Susan Delacourt
Why election campaigns matter — plus some handy tips to help with this one,
“Campaigns matter” is a political cliché, but an earned one. Recent election history — in Canada and beyond — has demonstrated that fates can turn on unexpected developments.
Neither Justin Trudeau nor Donald Trump was expected to win their last elections, we will remember.
All that said, election campaigns themselves rumble along some very familiar roads, with some universally standard features: the leader’s tour, the standard stump speech, morning policy announcements, evening rallies. Kissing babies is somewhat less fashionable than it used to be, but photos with babies are definitely still a thing on the campaign trail.
After you’ve seen enough election campaigns — the 2019 one will be the 11th federal election in my time as a political reporter — you gather up some handy tips for watching the action.
Here are some of them that have survived throughout the often unpredictable path of elections past — and will probably last through the coming election and beyond.
Buses aren’t metaphors. At some point, a leader’s bus or plane will break down or get lost and, no matter whose campaign it is, the metaphors will start flying. In campaign land, a lost bus is the gods’ way of telling us that this person cannot run a country. Never mind that the actual leader wasn’t driving the bus or responsible for the maintenance of the plane.
It just seems to be an irresistible way to link political fortunes to the random world of vehicular breakdowns. But really, sometimes a flat tire is just a flat tire.
Political rivals are going to say bad things about each other. Shocking as it is, the leader of the Liberal party doesn’t want the Conservative party leader to win the election and vice versa. Ditto for New Democrats, Greens and so on. Since this is to be expected, it’s not exactly front-page news, but the leaders will still pine for those headlines and work very hard to get them. In fact, politicians and their advisers are always more interesting when telling what they’re going to do if they win, rather than what their rivals will do. As a bonus, they’re generally (but not always) more truthful when talking about themselves too.
Zombie election language. “Knockout punch.” “Battle lines drawn.” “Vote-rich Ontario.” “Canada is a big country.” We try to ban these phrases in every election and they can’t be killed. They will be used, again and again, and we’ll resolve anew in 2019 to send them to the graveyard of political phrases. They’ll be back. They are the undead of political commentary.
Nicknames are for recess, not debate. Politicians accumulate nicknames at roughly the same rate they acquire enemies — because the two trends are related. But people who refer to political figures with derogatory nicknames generally aren’t interested in any kind of serious debate over policy or principle and can probably be ignored (with some exceptions). I find it a useful way to sort through email messages, actually. The ones that make some fun of a leader’s name (I’ll save you some of the examples) go straight to the trash file.
One slight twist to this rule: Donald Trump uses nicknames, all the time. Which sort of proves the point about seriousness, though the U.S. president is more difficult to ignore.
Taxpayers aren’t citizens. This is a personal hobby-horse of mine, but the idea that citizens are buying their democracy with tax dollars is just consumerist-politics run rampant. Paying taxes is just one part of citizenship; voting is another big part, and there are more. People who pay no taxes or less taxes than others are not inferior citizens and there are no citizenship-upgrade coupons for paying more taxes than others.
Reducing a country to a simple financial transaction between the government and the governed is at the very least regrettable and definitely, overly simplistic.
Crime stoppers: In nonpolitical life, it’s quite serious to accuse someone of taking bribes, stealing money and so on. In politics, levelling such accusations is increasingly another day at the office. Canada has an excellent legal system and if someone has been stealing or taking bribes, chances are the police would have been on the case before the alleged crime was announced to hundreds or even thousands of people. Calling a politician a criminal is as useful as calling them by a nickname.
Speaking of the public stage, as a final tip, elections don’t really happen at podiums. They are decided in voters’ minds. Politicians are often asked: “What’s your message?” (I wouldn’t mind putting that in the banned-phrase category too.) Ultimately, it’s not the messages sent, but how they’re received by voters that decides elections. It’s why campaigns matter — one cliché that still works.