would have created NDP news.”
But it required the Tories to “narrowly target and create echo chambers and get people cranked up.” It results in “tribal camps” — and Ford’s government still hasn’t stopped “narrowcasting” in campaign mode, Balagus cautioned.
“You have to move from campaigning to governing.”
Liberal campaign manager David Herle disdained online ads as unpersuasive — “I think digital advertising sucks” — but didn’t deny the power of social media to mobilize kindred communities. He said when social media delegitimized Wynne as unelectable, “We knew it was happening. We didn’t know how to fight it.”
The challenge is how to tell the story of policy complexity in a digital world that favours fragmentation and celebrity news.
With young people deriving their information from the digital sphere, campaign platforms will be even harder to pitch. Liberal promises of a $15 minimum wage, pharmacare, child care and free tuition should have appealed to young people, but couldn’t compete with Ford’s affordability message of buck-a-beer and cheaper gas prices (at the expense of the environment).
“I’m just going to totally re- ject the deification of the youth voter here — they’re not interested,” Herle argued, with Keneycke largely in agreement. “The vast majority of young people are off living young people lives.”
Green Party campaign manager Becky Smit agreed with her rivals that young voters continue to be the most elusive demographic, especially for a party whose environmental platform would normally be most compelling to youth. The Greens won their first seat ever, but environmental issues failed to catch fire provincewide.
The NDP’s Balagus said the disappearing youth vote hurt his party the most. Survey research showed that New Democrats had their greatest strength with the youngest demographic, which has the weakest turnout.
“The NDP is not going to win an election until young people vote in this province,” he told the audience.
That’s an ambitious goal in today’s brave new online world. The more voters turn to social media, the more they tend to tune out the big picture.
The digital battlefield has shifted everyone’s calculations. Elections that used to be battles for our hearts and minds are now less about persuasion and more about attention and retention — not to mention motivation.